A few weeks ago I wrote about how Skills-Based Hiring Is Real Now . Since then I have personally taken 12 of these assessments across 9 companies — partly out of research curiosity, partly because some of them came attached to roles I was actually interested in. I am now convinced that 90% of "skills-based" hiring assessments come in just three flavors. Once you recognize which flavor you are about to take, you can pre-prep in 20 minutes and walk into them dramatically calmer. Flavor 1: The Live Coding Pattern Match What it actually is: a 35-60 minute live session, usually on CoderPad or HackerRank, where you solve 1-2 problems while explaining your thinking out loud to an interviewer who mostly stays muted.…