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Recruiters quick start

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This document is for recruiters who want to know more about creating, scheduling, and managing interviews with the Interview platform.

📃 If you’re looking for information on ATS integrations, you can find that in the Integrations Feature Guide.

Interview is a platform for conducting remote interviews with programmers, in any browser. The Interview interface is very similar to common development software that programmers use, like an IDE, that runs and tests code as it is written. This makes for a comfortable and familiar candidate experience and allows the candidate to demonstrate their technical skills.

Logging In

If your company has an Interview account, ask your administrator for an invite and instructions on how to login. If your company does not have an Interview account, register here.

For paid plans, visit our Pricing page and click ‘Buy Now’.

Creating an interview pad

✅ Before you start interviewing candidates we highly recommend checking out our list of Best Practices for a Good Interview.

A pad is a session where the candidate and interviewer write and run code – either during a live collaborative interview or a take-home project. Interview saves a record of everything for your team to review and share afterwards. 

The playback mode window is open with the candidate's code and output at the top and the playback controls at the bottom.
CoderPad Interview’s Playback Mode

Live interviews are available on all Interview plans. Take-home projects are available to our Business and Enterprise customers.

Question Bank

The Question Bank is where you create and manage interview questions for your organization to share. It also provides example questions which you can copy and edit.

For live interviews and take-home projects, attach a question to the pad from the Question Bank.

You can also create pads for live interviews and take-home projects directly from the Question Bank: 

A screen shot of the question bank with a list of questions under the "My Content" tab listed.

After the interview

The candidate loses access to the pad when the interview ends or they submit the pad. 

Live interviews

To end a live interview, the interviewer clicks the End Interview button in the lower right-hand corner. 

The "end interview" button is highlighted at the bottom right of the screen.

This moves the live pad into the Ended status in the dashboard and enables playback mode. 

In your Pads List on your dashboard, click the Playback button to review the interview.

Take-home projects

To submit a take-home project, the candidate clicks the Submit Take-Home button in the lower right-hand corner.

The "submit take home" button is highlighted at the bottom right side of the screen.

You can also end a take-home interview from the dashboard by clicking the End button.

A pad item is shown with an arrow pointing to the "end" button.
A pad item is shown with an arrow pointing to the "end" button.

Ending a take-home interview moves the pad into Ready for review status.

Click the Review button to review the interview.

A pad item is shown with an arrow pointing to the "review" button.

When you are done reviewing the interview, click the Finish Review button.

This moves the pad into Reviewed status and enables playback mode. 

Click Playback to review the interview.

A pad is shown as an item in the pad list and the "playback" button is highlighted.

Share pads for review

Share pads with any member of your organization that has an Interview account with its original URL (in our example, coderpad.io/DKHC4J77).

Final tips

  • Each pad you create counts against your quota.
  • Pads available for use in upcoming interviews have a Not Started status in the dashboard.
  • You can delete pads, but once they’re gone, they’re gone for good, so be careful! 
  • Deleted pads count against your interview quota, unless they are deleted within 28 days of creation.
  • We strongly recommend that engineers new to Interview get familiar with the interface by using our sandbox. The Sandbox uses no interview quota.
  • If a candidate attempts to access the interview before you admit them, they will be taken to a customizable waiting room screen until you’re ready to start the interview. You can learn more about how to use this feature by checking out our waiting room documentation here.