Getting started

This walks you from an empty account to a scored candidate result. It takes about fifteen minutes, and you can do the whole thing on a trial without entering card details.

1. Verify your email

Registration sends a verification link to the address you signed up with. Until you click it, your account exists but cannot send invitations.

If you registered with a company domain rather than a free email provider, verifying also starts your 14-day trial automatically. The trial needs no payment method and does not convert to a paid plan on its own — when it ends, the account falls back to the Free plan and stays there until you choose to buy.

2. Create your first assessment

Go to Assessments in the top navigation and click New assessment.

An assessment is a container. It holds sections, sections hold questions, and settings on top of it decide how it behaves — how long candidates get, what counts as a pass, and what is recorded while they work.

You can start from scratch or, on Professional and above, copy a ready-made assessment out of the Library.

3. Add questions

Three question types are available:

Add questions directly to the assessment, or reuse ones you have already written from Question Banks.

Code questions are the ones worth reading about before you write your first — see Question types.

4. Set the rules

Open the assessment's Settings tab. The three that matter most on a first run:

• Duration — the time limit in minutes. Leave it empty for an untimed assessment.
• Pass mark — the percentage that counts as a pass. This is your threshold, and it is never applied automatically to a candidate; it only labels the result for your team.
• Proctoring — everything under this heading is off by default. Turn on only what you actually need, and read Proctoring first, because several of these settings are visible to the candidate and change how the assessment feels to sit.

5. Invite a candidate

From the assessment, open Invitations and add a candidate's email address.

Each invitation produces a unique link tied to that one address. Candidates do not need an account — they open the link, fill in the details you asked for, and start.

By default an invitation allows one attempt. You can raise that per invitation, and you can set an expiry date after which the link stops working.

You can also publish a single shared link that anyone can use, which is the right tool for a university cohort or an open call. See Inviting candidates.

6. Read the result

When the candidate submits, the attempt appears under the assessment's Results tab.

Multiple choice and code questions are scored on submission. Essays wait for a human. Code answers show which of your test cases passed, along with the candidate's code and how long it ran.

Full detail in Reviewing results.

What to read next

• Creating assessments — sections, shuffling, and scoring rules
• Inviting candidates — links, expiry, and retakes
• Team and roles — before you add colleagues