Live interviews

A live interview is a video room with a shared code editor. You schedule it, the candidate joins from a link, and everything either of you writes is visible to the other in real time.

This page is about the room itself. Scheduling, statuses and the report are covered in Managing interviews.

Getting in

The candidate gets a link. Interviewers can also join with a short room code, which is the practical option when someone needs to join from a phone or a machine that is not signed in.

The lobby

Anyone arriving through a link waits in a lobby until someone already inside admits them. Interviewers see who is waiting, and can admit, reject, or later remove a participant.

The lobby is what stops a link that has been forwarded from becoming an open door. It is worth keeping the habit of checking who you are admitting, especially on a link that went out days earlier.

Rooms hold up to five participants.

In the room

• Video and audio for everyone present
• A shared code editor — the same document for all participants, with live cursors, so you can watch someone work rather than watching them describe working
• Chat, for links and snippets that would derail the conversation if read aloud
• Questions, loaded from an interview template or imported mid-session from your question bank
• Notes and Scoring, on their own panel, visible only to your side

Running code

Below the editor are three tabs:

• Test Cases — for a test-case question, which of your cases passed and which failed
• Output — standard output from the run, which is all a pure-code question produces
• Debugger — step through execution and inspect variables

The debugger is worth knowing about before you need it. Watching a candidate reason about why a variable holds what it holds tells you more than the finished function does, and it turns "your code is wrong" into a conversation.

Notes and scoring

Notes are private to the interviewer who wrote them. Scores sit on the same panel, and both are per interviewer — two people on one interview each keep their own.

Fill the scorecard during the interview or immediately after. One completed an hour later is a memory test, and the point of scoring against fixed criteria is not to rely on memory. See Scorecards.

What is kept

Code snapshots are captured through the session, so the state of the editor survives the room being closed. Per question, the room also records time spent and how many times the code was run; both appear on the report as context, not as scores.

Recording

Interviews are not recorded. There is no record button and no stored video. If your process requires a recording, it has to happen outside the platform, with the candidate's consent obtained by you.

Ending an interview

Ending the interview closes the room for everyone and moves it to In Review. Notes, scores, code snapshots and chat stay on the interview and are collected on the report — see Managing interviews.

End it deliberately rather than closing the tab. The room stays open until someone ends it, and the elapsed time is recorded as the interview's real duration — which is the number your interview minutes are billed on.

What interviews cost

Interview minutes are metered. Your plan includes an allowance; minutes beyond it are billed as overage at the end of the cycle, on one invoice, if you have enabled overage. See Plans and billing.

The meter counts real room minutes, so the cost of an interview is the length of the interview. Leaving a room open after everyone has left costs money for nothing.