Finding people, judging them fairly, and remembering them afterwards. Hiring covers jobs and their pipelines, application forms, assessments for any kind of role, and a talent pool that keeps everyone the workspace has considered — including everyone it turned down.
For how it is built — the models, the API, what fires when — see Hiring architecture.
A person and their applications#
A candidate is a person, once per email address. An application is that person applying to one job. The same person can apply to several jobs, or to the same job again a year later; each is its own application with its own history, and the person is never duplicated.
An application ends in one of three ways: hired, rejected (always with a reason), or withdrawn (the candidate pulled out). None of them removes the person. Rejected and withdrawn candidates stay in the talent pool with everything the workspace learnt about them: their answers, their assessment results, why it did not work out.
Jobs and their boards#
Every job has its own board of stages. A new job's board is a copy of the workspace's default one — Applied, Screening, Assessment, Interview, Offer, Hired, Closed — and can be changed without touching any other job.
- Rename, reorder, add and remove the stages in between. A stage that still has applications in it cannot be removed; move them first.
- Hired and Closed are the two ends. Moving an application to Hired records it as hired; moving it to Closed rejects it and asks why.
- A stage can have an assessment attached, optionally sent automatically to everyone who reaches that stage — once per person, however often they are dragged in and out.
- A stage with an assessment can have score thresholds: a score at or above the advance threshold suggests moving the candidate on; one below the reject threshold suggests rejecting. These only ever suggest. The card is flagged and its owner is told; a person decides.
Applications with no job (added for a role you have not opened a job for) use the workspace's default board.
Getting applicants in#
- An application form. From a job, Create application form makes a form already connected to that job's board: it asks for the usual details and a resume, and each submission adds the applicant to the talent pool and puts an application in the board's first stage. Share its public link or embed it. Any other form can do the same with a Hiring candidate connection — see Forms.
- By hand. Add candidate on the board, with the job and the stage. Adding somebody who is already in the talent pool offers to add them to this job instead.
- From the talent pool. Re-engage puts a past candidate into another job's pipeline.
Assessments#
Assessments are for any role, not only engineers. When you create one, say whether it is technical, non-technical or mixed; that decides the suggestions you get for job titles and skills and how questions are written when you generate them.
| Question type | Good for | Marked by |
|---|---|---|
| Multiple choice | Knowledge with a right answer. Can have several right answers; each one picked earns its share and each wrong one takes a share back | Automatically |
| Situational judgement | "What would you do?" Every option has a score, so a reasonable second-best answer earns part marks | Automatically |
| Rating scale | "How well does this describe you?" Each point on the scale has a score; a negatively worded statement scores in reverse | Automatically |
| Written answer | Explaining, persuading, writing to a customer. Marked against the key points and rubric you give | AI, reviewable |
| File upload | A work sample — a plan, a design, a spreadsheet | A reviewer |
| Coding | Programming problems with test cases | Automatically plus AI |
Templates give you a head start: customer support, account executive, operations coordinator, communication and collaboration, backend and frontend engineering. Each creates a draft with its questions written out. Any assessment can also be saved as one of your own templates.
Sending one#
- From a stage that sends it automatically, or with Send assessment on a candidate's card.
- From the assessment itself, step 4: type or import people, or pick from the pipeline — a job and a stage, then the candidates in it.
Either way, an assessment sent from the pipeline reports back to it: the candidate's card shows the score, and the stage's thresholds decide whether to flag it.
Marking what the machine cannot#
File uploads and audio answers wait for a reviewer. Until the last one is marked the attempt stays awaiting review — no score is reported, nothing is suggested and no automation fires on a number with marks missing. The assessment's report lists what needs reviewing; mark each answer from the candidate's result page. Any automatic mark can be overridden the same way.
The talent pool#
Everybody the workspace has considered, searchable by name, company, role or place and filterable by outcome (in a pipeline now, hired, rejected, withdrawn, or no open application), tag, source, assessment score, job, and how long since anyone touched them. A candidate's profile shows every application they have had, every form they filled in, every assessment and its result, and a timeline of what happened.
Candidates are kept until an admin deletes them. Deleting a candidate erases all their applications and cannot be undone; nothing in the pipeline does it on its own.
Common mistakes#
- Treating a suggestion as a decision. A score past a threshold only flags the card. If a stage should reject everyone below 40%, somebody still has to click it — deliberately.
- Removing a stage with people in it. Refused; move them first.
- Auto-sending a draft assessment. Invitations to a draft wait; they are emailed when it is published.
- A resume question that is not a file upload. Only a file field can be mapped to Resume; a link field maps to Resume link.