Become a Remote Interviewing MVP With Adaface PairPro

Siddhartha Gunti -

A few things to know about this guide:

It is designed to help you understand how Adaface PairPro works and what you need to do to be successful in creating a candidate-friendly remote interviewing experience.

It is packed full of information that will let you have better conversations and hires.

It is completely free.

Don’t let the length of this guide scare you – PairPro is designed to be easy and intuitive. We want to make sure you are supported during your entire journey as an Adaface user.

So, whether you are still weighing the pros and cons of remote interviewing or are completely bought into remote hiring, we hope you will find this guide to be educational and informative in using Adaface PairPro to the fullest.

If you’re not already using Adaface for remote hiring, you can get your free account right here.

Get most out of PairPro

Have seamless audio/video conferencing with a collaborative code editor to make your next hire.

Okay, here is what we are going to cover in this guide –– feel free to skip around; you don’t need to go through this in order. There are tips from our experts in different sections, be sure to check them out!

Just click on each title below and you can jump right to that section.

If you are yet to dive into remote interviewing with PairPro, hopefully, this guide will get you thinking. If you have any questions while you are reading this guide, just use the chat button on the bottom right – we are here to help.

The basics

There are two reasons your business would use Adaface PairPro today:

  1. Give the best remote interview experience to your candidates - This is a great way to engage top candidates, improve your brand value, and also capture as much information about candidates as possible.
  2. Use a single tool that has all the features your hiring managers need to interview candidates - Technical hiring managers need a host of features to evaluate a candidate's coding skills, communication skills, and problem-solving ability to decide whether the candidate is the best fit for the role and the company.

Here are the features you need in your remote interviewing solution:

Technical features:

  • Code compiler (PairPro supports 24+ programming languages.)
  • Collaborative Code editor with syntax highlighting and themes (PairPro supports 24+ programming languages and 6 eye-soothing themes with a collaborative real-time code editor.).
  • Language documentation (PairPro provides language documentation for candidates for all popular programming languages.)

Communication features:

  • Audio and video conferencing (PairPro supports audio and video call right within the browser. No extra installation required!)

Interviewer features:

  • Popular questions (PairPro provides a questions library used by top interviewers.)
  • Questions library (PairPro lets you add your questions to make the questions library yours and accessible by every interviewer in the company!)
  • Private interviewer notes (PairPro lets interviewers add comments about the candidate during the interview. All comments are saved with every keystroke!)
  • Private scorecard (PairPro gives interviewers ability to score the candidate on their code quality, technical, and communication skills)

Recruiter features:

  • Multiple methods to invite candidates (PairPro invites can be integrated into your hiring process).
  • Share scorecards across the team (PairPro keeps everyone in your hiring team in the loop with shareable candidate scorecards).

Here's how a sample PairPro session looks like 👇.

Okay, let us fast forward a little bit and talk about things that you can do after you have decided to use PairPro. Adaface PairPro tab welcomes you to start the remote interviewing process.

A simple one-time task to improve your hiring team's productivity - Add interview questions your team asks to the PairPro library. Even though PairPro comes with popular interview questions by default, adding your interview questions will help you structure remote interviews better. Here are some points to note regarding the addition of your questions:

  1. All the added questions are kept private to your account.
  2. Added questions will be visible for all hiring managers during the PairPro sessions.
  3. Added questions can be used during the PairPro session with a click of a button and the candidate is shown question details to work upon.

Here is how adding your questions looks like in action:

Invite candidates to PairPro sessions the way that best fits in your hiring process

Adaface provides multiple ways to invite candidates to PairPro sessions. Choose the method that suits you the best.

Email invites:

You can add the candidate's name and email address in the Adaface dashboard to send an email invite. Candidates will receive a unique PairPro session link over email immediately.

Note that there is a slight chance that emails sent from Adaface might not be in the candidate's primary inbox. In such cases, you can ask the candidates to check their spam/ junk folders or share the invite link manually with them.

PairPro links can be generated with or without providing candidate details in your PairPro dashboard. Once links are generated, share the generated link to candidates over email. (You can copy the candidate link from "Actions" columns in PairPro invites table)

If you set up calendar invites for remote interviews, we recommend sharing the candidate PairPro session link in the calendar invite "location" and "description" fields so that candidates can find the PairPro links easily. (You can copy the candidate link from "Actions" columns in PairPro invites table).

Interviewers must be logged in to their Adaface account at all times. When interviewers open candidate links, if they are logged in, they will be redirected to the interviewer interface.

⭐ Tip:

For a better candidate experience, give the candidates information about what topics will be discussed during the interview so that the expectations are set. Additionally, you can share the company/ team/ interviewer/ job's profile so that candidate comes to the interview inspired. Remember the candidate is interviewing you as much as you are interviewing the candidate in a candidate-driven hiring process.

Starting the interview: ready...set...go (notes for interviewers)

Interviewers can open the interviewer PairPro session by clicking on "open" in the Actions column in PairPro invites table or if the interviewer is logged in, opening the candidate link will automatically route interviewers to the interviewer interface.

Using audio/video conferencing efficiently

Once the interviewer session is opened, click on "Start Audio/Video call" to turn on conferencing. The candidate will be asked to turn on their mic/webcam in realtime and both the interviewer and candidate are connected.

⭐ Video Tips:

  • If the candidate or interviewer has a poor internet connection, Adaface video conferencing solution will automatically downgrade video quality but this can be done manually as well by clicking on the Settings option inside the video call.
  • If you have an existing video conferencing solution, you can use PairPro without audio/video conferencing.
  • If there is more than one interviewer on the call, it is recommended to switch to audio-only conferencing.

Conduct candidate friendly remote interviews (notes for interviewers)

Here's how to make the best use of PairPro while interviewing:

  1. Use similar pre-decided questions so that you can compare candidate performances.
  2. Click on "Add question" to pick a question from the questions library. Once chosen, the selected question will be visible to both interviewer and candidate.
  3. Make notes about the candidate's performance for each question to have a detailed log of how the candidate performed. 🔒 Note that the interview notes are private and are visible only to interviewers.
  4. Switch to your favorite editor theme (editor themes are not synced so that candidate can choose their preferred theme).
  5. When you are ending the interview, score the candidate using a scorecard tab so that other interviewers, hiring managers, recruiters are kept in the loop and can compare candidates seamlessly. 🔒 Note that the scorecard details are private and are visible to interviewers.
  6. End the PairPro session using "End Session" action in the bottom bar. Ending the session will create a candidate scorecard and update the candidate scores on the dashboard. 🛈 Note that the PairPro sessions are ended 4 days after the PairPro session automatically if they are not ended manually.

⭐ Tips:

To create a positive candidate brand, interviewers are recommended to introduce themselves, team, job, company to the candidate.

It is also recommended to convey the candidate about the next steps before ending the remote interview.

And last but not the least, asking candidates if they have any questions, will show the candidates that you care :)

Get your entire team on the same page, even when hiring remotely

All PairPro sessions once ended will generate a detailed scorecard along with a score given by you in the scorecard tab. All scorecards have the candidate's code, interviewer notes, scoring notes, and topic-wise scores. These scorecards can be shared internally within your team to take the hiring decision.

Here's a free guide to learn more on how to become a tech interviewer MVP:

How to interview software engineers (a guide from interviewing 400+ engineers to build a stellar tech team)

Next-Gen Remote Interviewing

And that's a wrap! We just walked through a few examples of how you can use PairPro, and I just wanted to wrap up this guide with a final thought on the state of remote interviewing– which is something we’ve been talking about a lot at Adaface lately.

See, traditional remote interviews are something like this:

  • Ask the candidate to join on Hangouts call or phone call.
  • Share a google doc with the candidate.
  • Candidate writes code without syntax highlighting, code editor, and compiler - asking them to work without any of their favorite tools.
  • Interviewers manage a video conferencing tool, google doc, private notes, ATS system, emails, and phone calls to do one single interview.

But if you’re anything like me, I’m willing to bet that when you’re thinking about candidate experience and your company brand-

We want to avoid the messy traditional remote interviews at all costs.

It made sense to stick to those traditional methods before but today a top candidate is approached by 10 of your competitors at the same time. Your candidate brand and candidate-friendly hiring process are your key differentiation. Either you embed them in your hiring process or you lose a top candidate.

And that’s exactly why we built PairPro – so your interviewers can connect with candidates in a modern way.

So, we think that there are two paths forward for hiring teams from here:

  1. Stick to their guns, keep doing what everyone else has been doing, and wait...and...wait.
  2. Follow the lead of the modern hiring teams and change the way they do hiring to match the way that candidates want to interact with a company today.

Which path will you choose?

Ready to use Adaface PairPro for your remote interviews? Get a demo today.

Adaface also provides conversational assessments to screen candidates over 700+ skills. Check a sample assessment.