Understanding the Interview interface

HackerRank's CodePair is a live online interview platform for hiring companies to conduct coding interviews. Candidates are invited by the company's hiring managers to log in to CodePair and participate in a live coding interview session. CodePair enables both the interviewer(s) and a Candidate to communicate, code and collaborate interactively.

If you are a Candidate who has an upcoming interview on CodePair, this article explains how you can log in to the interview and walks you through CodePair's coding interface. Additionally, you can refer to the CodePair interview preparation checklist for Candidates topic for more information.

To login as a Candidate to a CodePair interview

1. Open your recruiter's email invite to the CodePair interview, and click the interview link. We recommend you to use the Firefox or Google Chrome browsers for the best experience.
2. In the Candidate section of the login page, specify your name and click Join as Candidate.

The CodePair interview screen is displayed as shown below.

 Tip: Click the  icon and select Quick Tour to get automatic guidance of the CodePair interface. Alternatively, from the same menu, click Video Tutorial to familiarize yourself about CodePair by watching a video.

Navigating through the CodePair Interface

The interface has a built-in code editor which supports a variety of programming languages. The live video-chat option allows you to engage and interact with your interviewers using chat, video, and call options. 

 Note: The video-chat capability is supported only when you are using Firefox or Google Chrome browsers. 

Your interviewer posts different Questions to you during the interview and each Question is displayed in a separate Question tab. When you are at a particular Question, click the Task Description pane on the left to view the complete problem statement. You must read and comprehend the problem statement carefully before answering the Question.

The Languages option lists the programming languages permitted by your test setter to answer a particular Question. Typically, based on the specific skills the company wants to assess in a Candidate the test setter determines the languages which will be available for coding. You must choose from the available programming languages to code your solution and CodePair's code editor automatically switches and adapts itself to the chosen language.

The lower half of the code editor displays the sample input values, compilation status and output from your code.

The Stdin tab displays the input values from the Sample Test cases if they are defined in the Question. Sample input values may be included in a coding Question to help you understand the type of input passed by the test cases to your code and the expected output values from your solution. To test your code, click "Run Code". The output produced by your solution or any compilation errors and warning messages is displayed in the Stdout area. 

Input values for the code in the "Stdin" tab

Click the "Run all test cases" option to execute all the test cases covering edge scenarios for the solution. The output is shown in the Stdout tab as shown below.

Click the  icon on the top-right corner of the page to customize the appearance of the CodePair screen and change code editing options.

Options to Customize the CodePair Editor Settings