Platform overview¶
SkillFoundry is a technical skills assessment platform. Instead of algorithm puzzles, candidates work on realistic engineering tasks — often derived from real pull requests — inside a full code workspace with a repository, tests, documentation, and AI-simulated stakeholders (a Customer and a Technical Program Manager they can chat with).
Hiring teams get a structured evaluation of each submission: automated test results, code quality analysis, and a behavioral profile of how the candidate worked, not just what they produced.
The pieces of the platform¶
| Component | What it does |
|---|---|
| Web application | Where everyone works day to day: candidate dashboard and code workspace, recruiter evaluation tools, organization administration, learning and gamification features. |
| VS Code extension | An optional in-IDE assessment experience. Candidates clone the task repository and work in their own editor, with the same submission and scoring pipeline. See Taking an assessment in VS Code. |
| REST API | Everything in the web app is available via the API for integrators. See the API overview. |
| Behavioral analytics | During assessments, SkillFoundry records how work happens (test runs, edit patterns, documentation reading — never keystrokes or clipboard contents) and turns it into behavioral scores. See Monitoring and data collection. |
Roles¶
Every SkillFoundry account has one primary role, chosen at signup or assigned via invitation:
| Role | Who | What they can do |
|---|---|---|
| Candidate | Developers taking assessments or practicing | Browse and complete tasks, view their own results, use learning paths and gamification (when enabled by their organization) |
| Interviewer | Hiring team members | Everything candidates can do, plus: create and assign tasks, invite candidates, review submissions, view reports. Requires membership in an organization. |
| Organization Admin | Account owners and IT admins | Everything interviewers can do, plus: manage members, billing, org settings, SSO/SCIM, branding |
| Platform Admin | SkillFoundry staff | Platform operations. This role cannot be self-assigned. |
Core concepts¶
- Task — a coding challenge. Tasks can be imported from real GitHub pull requests, created from templates, or curated public community challenges. Each task has a description (like a ticket), acceptance criteria, and usually a linked repository.
- Attempt — one candidate's run at a task. An attempt moves through the states Not Started → In Progress → Submitted, then gets scored. Attempts can also expire or be cancelled.
- Submission — the final code a candidate submits. Submitting is final — an attempt cannot be edited after submission (though a new attempt can often be started).
- Score report — the evaluation output: an overall score plus a breakdown across correctness, code quality, test coverage, working process, and communication.
- Organization — the workspace for a company. Organizations own tasks, members, candidates, billing, and settings such as the AI-assistance policy.
Typical flows at a glance¶
Candidate: sign up → choose the Candidate role → pick a task from the dashboard (assigned or public) → work in the code workspace or VS Code → run tests → submit → see status and score under My Tasks.
Hiring team: create or import tasks → invite candidates by email → candidates complete assessments → review submissions in the evaluation queue → view score reports and behavioral insights → make a decision.
Organization admin: create the organization → choose a subscription plan → invite team members → configure settings (AI policy, SSO, branding) → monitor usage and analytics.
Each of these flows has a dedicated getting-started guide:
- Getting started for candidates
- Getting started for hiring teams
- Getting started for organization admins
Signing in¶
SkillFoundry uses a hosted identity provider for authentication. You can sign up with email and password or a social login, and enterprise customers can enforce SAML SSO for their domain (see Organization administration). There is no separate "create password on our servers" step — password resets and multi-factor settings are handled through the sign-in flow.
Browser requirements¶
The web app targets modern evergreen browsers (current Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari). The code workspace uses an embedded editor (Monaco) which can be blocked by very restrictive browser extensions or corporate content-security policies — see Troubleshooting if the editor fails to load.