Welcome to Colare! Our team is guiding you through your very first assessment, on the way to assessing thousands of the world's best engineers. This playbook covers who does what, the phases week by week, the gates that make “proven” checkable, and how one perfected pilot becomes the way your whole company hires.
We learn how your team actually works: the real work, the bar, what matters. Then we build the assessment alongside your engineers.
Where everything gets perfected. One team, white-glove: scores, comms and process tuned to how your organization works.
New teams rerun the proven loop in the order your sponsor ranked, 2 to 3 weeks each. Adjacent formats go live fastest.
Hiring managers self-serve through the loop, and governance steps down to a light monthly and quarterly cadence.
Every milestone has one name and one date on each side. Your engineers decide what a good hire looks like; Colare does the heavy lifting.
| Role | What they own | Time it takes |
|---|---|---|
| Your side | ||
| Executive sponsor | The “why” internally, escalations, and the 30-day and quarterly reviews. Keeps the implementation visible past kickoff. | Kickoff + reviews |
| Engineering lead(s) | The bar: the consult, the assessment review, and borderline-score decisions during the pilot. | ~2 hrs per role |
| Recruiter(s) | Day-to-day operation: sending assessments, reading results, moving candidates. | 30 min + daily use |
| ATS admin | The assessment stage in your ATS and the integration connection (or the CSV fallback). | ~1 hr |
| Colare side | ||
| Implementation lead | The plan, the cadence, every milestone's status, and same-week escalation when anything slips. | End to end |
| Talent science team | Assessment drafting, rubric construction, cut-score derivation, and calibration analysis. | End to end |
The engineering lead changes per role: each discipline's hiring manager owns the bar for their own assessments.
A shared Mutual Success Plan lists every milestone, owner, due date, and status. It's filled in live at kickoff and opens every check-in. If it's not in the plan, it's not committed; if it slips, the plan shows it the same week.
One shared channel, opened at kickoff: your recruiters, your engineering lead, and Colare's team in the same place. Async questions get same-day answers, and anything that could slip a milestone is raised the day it's spotted, not at the next check-in. Slack or Teams, whichever your org runs. We join yours, including GovCloud environments.
One meeting that ends with everything downstream unblocked. The Mutual Success Plan is filled in live, and every parallel workstream is started, not scoped. We also capture the baseline: what screening costs you today, so every later review measures against real numbers instead of impressions.
The assessment is built through the engineering review loop: a 30-minute consult with your engineering lead (which doubles as the cut-score consult), assessment v1 within a week, then a review session where your engineers confirm or correct every question before anything ships. While the build runs, four workstreams run beside it:
The assessment becomes a stage in your ATS via native integration. Colare connects to 100+ ATS platforms, with a CSV fallback so launch is never blocked on the integration. See ATS integrations for how the connection works, plus step-by-step guides for Ashby and Greenhouse.
One 30-minute session covering sending, reading results, and where borderline scores route.
The invite email lives in the Colare platform. Your team reviews, edits, and brands every message a candidate receives before the first one goes out.
A short welcome video filmed with your team, so candidates hear about the role and the assessment in your voice, not ours.
Live candidates start flowing, and this phase is deliberately white-glove. We work closely with one team to perfect the process and learn your company as thoroughly as you're learning ours, before anything deploys company-wide. Closer touches by design: Colare watches every submission and flags anything that looks off the same day.
The session where the numbers take over from judgment. One ~60-minute working session with your engineering lead:
Shortly after, the 30-day review puts the results in front of your executive sponsor: candidates processed, pass-through vs. baseline, hours saved, calibration accuracy. The same format as every quarterly review that follows.
New disciplines don't restart the implementation. They rerun a loop that already works: consult with that discipline's hiring manager → build (2 to 3 weeks) → engineering review → pilot cohort → calibration. The expansion order comes from the ranking your sponsor set at kickoff, sequenced by content overlap (adjacent disciplines that share formats go live fastest) and hiring volume. Expansion is adoption, not paperwork: new teams run under the same agreement.
Each phase transition is a gate with explicit criteria, so “it's going well” is never a judgment call. A gate either clears or it names exactly what's missing.
Opens on the success plan: what cleared, what's next, what's blocked. Fifteen minutes because the plan does the tracking; the meeting only resolves what the plan can't. Anything urgent moves same-day in the comms channel.
Steps down after Gate 1. Pipeline health, upcoming reqs, expansion progress.
Five numbers, every quarter, same format: candidates processed, pass-through vs. baseline, hours saved, calibration accuracy, expansion pipeline. Sponsor-level, evidence over anecdote.
The three derivation methods, volume bands, the review band, and recalibration.
How a role moves from JD through the consult to a locked, engineer-approved proposal.
Sending assessments, reading results, and how scoring works, for hiring teams.
The milestone-by-milestone plan filled in live at kickoff.
The five-metric format used for the 30-day review and every QBR after.
What candidates see, how their work is evaluated, and how to set up.
The 30-minute session: sending, reading results, and routing borderline scores.