Take-Home Follow-Up Call

A follow-up call is a short live conversation that happens after a candidate submits their take-home assessment. Nix, the AI interviewer, opens the files the candidate sent and asks them to explain a few of the choices they made. What they explain updates that round’s scorecard, so you can tell whether the candidate understands and stands behind the work they handed in.

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At a Glance

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Turning On the Follow-Up Call

Once it’s on, the call appears in your workflow as its own step, Take-home follow-up call, attached directly under the take-home round.

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Choosing Who Gets a Call

Click the Take-home follow-up call step to open its settings. Under Who gets a call, pick one of two options: The call’s length is fixed at about 20 minutes. It also has the same Enable Video Insights switch as your other AI interview rounds.

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Steering What the Call Covers

The call works out of the box: Nix reads the assignment, the files the candidate submitted, and their take-home scorecard, and picks the parts worth talking through. If you want it to dig into something specific, open the call step’s Interview Guidance tab and switch to Guided. Whatever you write under Focus Areas & Context becomes Nix’s brief for the call. Good things to put in your guidance:

• The design decision or trade-off you most want the candidate to defend
• Parts of the brief that were easy to skip, to check whether they skipped them on purpose
• How deep to go technically for this role’s seniority

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Requesting a Call

With Only the candidates you pick, you start each call yourself. You can also use this to give a candidate another chance if they missed or skipped their call. The candidate is emailed a link and has 48 hours to start the call. Because it has to start before that window closes, it works best when you know they’re around. If the option is greyed out, the menu tells you why. Common reasons:

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Timing

While the call is waiting, the submission shows as Awaiting follow-up call on the candidate’s profile. If the candidate doesn’t start the call in time, it’s marked as not taken and the submission keeps the score it already earned. It can take up to about an hour after the window closes for the status to update.

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Reviewing the Call

Open the candidate’s profile, go to the Evaluation tab, pick the take-home round from the dropdown, and switch to Interview. Below the submission is a Follow-up call section with:

• Recording and Transcript buttons for the full call
• Question-by-Question Analysis: each question Nix asked, with a timestamp, the candidate’s answer, and AI insights

The take-home scorecard itself (requirement match, proficiency signals, risks and concerns) is updated with what the call settled. A candidate who clearly explains strong decisions can move up. One who can’t explain their own submission can move down. Before the call is finished, the section tells you where things stand:

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Fair to Every Candidate

• Skipping or missing the call never counts against a candidate. Their submission is reviewed either way and keeps the score it earned.
• The call never rejects anyone on its own. It adds evidence to the scorecard; the hiring decision stays with you.
• Candidates know in advance. With Everyone who submits, the assignment page tells them before they upload that a short call follows. With Only the candidates you pick, it tells them a call may be requested.
• Gaming the call ends it. If a candidate keeps trying to manipulate the interviewer, is abusive, or submitted files with hidden text written to trick the AI, the call ends early. One curious question doesn’t trigger this — only repeated attempts do.

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