R Rubric

Live Session

The Live Session screen is where Rubric earns its keep. It’s a single window, four resizable panels, and everything you need to run a thirty-minute interview without context-switching to another tool.

The four panels

┌─────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────┐
│                         │                         │
│   Candidate board       │   Interviewer guide     │
│   (Excalidraw)          │   (private Markdown)    │
│                         │                         │
├─────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┤
│                         │                         │
│   Rubric panel          │   Notes panel           │
│   (score 0–5)           │   (timestamped)         │
│                         │                         │
└─────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────┘

The horizontal and vertical dividers are draggable. Adjust the layout to whatever balance suits the round — for a senior architect interview you might give the candidate board most of the space; for a deep-dive on a single subsystem, expand the notes panel.

Top-left: Candidate board

An embedded Excalidraw canvas. This is the only panel the candidate sees when you share your screen.

  • The board comes pre-loaded with the problem statement and (often) starter shapes.
  • Edits the candidate makes are visible to you in real time.
  • You can draw on the board too — useful for “let me show you what I mean” moments.

If you’re using a video call’s screen-share, share only this panel (or use a window-level share that excludes the rest of the Rubric layout). Most tools support per-window or per-region sharing.

Top-right: Interviewer guide

The private Markdown brief. This is your reference, your follow-up question list, and your red-flag checklist all in one document.

A typical guide contains:

  • The full problem statement (more detail than the candidate sees).
  • The evaluation criteria for each rubric category.
  • Suggested follow-up questions, ordered roughly by depth.
  • Red flags — patterns that should lower a category score.
  • Hints you can offer if the candidate gets stuck.

Scroll freely. Search the guide with Cmd/Ctrl + F.

Bottom-left: Rubric panel

A live scoring panel showing every rubric category for this interview. Each category has:

  • A name and weight.
  • A 0–5 score selector.
  • Six descriptors (one per score level) so you remember what each score actually means.

Scoring is non-destructive — change a score as many times as you like. The final score updates automatically. See Scoring with Rubrics for how the weights combine.

You can score in real time as the candidate demonstrates each skill, or wait and score everything at the end. Most interviewers find a hybrid works best: jot the score when you see strong signal, refine at the end.

Bottom-right: Notes panel

A simple text input with one feature that matters: every note is timestamped against the session clock when you press Enter. So a note typed nine minutes into the round shows up as [09:14] mentioned consistent hashing for cache distribution.

Two ways to use it:

  • Live narration — short notes during the session, more later.
  • End-of-section pause — stop the candidate at natural breaks and write a longer paragraph.

Notes feed directly into the report. Write what you’d want to read back to yourself a week later when you can’t remember which candidate said what.

The clock

A subtle clock at the top of the window shows elapsed time. It starts when you click Start Session and stops when you click End Session. You can pause it (e.g., for a screen-share fix-up) — paused time is excluded from note timestamps.

The session is also marked “active” while the clock is running. Active sessions appear in the library sidebar so you can resume them after a restart or app crash.

Ending a session

When time is up, click End Session. Rubric:

  1. Stops the clock.
  2. Saves the final scores, notes, and elapsed time.
  3. Hands the bundle to the configured AI provider to draft a report.
  4. Opens the Report screen with the draft when it’s ready.

If you don’t have an API key configured, the session still saves — you just won’t get an auto-drafted report. You can always come back and generate one later from the same session.

Recovering from interruptions

Crashes happen. Network drops happen. Rubric persists session state to local storage every time you score, every time you save a note. If the app restarts mid-session, the Active sessions entry in the library sidebar will let you resume exactly where you left off, with the clock paused at the moment of interruption.