Compensating candidates for their time is not only the right thing to do, it is also required by law in many jurisdictions. In some cases, you may gain insights from candidate work, similar to those gained from resumes and in-person interviews.

Offering an honorarium reduces the likelihood that your best candidates will self-reject. Today, numerous social media threads are full of unhappy candidates who used legacy assessment systems conducted by brands that are now damaged.

Your hiring organization can purchase credits in advance at a ratio of $1 to 1 credit, with a minimum balance required to launch particular asssessments, called "Concerts". Each time a candidate delivers work, credits are deducted from your balance, with 90% going to the candidate and 10% to Pudding. Credits are shared across an entire organization, including all of its teams and individual managers.

In the context of Pudding, Candidates are professional independent contractors who engage in short-term, deliverable-based projects—commonly known as 'Paid Take-Homes.' They are LinkedIn-verified, use their own tools, set their own schedules, and retain ownership of the deliverables they produce.

Pudding scans Deliverable Guidelines prior to concert launches to ensure they do not impose supervision of any kind or reference employee-facing resources. Candidates may accept or reject invitations to concerts in Pudding, and set their own preferred rates.

Per the Pudding Terms of Service, deliverables may not be applied commercially or in the usual course of business without a separate agreement, commonly known as IP Assignment, upon hire.

All deliverables are compensated, irrespective of quality. If you are concerned about the quality of deliverables, you may vet your candidate pool in advance using your own methods outside of Pudding. Since you have full control over which candidates are invited, you can screen out candidates who might submit poor work.

$40 minimum fixed fee per deliverable and per estimated hour.

10 hour maximum estimated hours to complete per deliverable.

Maximum $1K total compensation per Candidate, per year.

Use of AI to supplement human ingenuity is expected, both in assesssments and in careers.

With this new reality in mind, forward-thinking hiring managers should customize Guidelines to inspire human-grade deliverables, and then evaluate them accordingly.

All candidates in a quorum on Pudding have access to AI, so the playing field is level.

Unlike conventional assessments, there is no standardized *correct* answer to Pudding assessments.

It is a non-trivial exercise for a candidate to identify, proposition and place confidence in the submissions from, a third party.

Some fingerprints from deliverable authoring tools are shared with hirers upon conclusion of concerts, which can be used in conjunction with follow-up interviews to verify a candidate is the original author.