Compass — Executive Assessment Platform

A multi-tenant decision assessment platform. Employers invite candidates, candidates work through scenarios under time pressure with no feedback, and each sitting produces a dimension profile and a written evaluation.

Built with Next.js 14 (App Router), Prisma and PostgreSQL.

Who sees what

Address	Who it is for
/	Public homepage
/practice	Anyone. Belongs to no employer and is deleted after 30 days
/intake	The open candidate form
/assess?token=…	An invited candidate. No name or email form - the invite carries it
/portal	An employer. Their own candidates and nobody else's
/master-admin	Whoever runs the platform

Every employer-facing query is scoped by clientAccountId. Practice runs carry no tenant, so the same filter excludes them without anyone having to remember to. The one deliberate cross-tenant read is the Live talent registry, which is master-admin only and audited on every access.

Deploying

See DEPLOY.md for step-by-step instructions, including the three things to configure once it is up.

Do not deploy this project with Vercel Drop — it must be built by Vercel from this repository.

Environment variables

All are set in Vercel under Settings → Environment Variables. See .env.example for details.

Name	Set by
DATABASE_URL, DATABASE_URL_UNPOOLED	Vercel, when you connect a Neon database
BLOB_READ_WRITE_TOKEN	Vercel, when you connect a Blob store
AUTH_SECRET	You. Also derives the key that encrypts stored provider keys, so changing it means re-entering those
ADMIN_EMAIL, ADMIN_PASSWORD	You — the first sign-in with these creates the Super Admin account

Local development

Requires Node.js 18.17+ and a PostgreSQL database.

cp .env.example .env   # then fill in the values
npm install
npm run db:migrate     # apply migrations
npm run db:seed        # load starter content - clears existing content first
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000.

The database

Schema changes go through migrations, not prisma db push — db:push is still in package.json for throwaway local work, but using it against a database that has migration history will drift from it silently.

npm run db:migrate            # apply pending migrations
npm run db:backfill           # assign pre-tenancy rows to the legacy tenant
npm run db:rank-registries    # recompute talent registry percentiles
npm run db:purge-expired      # delete practice runs past their retention date

prepare-db.ts runs the migration, the backfill and the purge in that order on every deploy, so a regularly deployed instance needs no scheduler. The purge keeps any practice run that joined the talent registry - the person asked for it to be kept, and the registry entry cascades from the sitting.

20261013084247_tenant_scoped_candidates is the one migration that can fail on existing data rather than only adding to it. It checks its own assumptions first and names the one that failed, and the backfill above has to run before it. prisma/prepare-db.ts does both in the right order during a Vercel build.

Authoring assessments

The scenario pack format, with templates, is in docs/scenario-pack-format.md. Packs are uploaded from the master console and previewed before anything is written.

Scores are normalised per dimension against the range that dimension could actually reach in the scenarios a candidate answered — so packs of different lengths and different weight scales are both usable, and comparable.