How can we do better interviews in the age of AI
Absolutely nobody likes the hiring process. Not the managers hiring, not the recruitment people, and certainly not the candidates.
Tech interviews are one of the worst parts of the process and are pretty much universally hated by the people taking them. We’ve all heard stories of people being asked comp sci questions about O(n) efficiency, only to connect APIs with basic middleware in their day job. I think the image below pretty much sums it up:
The last few years, though, have seen a whole bunch of advancements to counteract the interview process:
Before AI, there were cases of pay-to-interview schemes with interviewees who kept their cameras off during remote interviews. If hired, they sounded *suspiciously different *from the person who interviewed. We’ve had cases of North Korean workers trying to get jobs with tech companies using deepfake videos. Whether this was just for money or something more nefarious is to be seen. AI is, of course, the big one. Using apps like GitHub Co-pilot and Cursor to auto-complete code requires very little skill in hands-on coding. Asking Claude and OpenAI answers to technical questions will usually result in a right answer, and the failure rate is improving rapidly.
This doesn’t even include the AI implications of resume creation, mass applications, one-way video interviews, and other techniques that have caused a tug-of-war between employers and employees. Still, in this post, we’ll focus squarely on the tech interview.
Tech interview basics#
Skip this section if you know the process; almost every company hiring developers has some variation of the below:
Hackerrank - Online coding assessments usually use a pre-interview screen. Commonly used for grads, interns, and junior devs. It allows people to code in their own time at home without an interviewer spending their time assessing it. Pass this step to get to the other interviews.
Comp Sci Fundamentals- Focuses on computer science fundamentals and is, again, more typically asked of junior developers. It usually involves Big O notation, questions about data structures, loops etc.
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