Leaders at the software company Canva used to wonder whether job candidates were secretly using AI during technical interviews.
By early last year, that concern gave way to a bigger question: How good are they with AI?
Managers saw the company’s engineers getting more done with the technology, so they needed to ensure new hires could do the same.
“We just flipped the script and went, ‘OK, we’re going to invite you to use AI,'” Brendan Humphreys, Canva’s chief technology officer, told Business Insider.
The result, he said, has been stronger hires better equipped to wield powerful AI tools to help write code and solve problems.
Canva is one of a growing number of companies — including Meta and McKinsey — that are inviting some job candidates to use AI in parts of the hiring process.
Broadly, when ChatGPT emerged in late 2022, many employers worried that job seekers would use AI to help talk their way past interviewers. Yet as the technology becomes more capable and embedded in daily work, a number of companies are moving from policing it to evaluating candidates’ AI know-how.
That’s what happened at Arcade, an IT infrastructure startup. The company has always asked technical candidates to complete a take-home exercise. Yet now, it expects them to use AI in the process, Alex Salazar, the company’s cofounder and CEO, told Business Insider.
As the technology’s capabilities surged over the past year or so, he realized that candidates would likely turn to AI regardless of whether Arcade sanctioned it. Ultimately, Salazar said, the company wants its workers, including new hires, to use AI.
“So why are we creating this artificial test that doesn’t even really reflect the work they’re going to do when they get here?” he said.
Humphreys came to a similar conclusion at Canva. To factor in AI, he said, the company reworked its technical interview to make the questions “complex, ambiguous, and problematic.”
“If you just dump the question that we’re giving you into an AI, you’re going to get a substandard answer,” Humphreys said.
To land a job at the company, which has about 265 million monthly users of its graphic design software, technical candidates need to know how to thoughtfully question AI, he said.
Show us you can work with AI
One way to avoid concerns that candidates might be leaning too hard on AI is to have job seekers show their work. In Canva’s case, the company asks candidates to share their screen during a technical interview.
“We want to see the interactions with the AI as much as the output of the tool,” Humphreys said.
Courtesy of Canva
Arcade tells candidates to use whatever AI tools they want on their exercise, then include a transcript of their conversations with the AI. The idea is to learn who knows how to do the job and to work with an agent. Doing so, Salazar said, comes with a “very real learning curve.”
He said that the shift to allowing AI use in the exercise meant that Arcade placed greater emphasis on a candidate’s “taste.” That sensibility is important, he said, because AI can kick out answers, yet the best results often come from repeated iteration with these tools, he said.
“It’s going to show their ability to use the AI, but it’s also going to show what they think ‘good’ is,” Salazar said of candidates’ interactions with AI.
‘Ride the dragon’
Other companies want workers to demonstrate their AI acumen during the hiring process, too.
In a June post on an internal message board, Meta said it was developing a coding interview in which candidates could use an AI assistant, Business Insider previously reported.
That mode of working, Meta wrote, was “more representative” of the environment in which future developers would be operating. It also makes “LLM-based cheating less effective,” the company said, referring to large language models.
The consulting firm McKinsey & Company is piloting a change to its graduate recruiting process, asking candidates to use the company’s internal AI assistant, Lilli, during case interviews to assess how they work with the technology, several media outlets reported in January.
The acceptance of, or even the preference for, AI in some parts of hiring doesn’t mean companies will welcome job seekers who use the tools to misrepresent their skills. Even if a candidate gets away with it at first, hiring managers are likely to eventually discover that someone doesn’t have the goods, Susan Peppercorn, an executive coach, told Business Insider.
That’s because candidates who complete an assessment, for example, “are going to have to explain how they arrived at their thinking,” she said.
Understanding that thought process is what Canva seeks in its hiring, said Humphreys, who oversees roughly 2,600 technical employees in roles including software engineering, IT, and machine learning.
It’s a way of seeing whether a candidate makes sound technical decisions when it starts producing code, he said.
“What we’re testing for now in our interview process is an ability to harness that power, to control that power — to kind of ride the dragon,” Humphreys said.
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