Cheating Prevention in Technical Interviews: Balancing Hiring Integrity & Candidate Experience

Imagine a sound mixer. A large desk covered in sliders for each input channel. Dial up drums; dial down vocals, and so on, until you find the right balance.

Recruitment can feel like that. TA leaders are the DJ, deciding what to balance to build a hiring function that’s both efficient and effective. 

• Attract enough applications… but not so many you’re buried.
• Screen applicants down… but don’t be so rigorous you miss great people.
• Prioritize time-to-hire… but protect quality of hire too.
• Standardize processes… but don’t treat candidates like cattle. 

As the cheating conversation has exploded, one more slider is on most technical recruiters’ mixing desk:

• Protect the hiring process from cheating… but also protect candidate experience.

In other words, how do you balance looking after candidates with looking after the organization? Candidate experience with hiring integrity? Can you build a technical recruitment process that ticks both boxes? 

The answer is yes, and we’ll share some practical ways to do it. 

But the opportunity’s bigger than that. Because candidate experience isn’t just a priority to balance. Great CX is actually your best strategic lever to stop cheating in its tracks.

That’s a revolutionary idea, because it means you don’t have to backburner CX to frontburner integrity. And instead, can build an engaging, high-performance recruitment function that takes the cheating issue off the table. 

Let’s talk about developers cheating on technical tests 

GenAI frog-marching across the world and remote working momentum have both opened new doors for cheating, making hiring integrity a hot-hot-hot topic. 

(Business Insider reports that 10% of tech candidates attempt to cheat during hiring, for example. Ouch).

Cheating is a high-stakes problem

At best, cheating wastes everyone’s time and money. At worst, cheating imperils hiring decision-making. You might think you interviewed Kylie, but actually you interviewed Kylie’s friend Anusha. Or Reddit. 

Hopefully when Kylie turns up, she’s relatively capable. Perhaps she felt pressured to cheat because of the intensity of the job market, for example. So maybe she’s not a great culture fit – but hiring her doesn’t derail the business. 

🔖 Related read: Why do candidates really cheat?

But worst-case scenario, Kylie’s miles off the pace. And her lackluster coding skills escalate into embarrassing, time-consuming, costly issues. And then there’s the whole fire-rehire mountain too.

(Even more worst-case, the FBI warns of cybercriminals cheating to secure jobs that grant exposure to confidential data. Try explaining that one to your employees and customers.)

So how do you stop prospective devs from cheating their way into a job? Let’s start with understanding the scope of the problem. 

How do technical candidates cheat during recruitment?

The answer’s complicated, because one person’s cheating is another person’s resourcefulness. But let’s review the most common “cheating” touchpoints:

• Jacked-up resumes

You probably have an intuitive sense of what cheating on a resume looks like. But unpick that slightly and it’s more nuanced.

• Hiring a professional resume writer

Attitudes have evolved but for many traditionalists, any external help is “cheating”. Even if the role has nothing to do with the skill of resume writing.

• Using AI to create a resume

46% of 1000 jobseekers recently admitted to using ChatGPT to write cover letters or resumes – and 59% were hired. But then 11% were rejected when the employer learned they’d used ChatGPT. So is using ChatGPT smart, or dishonest?

• ‘White fonting’ terms to trick algorithms

Is tricking the algorithm cheating – or pragmatic? What about if the candidate only white-fonts skills they actually have? 

• Tailoring resumes to the job description 

Is this different from white fonting? On the one hand, candidates highlighting points from your JD shows they’re attentive and engaged. But what if they use AI to parse job descriptions and tailor their CV en-masse? Where’s the line?

• Exaggerating – or flat-out lying about – experience and skills

This probably feels like obvious cheating. But is there much difference between exaggerating and using a professional writer to shine the best possible light?

• Copy-and-paste code

Google. Reddit. ChatGPT. Copilot. Glassdoor. Stack Overflow.

There are heaps of places candidates can, theoretically, “cheat”. But using those channels doesn’t automatically mean a candidate is cheating. 

• Are they searching Google for a reminder because they haven’t used a certain language for a while? 

• Are they using Copilot to generate ideas but editing code using their skills, judgment and experience? 

• Are they copy-and-pasting but planning to test and codebug from that foundation?

• Or are they copying complex answers verbatim, because they don’t understand any better? 

You might consider all of these cheating. But there’s a strong argument that the first two or three are pragmatic, efficient ways developers solve problems on-the-job. 

Our State of Tech Hiring 2024 report found that 70% of developers think AI will help reduce their workload, for example. So can we really say candidates using AI is “cheating”? 

And another fly in the ointment:

• What if a candidate isn’t copy-and-pasting… not because they’re a good developer, but because they memorized everything?

Lots of recruiters wouldn’t consider that cheating. In fact, lots of technical hiring processes still (inadvertently) interview specifically for memorization. But is a good memory really the major skill for success? We’ll leave that with you…

• Asking a friend

This is more cut-and-dried – but not totally. Candidates might cheat by:

• Having someone else complete assessments
• Having someone off-screen for live interviews
• Being fed answers through an earpiece
• Bait-and-switching – one person interviews but another turns up

But what about… calling a more senior developer for an opinion? Arguably cheating, but also arguably exactly what they’d do on-the-job. 

What does cheating look like for you?

The point of these examples isn’t to make you worry even more about cheating. It’s to show that cheating is a spectrum. Ask fifty technical hiring managers what cheating looks like and you’ll get fifty different answers. 

Cheating also varies by industry, role, location and seniority. 

David Marr – Principal Technical Sourcer for Coalfire – points out that cheating practices are often more common for contract roles than full-time, for example. 

And CoderPad’s VP of Engineering, Nathan Sutter, says verbatim copy-paste answers are most common for graduate and junior roles because questions are most likely algorithmic. 

🎬 Webinar: Candidate Cheating vs. Candidate Experience in IT Recruitment

Preventing cheating starts with defining ‘cheating’ in your own context. Then you can explore ways to address it.

Practical ways to prevent and detect cheating

Once you’ve got your arms around the problem, you can pinpoint practical ways to mitigate. That’s where the right tooling comes in.

CoderPad’s platform empowers you to run coding assessments and collaborative technical interviews, with a heap of in-built anti-cheating features you can toggle on if you need them:

Prevention’s better than cure

• Question randomisation to mitigate the risk of question sharing
• Question timers to prevent searching for answers
• Copy/paste limitations to control when and how candidates copy and paste
• AI content testing to regularly update, test, and safeguard content library 
• Easy-build custom-code exercises to create more cheat-proof tests 
• Gamified coding exercises that are much harder to submit to AI for help

Detecting possible cheating 

• Code playback to see how candidates wrote their code
• IDE exit detection to know if/when candidates left their test
• Copy/paste tracking to spot if code might’ve originated elsewhere
• Plagiarism detection to spot if exact code is reused
• AI follow-up questions to check candidates’ understanding of code
• Candidate flagging to identity possible suspicious behaviour
• Location tracking to check candidates are based where they say
• Anomaly alerts for unusual candidate activity or performance 
• Test performance tracking to detect unusual improvement on retakes
• Webcam proctoring and AI analysis to flag suspicious behaviour 

CoderPad Screen makes a heap of sense if you’re struggling to get great resumes over to engineers. Especially if you’re worried about the integrity of applications. 

Recruitment-led resume screening is often a painful bottleneck because it’s hard to sort the diamonds from the rough amid buckets of technical nuance. (And the rise of AI-CVs). Managers end up wasting time interviewing candidates who don’t have basic technical skills, causing frustration and breeding internal resentment. 

Instead, CoderPad Screen empowers you to send candidates a short, gamified coding assessment that’s scored to your criteria. It’s better for everyone: Recruiters screen applications much faster and with way more confidence. Hiring managers only spend time interviewing the best candidates. Developers can show off their true skills in an engaging, fun way.

Learn more about how CoderPad can help mitigate cheating in your tech hiring process.

But let’s dig deeper into why you shouldn’t just switch-on all these features and be done with it.

Addressing cheating needs a bow and arrow, not a scattergun

McKinsey says candidate experience should be one of technical recruiters’ biggest strategic priorities. And no wonder. A great candidate experience can:

• Boost your employer brand, making it easier to attract top tech talent
• Improve candidate engagement and ease onboarding runways
• Increase offer acceptance, so more great devs sign on the dotted line
• Reduce costs by increasing recruitment efficiency

But taking a catch-all approach to mitigating cheating is directly counter to your candidate experience goals. 

Imagine you switch on total copy/paste blocking for all candidates. Yes, that’ll stop candidates copying answers verbatim from elsewhere. But it’ll also stop candidates checking and copying a piece of code from Stack Overflow, to avoid mistakes and save time. It comes back to your definitions: is that cheating?

Either way, serious developers aren’t likely to take well to sweeping prohibitions that feel arbitrary and ridiculous. And no adult likes being treated like a child.

The upshot is: a fire-blanket approach to preventing cheating smothers everything – including your best candidates. That’s never ideal, but it’s especially not ideal given the ongoing developer shortage.

Tech recruiters need to balance preventing cheating with prioritizing candidate experience. The best way to do that is with a measured, pragmatic, case-by-case approach.

But there’s also another, even bigger opportunity here. Because candidate experience isn’t just a priority to juggle. Candidate experience can actually be your biggest lever to help prevent cheating in the first place.

Candidate experience ⬆️, cheating ⬇️

Why do candidates cheat? Because they’re unskilled and want to convince you otherwise? Sure, occasionally. Some are desperate to get experience. A few subscribe to the ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ philosophy.

But mostly, candidates are skilled. But often they:

• Lack confidence in a competitive job market
• Lack confidence about what’s expected
• Worry they’re expected to have memorized everything 
• Are frustrated at boring, repetitive, generic, bland evaluations
• Are sick and tired of jumping through arbitrary hoops
• Don’t buy-into the opportunity because the interview tells them nothing

A great candidate experience can solve all those issues, to:

• Give candidates clarity about your expectations and hiring criteria
• Put candidates at ease by telling them what the hiring process involves
• Respect candidates’ time, with engaging, contextual, modern evaluations
• Help candidates excel with realistic true-to-job exercises (not memory tests)
• Move faster, with processes designed to skyrocket internal efficiency
• Uncover candidates’ true abilities with deep follow-up questions
• Help candidates assess whether you’re the right fit for them 

When you build a technical recruitment process like that, cheat rates plummet. Because you’re dismantling the reasons most candidates cheat in the first place. You’re building a process that’s respectful, engaging, empathetic, and valuable for everyone involved.

Yes, you’ll probably still get the 1% who were always going to cheat anyway. That’s why you choose tooling with comprehensive cheating prevention functionality. 

But instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, you also build a process that gives space for technical superstars to shine. 

So you can hire them. And keep building the brilliant processes, products, and services the business needs to thrive.