--- title: "Your Hiring Process Is Losing You Top Talent. Before They Ever Interview! | CoderPad" description: "Learn more about Your Hiring Process Is Losing You Top Talent. Before They Ever Interview! from CoderPad." canonical: "https://coderpad.io/blog/hiring-developers/your-hiring-process-is-losing-you-top-talent-before-they-ever-interview/" last_modified: "2026-05-27 21:27:09" --- [Back to blog](https://coderpad.io/blog/) # Your Hiring Process Is Losing You Top Talent. Before They Ever Interview! May 19, 2026 3 Minute Read [Hiring Developers](https://coderpad.io/blog/hiring-developers/) ## Here’s a hard truth most TA leaders don’t want to admit: your hiring process is screening for the wrong thing. Not skills. Not judgment. Not potential. It’s screening for the ability to interview well. And those two things have almost nothing to do with each other. We sat down with recruiting experts Cammas Freeman, Phil Strazzulla, and Kaylee Estes to talk through three of the biggest blind spots in technical hiring right now. What they said is worth slowing down for. [Play Video: Candidate Assessments for Technical Recruiting: AI Best Practices, Risks, and Expert Tips](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtRSVtykhAI) ## The Interview Starts Before You Send the Invite By the time a candidate walks into your first screening call, they’ve already formed an opinion about your company. They’ve read your Glassdoor reviews, Googled your leadership team, and decided whether your job description sounds like a real role or a wishlist written by committee. Your employer brand, your response time, your job post clarity, these aren’t “nice to haves.” They’re the first round of your hiring process, whether you’ve designed them that way or not. That’s exactly why candidate experience is baked into everything CoderPad builds. 96% of candidates complete CoderPad assessments not because they’re easy, but because they’re designed around real engineering work that feels worth a developer’s time. When your process respects candidates, your completion rates show it. And so does your employer brand. ## You’re Accidentally Filtering for Professional Interviewers The candidate who nails every behavioral question, tells a perfect STAR story, and confidently handles whatever you throw at them might be exactly who you want. Or they might be someone who’s simply very good at interviewing. The uncomfortable reality is that most structured interviews test interview performance, not job performance. If your process can be beaten by polish and prep, it’s not revealing real talent. It’s rewarding whoever practiced hardest. CoderPad was built to close that gap. Instead of algorithm puzzles and trick questions, CoderPad Screen puts candidates inside multi-file, realistic coding projects that mirror actual engineering work. You see how they think, how they structure code, how they handle ambiguity. Not how well they memorized a sorting algorithm at midnight. The result is fewer mis-hires, faster decisions, and a clearer signal on who can actually do the job. ## AI in Interviews: The Question You’re Not Ready For Should candidates use AI during technical assessments? It’s a genuinely polarizing question and one your team probably hasn’t aligned on yet. But here’s the more useful reframe: if a candidate can use an AI tool to pass your technical screen, what does that tell you about your screen? And what does it tell you about the actual job? We live in an AI-assisted world. Designing assessments that mirror how work actually gets done isn’t lowering the bar. It’s raising the relevance of what you’re measuring. CoderPad leans into this directly. AI assistants are built into the platform and prompts are captured so interviewers can see exactly how candidates think, validate, and ship alongside AI. You’re not just measuring output. You’re seeing judgment. That’s the skill that actually matters now. ## The Fix Isn’t a New Tool. It’s a New Frame. Better hiring doesn’t start with a fancier scorecard. It starts with being honest about what your process is actually testing and whether that maps to what the job actually requires. The companies winning on technical talent right now have done that audit, made it uncomfortable, and rebuilt around real signals. CoderPad helps teams get there faster: 30% reduction in time to hire, $30K+ saved per hire, and assessments trusted by engineering teams at Shopify, Meta, Spotify, and Goldman Sachs. If you want to talk through what a smarter technical hiring process looks like for your team, we’d love to dig in. ## Get a smarter technical hiring process [Book a demo](https://coderpad.io/sales/) ## Subscribe for more CoderPad insights ## Trending Articles Previous slide Next slide [Hiring Developers ## How to Hire for AI Fluency Now That It’s a Critical Skill Based on the CoderPad webinar featuring Bayo Ojuri (CoderPad), Bonnie Dilber (Zapier), and Melany Austin (GoDaddy). “AI fluency” has quietly become a line item in nearly every technical job description. The problem: most teams added the requirement long before they had a reliable way to assess it. You can ask a candidate whether they use […] Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/hiring-developers/how-to-hire-for-ai-fluency-now-that-its-a-critical-skill/) [Hiring Developers ## Hot Takes on Hiring: “AI Fluency” Is a Myth Our CEO, Amanda Richardson, and our Head of Product, Frank Hauben, can’t agree on anything else. We put Amanda and Frank on camera, handed them five spicy hot takes about AI in hiring, and told them not to sit on the fence. They sat on the fence anyway. Here’s what they actually fought about. Amanda […] Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/hiring-developers/hot-takes-on-hiring-ai-fluency-is-a-myth/) [Hiring Developers ## 5 Unfiltered Takes on AI That Engineering Leaders Actually Believe We put a room full of senior engineering leaders together, took away the slides, added beer, and asked them to say the thing they’d never put in a LinkedIn post. No PR-approved talking points, no vendor gloss, just people who ship for a living telling the truth about what AI is doing inside their orgs […] Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/hiring-developers/5-unfiltered-takes-on-ai-that-engineering-leaders-actually-believe/) [Hiring Developers ## Your Developer Interview Loop Is a Year Old. Is It Still Finding Your Best Candidates? A YC-backed founder called me last week with some good questions. His 20-person startup hadn’t hired an engineer in over a year. Now they’re opening reqs again, and instead of just dusting off the old loop, he wanted to understand how interviews had changed and if candidates were ready for AI interviews. His process — […] Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/hiring-developers/your-developer-interview-loop-is-a-year-old-is-it-still-finding-your-best-candidates/) [Hiring Developers ## AI Fluency Is the New Technical Skill. Is Your Hiring Process Ready? Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed software development. Developers are no longer working in isolation, writing every line of code from memory. AI has become part of the engineering workflow, helping developers brainstorm approaches, generate boilerplate code, and debug complex issues. The question isn’t whether engineers are using AI. It’s how effectively they’re using it. Hiring […] Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/hiring-developers/ai-fluency-is-the-new-technical-skill-is-your-hiring-process-ready/) [Hiring Developers ## AI Didn’t Kill Entry Level Hiring. Bad Screening Did. For the last two years, the narrative has been loud, confident, and mostly wrong: AI is coming for entry level engineering jobs. The story goes something like this: If AI can write code, summarize docs, generate tests, and debug basic issues, why would companies still hire junior engineers? It sounds logical. It is also incomplete. […] Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/hiring-developers/ai-didnt-kill-entry-level-hiring-bad-screening-did/) [Hiring Developers ## The Resume Is Dead. Most Teams Just Haven’t Admitted It Yet. Resumes made sense when applying for a job took real effort. That era is over. AI lets candidates apply to hundreds of roles in the time it once took to write a single cover letter. Employer-side AI systems process the flood. The result is a hiring funnel built almost entirely on artificial signals, where the […] Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/hiring-developers/the-resume-is-dead-most-teams-just-havent-admitted-it-yet/) [Hiring Developers ## Is Your Technical Hiring Process Screening Out Great Engineers? The short answer: Many technical hiring processes are doing the latter. High-friction interview loops, live coding under observation, and AI-restrictive assessments are measuring interview performance, not job performance. The fix isn’t rebuilding from scratch — it’s auditing whether your process measures engineering capability or something else entirely. If you attended our recent webinar with CoderPad […] Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/hiring-developers/is-your-technical-hiring-process-screening-out-great-engineers/) [Hiring Developers ## Junior Developers Are Your Strategic Advantage—If You Can Actually Evaluate Them Campus recruiting season arrives the same way every year: hundreds of applications, a narrow window, and a process that was never designed for this much volume or this much pressure. Meanwhile, the definition of “technical skill” is actively shifting—AI-polished resumes have made traditional screening nearly meaningless, and the skills that predict junior developer success look […] Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/hiring-developers/junior-developers-are-your-strategic-advantage-if-you-can-actually-evaluate-them/) [Hiring Developers ## CoderPad Uses CoderPad to Hire Engineers. Here’s How. When we opened our latest software engineer role, we had 100 applications within 24 hours. By the end of the first week, without running a single ad, we had 160 candidates in the pipeline. That’s a lot of signal to sort through. And it forced us to be honest about something every engineering leader eventually […] Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/hiring-developers/coderpad-uses-coderpad-to-hire-engineers-heres-how/) [Hiring Developers ## Is Your Technical Hiring Process Built for the AI Era? Find Out With a New Quiz. AI didn’t just change how engineers build software. It changed what it means to hire one. The tools engineers use every day — AI coding assistants, prompt-driven debugging, multi-model workflows — are now fundamental to how modern development teams operate. According to our State of Tech Hiring 2026 Report, 82% of developers find generative AI […] Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/hiring-developers/is-your-technical-hiring-process-built-for-the-ai-era-find-out-with-a-new-quiz/) [Hiring Developers ## In the AI Era, Shopify Is Investing in Junior Engineers—Not Cutting Them We spoke with Farhan Thawar, VP and Head of Engineering at Shopify, about why the company 10x’d its internship program, what AI-native hiring really looks like, and the three-part framework reshaping how technical talent gets evaluated. The conventional wisdom goes something like this: AI is coming for developers, and the first casualties will be the […] Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/hiring-developers/in-the-ai-era-shopify-is-investing-in-junior-engineers-not-cutting-them/) ## Hire with confidence. See why engineering teams trust CoderPad to evaluate developers with realistic, AI-ready hiring workflows. [Request a demo](https://coderpad.io/sales/)