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.
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.