--- title: "Q&A: Musings of a CEO on Tech Interviews, Cheating and AI | CoderPad" description: "In this Q&A session on cheating and AI in tech interviews, Amanda Richardson emphasizes the importance of trust and effective interview design." canonical: "https://coderpad.io/blog/interviewing/qa-musings-of-a-ceo-on-tech-interviews-cheating-and-ai/" last_modified: "2026-04-15 16:19:20" --- [Back to blog](https://coderpad.io/blog/) # Q&A: Musings of a CEO on Tech Interviews, Cheating and AI June 27, 2024 5 Minute Read By Nathalie Figuière [Hiring Developers](https://coderpad.io/blog/hiring-developers/) [Interviewing](https://coderpad.io/blog/interviewing/) Yes, AI has changed the way that candidates cheat. But, it’s also changed the way that we work and interview. I sat down with CoderPad CEO, Amanda Richardson, to collect her perspective on tech interviews, cheating and AI. In this Q&A session, she emphasizes the importance of trust and effective interview design. She encourages recruiters and hiring managers to shift their mindset from fear to curiosity. Q: What would you say to hiring managers and Talent Acquisition professionals who are worried about cheating in interviews? So many TA and technical hiring managers ask me about cheating in interviews—and I agree that cheating can be an issue. But NOT in the way most people think. I’d say lead with trust, not fear. Trust that 99% of candidates believe in themselves enough to show their real skills (and the other 1% was always going to be undeterred). Trust that you’re in it together: you want the right candidates for the role, and candidates want the right company to work for. Q: How should interviewers, who are mindful of cheating, approach designing interview questions? In the same way any interviewer should approach interview questions. Orient around giving the 99% of people who want to find the right-fit job questions that are unique and pertinent to the role at hand. Q: How would you recommend that recruiters react, when faced with a cheater? Be open-minded. Curiosity will get you further than assumptions. Ask for explanations. Seek understanding without instant judgment. And see what you find out. Q: How can hiring managers handle the high volume of candidates for technical positions, while minimizing cheating? Ok, it’s wild out there. The sheer number of candidates for every technical job is overwhelming. And with volume, comes a higher risk of fraud. Getting through the volume in a way that (a) prioritizes [candidate experience](https://coderpad.io/events/candidate-cheating-vs-candidate-experience-in-it-recruitment/) while (b) getting your teams the visibility they need is the real trick. But how do you do it? We actually recently experienced this ourselves. We posted a Director of Customer Success role and a People Manager role, both fully remote. We received over 800 resumes, in about 36 hours—for each role! And I know a lot of HR folks are seeing very similar application flows. So how do you quickly screen candidates and manage a funnel of hundreds of applications. I don’t think there’s just one answer. For our Customer Success role, for example, we put together a short Excel exercise. It takes only a couple of minutes to complete and focuses on calculating net dollar retention and gross dollar retention—two key skills for the job. We added a couple of objective screening questions to ensure we’re aligned on expectations for what this leader should be able to do. ## Psst. Are you following us on LinkedIn? Previous slide Next slide Q: What’s your take on the perception that it’s easy for candidates to cheat in technical interviews? Recently a friend and I were talking about technical interviews. “Everyone’s cheating all the time,” she said. “It’s crazy. And it’s so easy to find question answers online.” I asked her how she was creating her questions for the interviews, and she is pulling questions off LeetCode. You know what the REAL answer is? Create better interview questions. Questions that are tailored for recent problems, unique to your business, and actually [test for the skills you need](https://coderpad.io/platform/technical-screening/). With this, you will attract and engage great candidates who are: - Motivated by the work that you actually do and value - Excited by your company mission and purpose - More likely to understand how to do the work, and solve the problems you need to solve Q: Do you consider that using AI tools, like ChatGPT, in technical interviews is cheating? Absolutely not. Don’t hobble your candidates, help them! Let them use these tools. Technical interviews are about assessing two things: one, can the candidate actually do the job with the tools they will have, and two, will they be able to work with your team? For the first point, you have to give them the tools they need and will be expected to use on the job. Sure, there are things like GitHub, but there are also tools like Copilot and Stack Overflow. These are shortcuts that make developers more efficient and, in the end, help you assess whether or not they can do the job. Q: What would you say to those who do consider that using AI tools in technical interviews is cheating? When I hear recruiting teams talk about how [using AI or ChatGPT during the interview process](https://coderpad.io/blog/hiring-developers/hiring-managers-you-should-want-candidates-to-use-chatgpt-to-pass-your-technical-interviews-heres-why/) is cheating, I actually get concerned. It gives me the impression that they don’t fully understand the job of a developer. If you think a developer just pumps out a bunch of code, that is certainly a core part of the job, but it is not actually the most important part. Developers are problem solvers. There are often multiple ways to solve a problem. Talented developers will design a solution that is scalable, secure, and future-proof (in terms of how the product might evolve or extend). They’ll think about solving a problem for your customer. That’s the real value of developers. Q: Why do you consider it important to allow candidates to use tools like ChatGPT during interviews? Telling them they can’t use ChatGPT or that it’s cheating actually means you can’t assess them with the tools they’re going to use or for the resourcefulness they need to get the job done. You need to be able to assess whether or not they can solve problems in the context of your business and with the tools you’ll give them. So give them ChatGPT, see how they do, see how they perform in the interview, see if they can decipher a right answer or understand how an answer was conceived and how it could be applied to the job. Q: What’s your advice for hiring managers who are still hesitant in regards to adopting AI within their interviews? If you’re hesitant about letting candidates use AI in your interview process, rethink your mindset. Consider why it scares you and what the real problem is. Maybe turn to peers who are [letting candidates use AI during technical interviews](https://coderpad.io/events/how-interviewers-are-leveraging-chatgpt-to-hire-developers/) to focus on skills around future-proofing, developing sustainable products, and solving problems efficiently. Ask them how it’s going for them. ## Subscribe for more CoderPad insights ## Trending Articles Previous slide Next slide [Interviewing ## 3 Tips To Introduce ChatGPT Into Your Technical Interviews Integrating ChatGPT into technical interviews involves setting clear expectations, demonstrating its practical use, and acknowledging its limitations, creating a fair and realistic assessment environment that aligns with the evolving landscape of software development Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/interviewing/3-tips-to-introduce-chatgpt-into-your-technical-interviews/) [Hiring Developers ## 4 ChatGPT Prompt Templates to Enhance Your Coding Interview Process Learn how to easily streamline your coding interviews with ChatGPT. Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/hiring-developers/4-ways-to-use-chatgpt-to-enhance-your-coding-interview-process/) [Hiring Developers ## 18 Features Your Tech Assessment Tool Should Have to Prevent Cheating This article is an overview of “anti-cheat” features that can help you prevent, detect and mitigate cheating attempts within your candidate assessment process. Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/hiring-developers/18-features-your-tech-assessment-tool-should-have-to-prevent-cheating/) [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/) ## 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/)