Leaders at software company Canva wondered if job candidates were secretly using AI during technical interviews.
By early last year, that concern had turned into a bigger question. “How good are they at AI?”
Managers realized that the company’s engineers were leveraging technology to accomplish more and needed to help new hires do the same.
“We flipped the script and said, ‘OK, we’re inviting you to use AI,'” Brendan Humphries, Canva’s chief technology officer, told Business Insider.
The result, he said, has been increased recruitment with the ability to write code and master powerful AI tools to help solve problems.
Canva is one of a growing number of companies, including Meta and McKinsey, that are encouraging some job seekers to use AI as part of the hiring process.
When ChatGPT debuted in late 2022, many employers were concerned that it would help job seekers use AI to get past interviewers. But as technology becomes more capable and integrated into daily operations, many companies are moving from policing technology to evaluating candidates’ AI know-how.
That’s what happened at Arcade, an IT infrastructure startup. The company has always required technician candidates to complete take-home exercises. But now it expects to leverage AI in that process, Alex Salazar, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told Business Insider.
He finds that candidates are likely to turn to AI, regardless of whether Arcade approves it or not, as the technology’s capabilities have improved dramatically over the past year or so. Ultimately, Salazar said the company wants its employees, including new hires, to take advantage of AI.
“So why create an artificial test that doesn’t really reflect the work they’re going to do once they get here?” he said.
Humphries came to a similar conclusion with Canva. To take AI into account, the company reworked its technical interviews to make the questions “complex, ambiguous and problematic,” he said.
“If you just put the questions we give AI into AI, you’re going to get subpar answers,” Humphries 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 ask thoughtful questions about AI, he said.
Show us what you can do with AI
One way to avoid concerns that candidates are too AI-biased is to ask job seekers to show their work. In Canva’s case, the company asks candidates to share their screen during technical interviews.
“We want to see not only the output of the tool, but also the interaction with the AI,” Humphries said.
Brendan Humphries, Canva CTO Provided by Canva
Arcade will instruct candidates to use their desired AI tools in the exercise and include a recording of their conversation with the AI. The idea is to learn who knows how to do the job and work with an agent. Doing so comes with a “very real learning curve,” Salazar said.
He said the move to allowing the use of AI in exercises would mean arcades would place more emphasis on candidates’ “preferences”. AI can come up with answers, but sensitivity is important because the best results often come from using these tools repeatedly, he said.
Regarding the candidate’s involvement with AI, Salazar said, “It’s going to show their ability to leverage AI, but it’s also going to show them what they think is ‘good.'”
“Ride a Dragon”
Other companies also want their employees to demonstrate AI acumen during the hiring process.
Business Insider previously reported that Meta said in a June post on an internal bulletin board that it was developing a coding interview that would allow candidates to use an AI assistant.
That working mode is “more representative” of the environment in which future developers will work, Mehta wrote. “It also reduces the effectiveness of LLM-based cheating,” the company said, referring to large-scale language models.
Consulting firm McKinsey & Company is piloting changes to its graduate hiring process, asking candidates to use its in-house AI assistant, Lili, during case interviews to assess how they use technology, multiple media outlets reported in January.
Just because AI is accepted or even preferred as part of the hiring process doesn’t mean companies will welcome job seekers who use the tools to misrepresent their skills. Executive coach Susan Peppercorn told Business Insider that even if a candidate does well at first, recruiters are likely to eventually realize that person isn’t the right fit.
That’s because, for example, candidates who complete an assessment “need to explain how they arrived at their ideas,” she says.
Humphries, who oversees about 2,600 tech employees in roles such as software engineering, IT and machine learning, said Canva looks to understand that thought process in hiring.
This is a way to make sure candidates are making good technical decisions when they start writing code, he said.
“What we’re testing right now in the interview process is the ability to harness that power and control that power and ride the dragon, so to speak,” Humphries said.
Do you have a story to share about your career? This reporter can be contacted at: tparadis@businessinsider.com
