Mercor’s interview process is less atmospheric coding and more whiteboarding.
On Saturday’s episode of the 20VC podcast, Osvald Nitski, head of product at Mercor, said the AI training company is moving away from take-home assignments that can be completed with AI.
“We’re going to do one round to see if the person is familiar with AI tools,” he said. “We look at being able to set up a good experiment, understanding statistics, having good judgment, and also system design,” he said, referring to what is expected of him in a whiteboard session.
Whiteboard interviews, where candidates draw and explain their thought processes, became the industry gold standard in the 2010s and are part of standard technical interviews at companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft.
Nitzky, who joined the $10 billion startup last year, said on the podcast that AI makes it very easy to “offload” many decisions.
“We want to make sure people have good judgment and understand what they’re doing instead of just spewing out what comes out of Claude,” he said.
Mercor uses AI to screen candidates for the talent market, but its full-time job interview process is inconsistent with the hiring process in much of Silicon Valley.
As an example, traditional interviews such as culture fit screenings and whiteboard sessions are rapidly replacing work trials and take-home evaluations, which Nitzky said Melkor has moved away from. AI coding startups like Lovable, Cursor, and Kilo say work experiments are a one-shot way to determine whether a person has the technical and soft skills you want to see.
Mercor’s low AI interview strategy is also unique compared to its peers.
Business Insider has reported in recent months that Big Tech companies such as Google, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, and Cisco are changing their interviews to allow candidates to use AI. Some tech startups give candidates full access to AI tools and coding assistants.
Emily Cohen, head of human resources and operations at AI coding startup Cognition, said her company has changed its interview process to take AI and vibe coding into account.
“I think it’s like letting a kid take a math test without using a calculator,” she said of not allowing the use of AI in interviews. “For much of the building of things similar to what you do in your role, you can and should use AI tools.”