A reader writes:
I’m conducting interviews next week, and usually my workplace sends interview questions to interviewers 30 minutes before the interview. This is in an effort to provide a more accessible and equitable experience for our interviewees, who may need extra time or feel more comfortable when they know the questions ahead of time. This also matches how the employee would normally work – he or she will have ample time to review and answer questions. All of our interviews are remote.
I’m working with a new panel member who suggested we stop this practice because they were feeling that candidates were using the extra time to have AI prepare answers to questions and then answering using AI-generated answers and they were not getting an accurate representation of the candidate. Ugh.
I haven’t been on an interview panel in about two years, so I don’t have a lot of recent experience and therefore haven’t experienced it firsthand. But I’ve really appreciated the general movement of giving questions ahead of time and really would hate to give it up. Candidates feel more comfortable when they are more familiar with what they are being asked and are able to focus on giving a good answer. But I also want to make sure that we only get answers that actually come from the candidate.
Should we stop giving questions early? Is there anything else we can do?
Can you compromise and instead of sending all your interview questions quickly, can you only send the ones that make the most sense and then take some time to think over them?
Generally, candidates will benefit most from pre-asking “Tell me about a time when…” questions (such as “Tell me about a time you had to deal with a difficult client” or “Tell me about a project you managed from start to finish that you are proud of” or so forth) because this way the candidate has time to think about examples from their past that are consistent with the prompt. It’s also hard for someone to BS using AI because the answers must be specific to their own experiences.
Plus, as an interviewer, you should be asking a lot of follow-up questions about them anyway. Instead of asking questions and moving on, you should probe into more details, like “What were the biggest challenges,” “How did you deal with them,” “What kinds of systems did you use to stay on track,” “Why did you decide to do it that way,” “How did you handle X,” and so on. Those follow-ups should be an essential component of your interviews, and this was always the case, long before AI, because you’ll learn a lot more about how people work when you probe like this rather than just getting an initial answer and moving on.
It’s very hard to use AI to sift through this kind of follow-up for people. That doesn’t mean they won’t try – some people will still try – but it will be noticeable, and you should feel free to reject those people! In fact, you should feel free to invoke it at that very moment if you wish.
But when you continue to send them ahead of time, you may put others off. Or for others, you might consider sending a list of broad topics you plan to cover, without offering specific questions you want to ask.
However, the other thing to remember is that anything you learn about a candidate during the interview process is useful data – so if you learn that someone is willing to submit canned AI answers as their own ideas, the interview process provides useful information that you can use to evaluate them. So your goal isn’t to eliminate it completely, just to take appropriate steps to reduce it – and then if you still see it happening, understand that this is valuable information about that person.
