Cheating in Interviews: What It Really Reveals About Candidates

“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” – Bill Gates


It’s a clever quote and it’s more relevant than ever in the age of AI.

Companies today are spending millions trying to stop what they see as AI “cheating” in technical interviews. These interviews are changing fast. Many candidates feel they have to use AI tools just to keep up in remote interviews. And how are companies reacting? By investing in expensive proctoring software and even considering “clean room” interview centers, like SAT testing sites, to keep candidates under careful watch.

But maybe we’re asking the wrong question. Instead of “How do we stop candidates from using AI?” maybe we should be asking: ““What skills are we actually testing for in 2025?”

Because the future of hiring shouldn’t be about trying to catch people, it should be about understanding how they solve problems in the real world, a world that includes AI.

Reality of Hiring in the Age of AI

With the rise of AI tools, applicants are coming to remote technical interviews fully loaded with their favorite copilots and chatbots. Honestly, can you blame them?

Many candidates feel that not using AI during an interview puts them at an unfair disadvantage. If they rely on tools like ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot daily in their current role, showing up to an interview “AI-free” feels like being asked to compete with one hand tied behind their back. It's like being told to take a math test but leave your calculator at home, even though you use it every day at work.

If your goal is to find great engineers, not walking encyclopedias, then clamping down on AI use might not only be unnecessary... it might be counterproductive.

In the real world, engineers aren’t working in a vacuum. They’re Googling, debugging with ChatGPT, auto-generating boilerplate, and collaborating with AI to move faster. That’s the job now. And if that’s how they’re working every day, shouldn’t your interview reflect that reality?

Maybe it’s time we stopped testing for textbook recall and started testing for something far more important: how candidates adapt in the modern, AI-powered workplace.

Integrity and Openness in the Interview Process

At Canva, engineers use AI tools every day and that’s not even an exaggeration. Almost half of their frontend and backend engineers actively use AI to explore their codebase, prototype ideas, and speed up development. The goal isn’t to replace thinking. It’s to free up time for solving real problems.

That’s why Canva takes a refreshingly honest approach to interviews. They expect candidates to use AI. They actually want to see how well someone works with it. In their words:

“We want to see how well candidates collaborate with AI to solve problems. This approach gives us a clearer signal about how they'll actually perform when they join our team.”
— Canva 

Instead of trying to catch people, Canva watches how they work. That gives a clearer view into how someone actually thinks on the job. And if Canva,  one of the most renowned tech brands, is openly embracing AI in interviews, maybe it’s time for us to rethink what a “fair” tech-role screen really looks like.

What Your AI Use Reveals About Your Thought Process

Great technical interviews don’t just test knowledge; they reveal how a candidate thinks, solves problems, and communicates. Even when someone’s using AI, their process still shows.

You can see what a candidate types in first. You can watch how they tweak prompts when things don’t work. You can hear how they explain their decisions. You can see whether they just jump into prompting the AI, without properly framing or understanding the problem themselves. These little things give insight into how someone might contribute in a real-world work setting.

In fact, one software engineer put it perfectly:
“In the age of AI, let candidates use AI. Paid trial is the best proxy, followed by a take-home exercise, and finally a live coding interview where you can use AI.”

How People Actually Work When No One’s Watching

Interviews should reflect real work. And let’s be honest, some hiring processes today are built around fear. Fear of being tricked. Fear of candidates using AI tools to get an unfair advantage. So what do many companies do? They double down. More rules. More restrictions. More computer science trivia.

But that kind of approach misses the actual point.

As one CEO put it, “If candidates are cheating your interview process by using AI, the solution isn’t to quiz them on computer science topics. It’s to pair with them and watch them cook. If they can cheat with AI better than you can, hire them.”

And that’s the shift we need. Don’t try to catch people, pair with them. Build with them. Watch how they think, how they adapt, and how they work in real time with the tools they rely on to understand how they resolve real tech issues. If AI is part of their workflow (and let’s be real, for most engineers, it is), then let them show you how they use it. If they’re better at using AI than your current team, that’s not a red flag, that’s a hiring signal.

We don’t need interviews that pretend AI doesn’t exist. We need interviews that reflect how engineering actually works today: messy, collaborative, creative, and yes, AI-assisted.

How Stardex AI Is Embracing the Shift

Like Canva, we’re not trying to fight the way things are changing, we’re embracing it.

At Stardex AI, we don’t see AI as a threat. We see it as a way to make hiring better. That’s why we built an AI-powered applicant tracking system (ATS) to give recruiters more time to do what they’re great at— talking to people, asking better questions, and using their judgment to make smart hiring decisions. Stardex helps recruitment firms move faster by pulling up candidate info quickly, showing useful insights, and handling the boring, repetitive stuff. 

And the same goes for how we hire our engineers.

Just like Canva, we encourage our candidates to use AI in technical interviews. We want to see how they really work. How do they think through problems? How do they use AI to help them code? Seeing this in action gives us a much clearer picture of whether they’d be a good fit for our team.

Because in the end, we’re not interested in how well someone can memorize code. We care about how resourcefully they think, how efficiently they work, and whether they can build great things with the tools they already use every day.

Instead of trying to catch people “cheating,” we focus on seeing how effectively they actually get things done. That’s what hiring should be about.

Curious how Stardex AI can help your team hire smarter and faster?


Book a demo with us today to see it in action  and discover how it can help you find your next superstar hire.