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How is AI changing interview processes? Not much and a whole lot.

By Aline Lerner | Published: September 17, 2025; Last updated: October 8, 2025

A year and a half ago, we predicted that advances in AI would force companies to abandon cookie-cutter LeetCode questions. Despite that prediction, we bet heavily that, even if their content and format would change, algorithmic interviews were here to stay.

Now we're seeing the results. Despite clickbait headlines suggesting that Meta and other tech giants are ditching algorithmic interviews for AI-assisted ones, our survey of FAANG+ interviewers reveals a different reality: zero FAANG or FAANG-adjacent companies have moved away from algorithmic questions.

But what else is changing? Will we return to in-person interviews? Will questions get harder? How rampant is cheating, and what are companies doing about it? If candidates can now use AI in interviews, what will these new interview types look like? And how does all of this differ between FAANG & FAANG+ companies and startups?

Perhaps most importantly, have the advances in AI been a forcing function to change interviewers (and interviewers) for the better?

Read on to find out!

How well do LeetCode ratings predict interview performance? Here's the data.

By Mike Mroczka | Published: September 11, 2024; Last updated: September 15, 2025

Have you ever wondered if you should spend more time on LeetCode, participate in those contests, or focus on solving harder problems? A popular Reddit post suggests you need 700+ questions and a LeetCode rating between 1800-2000 to pass FAANG interviews. Is this really what the data supports? To answer these questions and more, we looked at our users' LeetCode ranks and ratings and tied them back to interview performance on our platform and whether those users worked at FAANG.

In this post, we’ll share what we’ve learned.

Are recruiters better than a coin flip at judging resumes? Here's the data.

By Aline Lerner and Peter Bergman | Published: April 30, 2024; Last updated: July 22, 2025

In partnership with the team at Learning Collider, we ran a study to see how good recruiters were at judging resumes.

We asked technical recruiters to review and make judgments about engineers’ resumes, just as they would in their current roles.

They answered two questions per resume:

Would you interview this candidate?
What is the likelihood this candidate will pass the technical interview?

We ended up with nearly 2,200 evaluations of over 1,000 resumes. We then compared those judgments to how those engineers performed in interviews on our platform. Here's what we learned.

Refuting Bloomberg's analysis: ChatGPT isn't racist. But it is bad at recruiting.

By Aline Lerner | Published: April 10, 2024; Last updated: October 25, 2025

Bloomberg recently published an article saying ChatGPT has racial bias when evaluating resumes. We re-ran their numbers and saw that they didn't do any statistical significance testing. In other words, there's no evidence of racial bias, at least not in this data set. However, ChatGPT has another kind of bias -- it drastically overestimates the value of top companies and top schools and does non-traditional candidates a disservice as a result.

Want to work from home? That’ll be $46,282.

By Elliot Plant | Published: February 13, 2024

Software engineering jobs come with a lot of perks. But that doesn’t mean our jobs are perfect. Work requires us to commute, reduces the time we can spend with family, increases our stress levels, and forces us to deal with teammates we don't gel with. And sometimes we work for companies with questionable morals and use technologies we don’t enjoy.

For some of us, it’s worth trading cash for a job that fits into our lives better. But how much cash?

To figure this out, we surveyed our users about times they took jobs with lower compensation, why they did it, and how much money they left on the table. We have the numbers!

How hard is it to cheat in technical interviews with ChatGPT? We ran an experiment.

By Mike Mroczka | Published: January 30, 2024; Last updated: November 12, 2025

Does ChatGPT make it easy to cheat in technical interviews? To find out, we ran an experiment where we instructed interviewees on our platform to use ChatGPT in their interviews, unbeknownst to their interviewers. The results were surprising, but as a preview, know this: companies need to change the types of interview questions they are asking—immediately.

When is hiring coming back? Our predictions for 2024.

By Aline Lerner | Published: December 10, 2023; Last updated: December 7, 2024

Predictions are hard, and, inevitably, most of them turn out wrong. But we’d like to brave the scathing mockery of the internets and try anyway! Our courage is bolstered by some useful data we have (both proprietary and gathered from the internet), which we’ll use to guess what will happen in 2024 and to answer the question foremost in many of our minds: When is hiring coming back?

Why AI can’t do hiring

By Aline Lerner | Published: May 15, 2023; Last updated: August 1, 2025

The recent exciting and somewhat horrifying inflection point in AI capability tipped me into writing this blog post.

I simply don't believe that AI can do hiring. My argument isn't about bias (though bias is a real problem) or that it's technologically impossible. It's just that the training data simply isn't available.

Most people believe that if you can somehow combine what's available on LinkedIn, GitHub, and the social graph (who follows whom on Twitter etc.), you'll be able to find the good engineers who are actively looking and also figure out what they want. This is wrong. None of those 3 sources are actually useful. At the end of the day, you can’t use AI for hiring if you don’t have the data. And if you have the data, then you don’t strictly need AI.

Does posting Open To Work on LinkedIn help or hurt? A tale of two labor markets.

By Aline Lerner and Maxim Massenkoff | Published: April 10, 2023; Last updated: May 28, 2023

If you’re a software engineer who’s on the market, should you list yourself as OpenToWork? Does doing so carry a negative signal? And with the recent deluge of layoffs at tech companies, has the meaning of OpenToWork changed?

TL;DR It used to be bad. Now, it's not. Moreover, it's clear to us that the people who were laid off in the 2nd half of 2022 and 2023 so far are great... and that, by and large, these layoffs were indeed NOT based on performance.

Why you shouldn’t list certifications on LinkedIn

By Aline Lerner | Published: March 13, 2023; Last updated: May 15, 2023

People often suggest that interviewing.io should create a certification that our users can post on their LinkedIn profile, e.g., something like “Top 10% performer on interviewing.io”. Presumably, these certifications would signal to recruiters that this person is a good engineer and worth reaching out to and should carry more signal than where said person went to school or worked previously.

I've always thought certifications were a terrible idea, and I’ve resisted building them. Now, we've finally dug into the data to see if my hatred of them holds water. TL;DR it does.

Our business depends on having the best interviewers, so we built an interviewer rating system. And you can too.

By Aline Lerner | Published: January 17, 2023; Last updated: November 12, 2025

interviewing.io is an anonymous mock interview platform and eng hiring marketplace. Engineers use us for mock interviews, and we use the data from those interviews to surface top performers, in a much fairer and more predictive way than a resume. If you’re a top performer on interviewing.io, we fast-track you at the world’s best companies.

We make money in two ways: engineers pay us for mock interviews, and employers pay us for access to the best performers. To keep our engineer customers happy, we have to make sure that our interviewers deliver value to them by conducting realistic mock interviews and giving useful, actionable feedback afterwards. To keep our employer customers happy, we have to make sure that the engineers we send them are way better than the ones they’re getting without us. Otherwise, it’s just not worth it for them.

This means that we live and die by the quality of our interviewers, in a way that no single employer does, no matter how much they say they care about people analytics or interviewer metrics or training. If we don’t have really well-calibrated interviewers, who also create great candidate experience, we don’t get paid.

In this post, we’ll explain exactly how we compute and use these metrics to get the best work out of our interviewers.

How much have 2022 layoffs affected engineers vs. other departments? We dug into the data to find out.

By Aline Lerner | Published: October 12, 2022; Last updated: October 31, 2025

Over the past few months, I’ve seen a number of fear-mongering pieces in the press about how the recession is driving tech layoffs and how tech employees (and engineers specifically) are losing their leverage as a result. The problem is that “tech” can mean anyone working at a tech company. You’re an engineer? Of course, you’re tech. You do ops? Great, you’re tech. You do marketing? You, too, are tech! These are all critical roles at tech companies, and what I take umbrage with isn’t the decision to label non-engineers as tech employees. It’s deliberately misleading your audience by implying that “tech” refers to engineers specifically.

I don’t like imprecision, and I really don’t like fear-mongering. So, we at interviewing.io dug into the data to see if engineers do indeed have a reason to fear.

The definitive list of companies who are hiring engineers right now

By Aline Lerner | Published: September 19, 2022; Last updated: October 31, 2025

interviewing.io is both a mock interview platform and an eng hiring marketplace (engineers use us for technical interview practice, and top performers get fast-tracked at companies), so we have some unique insights into how recent hiring freezes have affected engineers’ behavior. We also have unique insight into which companies are actually hiring. As such, in the spirit of being useful during a hard and uncertain time, we thought it’d be interesting to survey our users to see what’s actually going on in the market. TL;DR There are lots of engineers actively looking. There are also lots of companies who are actively hiring. Read the actual post to see the full list of 447 U.S. companies who are hiring software engineers right now.

Does communication matter in technical interviewing? We looked at 100K interviews to find out.

By Dima Korolev | Published: May 17, 2022; Last updated: October 19, 2025

The interviewing.io platform has hosted and collected feedback from over 100K technical interviews, split between mock interviews and real ones. It’s generally accepted that to pass a technical interview, you have to not only come up with a solution to the problem (or at least make good headway), but you also have to do a good job of articulating your thoughts, explaining to your interviewer what you’re doing as you’re doing it, and coherently discussing tradeoffs and concepts like time and space complexity. But how important is communication in technical interviews, really? We looked at the data, and it turns out that talk is cheap. Read on to find out how and why.

We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work. Here are the results.

By Aline Lerner | Published: March 30, 2022; Last updated: September 10, 2025

At interviewing.io, we’ve hosted over 100K technical interviews, split between mock interviews and real ones. As it happens, we know where our users currently work – they tell us that when they sign up. Given that we have this data AND given that we know how well people do in their interviews, we thought it would be interesting to see which companies’ engineers are especially good at technical interviews. Our resulting top ten lists are in this post!

The Eng Hiring Bar: What the hell is it?

By Atomic Artichoke | Published: March 30, 2020; Last updated: November 12, 2025

No engineer has ever sued a company because of constructive post-interview feedback. So why don’t employers do it?

By Aline Lerner | Published: February 5, 2020; Last updated: November 12, 2025

One of the things that sucks most about technical interviews is that they’re a black box—candidates (usually) get told whether they made it to the next round, but they’re rarely told why they got the outcome that they did. Lack of feedback, or feedback that doesn’t come right away, isn’t just frustrating to candidates. It’s bad for business. We did a whole study on this. It turns out that candidates chronically underrate and overrate their technical interview performance, like so: Where this finding starts to get actionable is that there’s a statistically significant relationship between whether people think they did well in an interview and whether they’d want to work with you.

We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in eng hiring.

By Aline Lerner | Published: December 2, 2019; Last updated: January 23, 2026

If you say the words “there’s a pipeline problem” to explain why we’ve failed to make meaningful progress toward gender parity in software engineering, you probably won’t make many friends (or many hires). The pipeline problem argument goes something like this: “There aren’t enough qualified women out there, so it’s not our fault if we don’t hire them.”

You probably don’t factor in engineering time when calculating cost per hire. Here’s why you really should.

By Aline Lerner | Published: April 23, 2019; Last updated: October 31, 2025

Whether you’re a recruiter yourself or an engineer who’s involved in hiring, you’ve probably heard of the following two recruiting-related metrics: time to hire and cost per hire.

Can fake names create bias? An exploration into interviewing.io’s pseudonym generator

By Atomic Artichoke | Published: March 6, 2019; Last updated: October 31, 2025

Hello everyone, my name is Atomic Artichoke, and I’m the newest employee of the interviewing.io team, having joined a couple months ago as a Data Scientist.