I've had to interview a number of candidates throughout my last couple of jobs, and I've been slowly putting together a list of what actually happens when someone gets flagged for using AI assistance during the process. I wanted to talk about what I've found to be the most common outcomes, and also some of the misconceptions, because I find that most posts about this topic are from a candidate's perspective, how to hide the tool, how to avoid the camera, but I wanted to share some of what I'm seeing from the other side.
I should also preface this article by saying I'm not representative of all interviewers; everyone is going to have their own approach, and what plays out at my workplace doesn't necessarily mean it's important to other employers. I'm just providing my perspective on what I've found this year. Alright, now that the preamble is out of the way, let's jump into it!
I think the biggest myth is one of (if not the most) widespread ones I see online, which is the proctoring camera moment. People imagine a tool catches you in real time, a webcam plugin throws up a red box, the interview ends and security walks you out. In my experience, this is not how it goes at all. Almost every flag I've written or seen written has come from interviewer notes after the fact, not from a piece of software.
Now, not every workplace runs interviews the same way, but I feel this characteristic is still applicable across almost any circumstance. The interviewer hears something off in the cadence, or the answer comes in too clean, and the note goes into the ATS.
That being said, having a rubric-shaped answer is the largest single tell. I'm much more interested in whether a candidate can communicate technical concepts to me than if they've memorized a polished four-sentence reply. You can tell a lot about someone's work ethic just by listening to how they talk about a project, and the AI-assisted answer tends to skip the doubling back, the small corrections, the additional detail thirty seconds later.
I've met brilliant candidates with sloppy tooling, which is kind of like mixing 16 year scotch with Coke Zero. There's certainly a lot of potential but it's been lost underneath a layer of suspicion, and if you drink too much you'll end up with a massive headache.
If you do get flagged, you usually never know. The note is a permanent line in the file that the next interviewer reads before deciding whether to talk to you. A friend on Reddit kept mentioning InterviewMan and the ones I flagged this year weren't using anything that light. Don't be the one in the ATS note!
Ready to Ace Your Next Interview?
Join 57,000+ professionals using InterviewMan to get real-time AI assistance during their interviews.
