I Was Shocked To Catch A Candidate Cheating In An Online Interview
I heard about this before, but I experienced it the first time
We were recruiting for apps and frontend teams. A candidate expressed interest in the backend and cloud team. Though we are not looking to hire, I gave him a chance primarily because of the institute he graduated from.
Based on my previous experience, I always start the discussion with a few programming questions followed by CS concepts, and finally I discuss a few design problems. This helps me eliminate the candidate faster.
This was a unique experience as this is the first time I saw a candidate cheating and trying to copy code from one of the popular sites.
Here is how the interview went —
The first impression was great
A colleague and I started the discussion with the candidate on Google Meet. We asked him to share his screen so that we can see the code he writes.
I was impressed to see him use Linux, we don’t get to see that very often with someone having an experience of only a few months.
We started with very basic programming problems that most of us would have solved in 2nd or 3rd year of the graduation program. To my surprise, he started writing the programs in C++ and the coding style was great.
We started noticing a weird pattern
As the level of problems started going up, we started noticing a pattern. We asked him to solve a programming problem that needs to be thought and then coded. He started writing code within a couple of minutes without scribbling anything on the paper.
My colleague called up on my phone and expressed that he might be cheating. We found the solution to the problem on a website and we figured out the candidate was copying the code from there.
We moved on to computer science concepts. We started a discussion on a few well-known problems in Computer Science and Operating Systems, the same pattern appeared there.
At first, he did not have a clue, then after staring towards his right side suddenly bookish definitions started coming out of his mouth.
We started enjoying it
We moved on to the questions that he would not be able to find easily on the internet. It took only one design question to confirm our theory that he was cheating.
Again, in the beginning, he took quite some time to start answering, then a few definitions from Wikipedia, and then he completely gave up.
I was shocked
I hold great respect for the institute he graduated from. A very few talented and lucky ones get to go there. I never expected this from such a candidate.
Maybe it was the pressure to perform well or desperation to switch jobs. I am not sure but he was not too bad either. But because of this act, it was clear that we did not want to hire him.
Then I was scrolling through the hiring channel we have on Slack. I could see a bunch of other colleagues having similar experiences with candidates.
Take-Aways
This is the first time I have personally seen this kind of behavior. Definitely heard of this but never expected someone from a great institution to do so.
As my other colleagues say, this has become quite common in the online world of recruitment in the post-pandemic era.
I suggest you should be careful while conducting interviews online and always look for such patterns.
