should we stop sending interview questions in advance since candidates are running them through AI?

A reader writes:

I am conducting interviews next week, and normally my workplace sends interview questions to interviewees 30 minutes prior to the interview. This is in an attempt to provide a more accessible and equitable experience for our interviewees who may need additional time or feel more comfortable when they know the questions ahead of time. This also aligns with how the employee would normally work — having ample time to review and respond to questions. All our interviews are remote.

I am working with a new panel member who suggested we stop this practice because they were finding candidates were using the extra time to have AI generate answers to the questions and then answering using the AI-generated answers and they weren’t getting an accurate representation of the candidate. Ugh.

I haven’t been on an interview panel in about two years, so I haven’t had much recent experience and because of that haven’t experienced it firsthand. But I have really appreciated the general movement toward giving out questions ahead of time and would really hate to give this up. Candidates seem much 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 ensure that we are only getting answers that really come from the candidate.

Should we stop giving out the questions early? Is there something else we can do?

Can you compromise and rather than sending all your interview questions early, can you just send the ones that most benefit from some time to think them over?

Generally, the questions that candidates will benefit the most from getting in advance are “tell me about a time when…” questions (like “tell me about a time when you had to deal with a difficult client” or “tell me about a project you managed start to finish that you are proud of” or so forth) because that way the candidate has time to think of examples from their past that fit the prompt. Those are also harder for someone to BS their way through using AI because the answers need to be specific to their own experiences.

Plus, as an interviewer, you should be asking a lot of follow-up questions about those anyway. Rather than asking the question and moving on, you should be probing for more details, like “what were the biggest challenges,” “how did you approach that,” “what types of systems did you use to stay on track,” “why did you decide to do it that way,” “how did you handle X,” and on and on. Those follow-ups should be an essential component of how you interview, and that was always the case, long before AI, because you’ll learn a ton about how people operate when you probe like that rather than just getting an initial answer and moving on.

It’s far harder for people to use AI to bullshit their way through those sorts of follow-ups. It doesn’t mean they won’t try — some people still will — but it’s going to be noticeable, and you should feel free to reject those people! In fact, you should feel free to call it out in the moment if you want to.

But while you continue sending those ahead of time, you could hold back the others. Or for the others, you could consider sending over a list of the broad topics you plan to cover, without offering up the specific questions you’ll be asking.

The other thing, though, is to remember that everything you learn about a candidate during the interview process is useful data — so if you learn that someone is willing to present canned AI answers as their own thoughts, that’s the interview process delivering useful info that you can use to assess them. So your goal doesn’t need to be to stamp it out entirely, just to take reasonable steps to minimize it — and then if you still see it happening, figure it’s valuable info about the person.

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