Tech Company Fails To Hire After 450 Interviews, Says Candidates Are Copy-Pasting From AI

A tech company recently took to Reddit to express disappointment after failing to hire a single candidate for a junior developer role. In its post, the anonymous firm revealed that around 12,000 people had applied, and 450 were interviewed. However, it ultimately didn't hire anyone, citing concerns that a large number of applicants relied heavily on artificial intelligence (AI) tools for coding without truly understanding the underlying logic. 

"We recently posted a job opening on LinkedIn for Junior Frontend/Backend Devs and QA roles, offering a salary range up to Rs 20L. Over 12,000 people applied. We filtered out more than 10,000 candidates due to insufficient skill sets or resumes that didn't align with the role, not because we want to be harsh, but because we don't want to waste candidates time as well ours by putting them through interview rounds only to reject them later," the company wrote. 

"We even allowed candidates to use GPT to solve problems. However, when we ask about time or space complexity, or an explanation of the code they just wrote, many are unable to respond," it added. 

Took more than 450 interviews for a single vacancy. No one got selected.
byu/ZestycloseWater5742 indevelopersIndia

Further, the firm claimed that a lot of candidates are "copy-pasting" code from AI without understanding a single line of it. "This makes it extremely difficult these days to find a developer who truly understands what they've written," it said. 

"We're starting to question whether we're making mistakes in our hiring process, or if it's just high time for junior devs to realize the importance of actually understanding the code before pasting it from GPT," the company concluded. 

The post has triggered a discussion online, with several users suggesting that it evaluate its interview process. 

"You seriously need to evaluate your interview process and the time wasted on interviews. Either your recruiting team is bringing you bad developers or your process is having issues. Either way, wasting 450 hours to find one engineer is stupid, to say the least," wrote one user. 

"Evaluate your interview process. Highly inefficient. Don't blame the candidates. There are serious expectations mismatch," commented another. 

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Responding to this, the company stated, "The entire point is people are going to use AI anyways in their Jobs as well everyone does, so there is no point of saying to them that do not use AI to write code in the interviews as well. The candidate should understand the solution and the logic behind each and every line, that is our only concern." 

Some users also agreed with the original poster. "Truly agree, candidates nowadays are missing on core funcdamentals. Your HR team can try to implement a resume shortlister and a tech assignment round before F2F," wrote one user. 

"Looking at comments, I somehow feel, people are not ready to accept that candidates are not good and just relying on AI without understanding basic things. Everybody is blaming either hiring process or budget issues," commented another.