How to Hire AI Engineers when EVERYONE is cheating with AI — Beth Glenfield, DevDay

Channel: aiDotEngineer

Published at: 2025-07-22

YouTube video id: Zqu0VaJw3vo

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zqu0VaJw3vo

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Hi everyone. So, I'm Beth Glenfield. I
actually flew in from Ireland. So, uh I
will try and slow down my accent for
everybody. I have heard that I do get a
bit American sometimes. So, uh, yeah,
may not be the Irish accent you're
expecting. So, I'm going to talk to you
today about how I believe AI is breaking
how we hire technically.
So, I know everyone's very busy, but
just a few questions to think about. Is
that okay?
Is, are you using AI today in your
recruitment process both as an
interviewee and an interviewer?
Are you competing against Google or Meta
employees both for positions but also
for candidates?
And are you recognizing that leak code
puzzles just aren't really up to scratch
like they used to be for knowing if
people will build great AI products.
So, welcome to 2025 where the technical
recruitment process is very broken and
small companies are getting crushed in
the talent war.
So just to refresh our memories, let's
look back at what happened over the last
18 months. So we had Clu come to the
table. H they have raised a 5.3 million
round and it is a AI cheating service
from a ex Colombia student. Um they're
currently heading towards 1 million in
ARR and um we're also seeing 93% Leico
Wizard success rates for Google Google
and Meta interviews and we're seeing
like one in three interviews now are
having AI assistants. So really whenever
you're interviewing candidates you're
just interviewing for who has the best
AI coding assistant.
So Sam Alman said this very plainly. The
tactical thing to do is to learn the
best AI tools. We also saw that Mark
Beni off announced that Salesforce will
no longer be hiring software engineers
this year because according to them,
they have seen an 30% boost in their
productivity since they've replaced
people with AI. I would like to see the
data on that. But really, jobs have
fundamentally changed.
And you're not just competing on
compensation anymore. You're competing
on brand recognition, career prestige,
and perceived stability. There's a lot
of people being laid off and people are
looking for security. So when a
candidate has to choose between your
series A startup and Google's AI
division, we kind of know what really
happens there.
So the candidates you actually want for
AI development, the creative problem
solvers, the collaborative leaders, and
the ones who can work with AI instead of
being replaced by AI. They are not being
optimized for leak code performance.
Instead, they're building AI tools and
using AI libraries. They're contributing
to open source. They are understanding
how the business impact will be
impacted. And that is just not what leak
code is indexing for.
So what if instead of asking candidates
to solve puzzles that they will never
actually use in a uh job, you could
observe how they collaborate with AI
teammates on actual business scenarios?
What if instead of measuring their
ability to memorize algorithms, you can
see how they delegate tasks, how they
handle ambiguity, and how they deal
whenever requirements change mid-sprint.
So you're not competing on brand
recognition. You can demonstrate to a
candidate at the beginning of a process
what your engineering culture is and see
how they would perform in your
environment.
So at Devday, we are completely
reimagining the technical hiring process
in the AI era. Here are some examples of
what we're seeing today. Like I
mentioned earlier, and then we'll get
into what we're considering is the new
kind of process you should be looking
for in a hiring process.
What we what we do instead of getting
candidates to code interviews is we
create real life workplace simulations.
candidates work alongside AI agents with
very different personalities. You can
have the perfectionist, the pragmatist,
the security expert, and even the junior
developer that needs extensive
mentoring. So that now they have to make
tradeoffs on day in day out situations.
They're not solving contrived problems.
They are building features specifically
for your business domain.
So instead of measuring how they can
code, we're actually actually measuring
them on skills that matter. How do they
collaborate with AI? How do they handle
ambiguity? How do they communicate these
technical decisions in pull requests, in
comments, on tickets? And how do they
mentor others and adapt when everything
changes on a daily basis?
Now, if you do work at Google or Meta,
you can just brute force your hiring
process. You interview a hundred
candidates, you hire five, and you give
them great paychecks.
But for the majority of companies, we
don't have the luxury. You cannot afford
to make one bad hire, and you can lose
up to 20 to 60K in that bad hiring
process. And you definitely can't afford
to hire someone who doesn't know how to
ship AI products.
So, look, the future is coming for us
whether we like it or not. Uh Mark
Zuckerberg says that AI will handle
mid-level engineering work by later this
year. TechCrunch is also reporting that
we're wiping out entry-level engineering
jobs. But that doesn't mean fewer
engineering jobs. They're just very
different engineering jobs. Jobs that
require creativity,
collaboration, and the ability to work
according to business judgment and not
just code. jobs that require working
with AI instead of being replaced by it.
So, we're currently working with select
design partners. If you're interested in
thinking about this process or learning
more or just want to chat about how
you're thinking about hiring, let me
know. My details are on the screen or
just come find me at the event. Thank
you.
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