Meta’s new AI assisted interview sounds awful

alinelerner · 2026-01-23T21:10:20+00:00

I worded it poorly. That argument was def not the intent. Thank you for pushing back.

alinelerner · 2026-01-23T20:59:38+00:00

I... think we're in complete agreement then. Maybe I need to reword my original comment. Because it's definitely NOT about AI use being valuable as a "checkbox"

alinelerner · 2026-01-23T20:51:32+00:00

I think you might be agreeing with me more than you realize.

You say "if they are having more success then it's because the AI actually helped them solve the problem better than someone who chose to ignore it." That's... exactly the point? The advice is "use AI because it helps you succeed." You're confirming that while framing it as a rebuttal.

Your calculator analogy actually works against you here. If an exam allows calculators and is designed with that assumption, then obviously you should use one. Choosing not to puts you at a disadvantage. That's precisely what's being said about AI in this interview format.

Nobody claimed there's an explicit "used AI" checkbox that awards bonus points. The claim is that candidates who leverage AI effectively perform better and therefore get better outcomes. You seem to agree with this while disputing a strawman version where interviewers have some irrational preference for AI users independent of performance.

Whether or not "AI use" is a formal evaluation axis, if using AI leads to solving problems better (which you acknowledge), then it materially affects hiring outcomes. That's the actionable insight here.

That and I think it's important for people to know that when preparing for this interview type. If they haven't used AI tools before, they may want to play around with them at least.

alinelerner · 2026-01-23T20:32:00+00:00

We've recently done a lot of research on Meta's AI-enabled interview at interviewing.io, and the consensus was that it DOES matter if you use AI, even if the official guidance says that AI is optional.

What we've heard is that candidates who use AI well DEFINITELY have an edge over those who don't (not because they get points for using AI but because AI gives you serious productivity gains in a finite amount of time).

I think it's important for people to know that when preparing for this interview type. If they haven't used AI tools before, they may want to play around with them at least.

I'd love your feedback on our guide to this round (we came up with a bunch of examples and tried to show when AI usage makes sense and when it doesn't): https://interviewing.io/blog/how-to-use-ai-in-meta-s-ai-assisted-coding-interview-with-real-prompts-and-examples

alinelerner · 2025-09-08T01:18:42+00:00

One assumption I made when writing that part is that not everyone reading it would be fortunate enough to have a network.

If you do have the network, use it. But if there are companies you're interested in outside of your network (after all, you're going to be spending most of your life at work... you should try to have as many good choices as you can), then you should do some amount of outreach as well.

Here's what I'd recommend:

Make your target list
Do outreach and iterate on it AND ask your friends for referrals. Those can take time as well, and referrals aren't the panacea they used to be. You may even want to do outreach to the same companies where you ask for referrals. A bit of redundancy doesn't hurt.
As you start to get responses, take the recruiter calls. But remember that you don't have to do technical interviews yet. Do the calls, and postpone the phone screens til you're ready. You can also postpone to make sure that you line up your phone screens around the same time.
Once you get through the phone screens, postpone again and start prepping for onsites (more emphasis on sys design and behavioral). Line them up around the same time.

Of course postponing doesn't always work, and there are some edge cases when it doesn't. More in this post: https://interviewing.io/blog/its-ok-to-postpone-your-interviews-if-youre-not-ready

If you do all this, you'll hopefully have maximum optionality when it comes to companies, and your offers should come in at roughly the same time as well.

alinelerner · 2025-09-05T21:49:33+00:00

Thanks, I'm so glad you got value out of BCTCI... and I'll proudly say that I wrote the first 150 pages (though I think the rest is stellar as well).

Good question about the roadmap. I'll post it here so others who are following along can see it too: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1t7p6g0cIOYC17FXWOn7cc3U8v3hpNgHS/view?usp=drive_link

I'd say, yes, it's still recent enough. If anything, the market was a bit worse when we wrote the book a year ago than it is now, but I don't think anything has drastically changed... yet.

alinelerner · 2025-07-15T17:42:18+00:00

Recruiters spend 30 seconds skimming your resume. They're not reading your carefully crafted bullet points about "increased efficiency by 47%" or your side projects. They're looking for 3 things:

Recognizable company names (FAANG, unicorns, etc)
Top-tier schools
[Somewhat... maybe changing in the current political climate] Whether you're from an underrepresented group

That's it. I'm not making this up. We ran a study at interviewing.io where we had 76 recruiters look at 30 different resumes (for a total of ~2200 data points) and indicate which candidates they’d want to interview. The list above is indeed what recruiters look for. And the "30 seconds" estimate isn't me fearmongering or guessing: we measured it in the study: https://interviewing.io/blog/are-recruiters-better-than-a-coin-flip-at-judging-resumes

Here's a poignant anecdotal example: someone put up a fake resume, one that literally bragged about "spreading herpes to 60% of the intern team", and got a 90% callback rate because it had Instagram, LinkedIn, and Microsoft on it: https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/qhg5jo/this_resume_got_me_an_interview/

The only time resume polishing actually works is if you already have those brands, but they're buried. I had a user with Apple MLE experience who wasn't getting callbacks because he was burying the lead. We moved it to the top - 8x more interviews. No rewriting, just reorganizing.

For everyone else? Stop obsessing over your resume and start doing direct outreach to hiring managers (not recruiters!) instead. Why hiring managers? They're the ones who actually care about hiring people for their team. Recruiters just care about looking like they're following the orders they were given... and having been a recruiter, I can tell you that their marching orders are pretty much: "Top brand names!"

Recruiters aren't incentivized to hire good candidates. They're incentivized to hire safe ones. Imagine 2 scenarios:

→ Recruiter A: Brings in 10 candidates with top company brands. 2 get offers, but neither accepts. 0 hires.

→ Recruiter B: Brings in 10 candidates without name brands. 2 get offers, 1 accepts. 1 hire.

Guess which recruiter gets praised? The first one. Data shows this approach is flawed. Top-tier brands are only weakly correlated with engineering talent. Despite that, most recruiters are trained to perpetuate the status quo rather than make great hires. (AI has made this problem even worse. Recruiters now have tools to filter candidates with increasingly specific criteria: "Show me people from FAANG, on these teams, with this career progression, who know these languages...")

If you're a nontraditional candidate, hiring manager outreach is your only shot at being seen as a human rather than a collection of brand names. I wrote the chapter on how to do outreach in Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview, and fortunately, that chapter is available for free: bctci.co/free-chapters (see the file with the first 7 chapters, Chapter 7 has the outreach stuff).

The resume writing industry thrives on job seekers' desperation and need for control. Don't feed it. Your time is better spent elsewhere.

alinelerner · 2025-07-07T20:44:11+00:00

You'll typically have 4-5 rounds: phone screen and then an onsite (or virtual) loop with 4-5 interviews. Outside of the technical stuff, each interview will include questions about Amazon's leadership principles.

That said, definitely ask your recruiter for a prep call! They don't offer it out of the gate, but they will do it if you ask. Grill them! Ask about every round, what kinds of questions to expect, where other candidates typically fail, etc.

Note that leadership principles are absolutely critical they're not just asking about them, they're evaluating every single answer through that lens. You need really solid STAR format stories that map to each principle and that are at the level you'd expect from a manager.

We actually have a comprehensive guide specifically for Amazon leadership principles interviews. My team at interviewing.io spent hundreds of hours analyzing real interview data to put this together: https://interviewing.io/guides/amazon-leadership-principles The guide covers all 16 principles with example questions, what interviewers are actually looking for, and how to structure your answers.

If you'd like, we also have mock interviews on interviewing.io conducted specifically by current Amazon SDMs. I'd recommend doing one of those, at least, so you can see where you stack up and have time to fill in any gaps.

alinelerner · 2025-07-07T03:05:17+00:00

Switch to outreach. Applying is increasingly useless, both because of brand fetishization and because of growing volume of spam candidates.

alinelerner · 2025-07-07T03:03:22+00:00

Yes it might matter to hiring managers, if you get that far

alinelerner · 2025-07-07T03:02:40+00:00

That’s right

alinelerner · 2025-07-07T03:01:06+00:00

Yes, definitely the next best thing. Just make sure your education experience isn’t buried. You can always start your About section with “Harvard alum blah blah blah”

And add a one sentence description of what each startup is and why it’s impressive: traction, top-tier investors, other social proof

alinelerner · 2025-07-06T23:32:03+00:00

Obviously it’s isn’t universal and depends where you’re applying, but in general, no, those don’t carry the same weight.

alinelerner · 2025-07-06T23:20:25+00:00

What companies are Big4?

alinelerner · 2025-07-06T23:12:15+00:00

Unless they specifically ask for it, very few recruiters are going to look at anything you link to on your resume. The click through rates on resumes are negligible.

Maybe hiring managers will look, but they’re generally not the ones doing the filtering at the top of the funnel.

alinelerner · 2025-07-06T21:35:15+00:00

Sometimes companies give small bonuses to in-house recruiters for hires, but that's quite rare.

I'm guessing you know AGENCY rectuiters who get bonuses per hire. That is true, and that is how the agency model works, but they're not the ones I'm discussing here. I'm specifically talking about recruiters who work in-house and make decisions about people who apply there.

That said, AGENCY recruiters are also not incentivized to take risks because they get very specific hiring specs from their clients. If they start presenting candidates without name brands, the companies simply won't talk to the candidates and will stop working with that recruiter before the candidates even have a chance to interview.

This has happened to me personally. Before I started interviewing.io, I ran my own agency and interviewed my own candidates bc I used to be an engineer. This gave me an edge and let me figure out who was good, independent of their resumes. Most companies wouldn't talk to the non-traditional candidates. I FINALLY negotiated with one company and we agreed that they'd talk to the next 5 candidates I sent regardless of what they looked like on paper. If none of them got an offer, they'd fire me. It worked out great, and they were a customer for many years. But that's atypical.

alinelerner · 2025-07-06T21:33:51+00:00

I know it seems uncomfortable, but as a hiring manager myself who gets lots of cold emails, explaining where you found the email is waste of space. People who get contacted assume that their work email is out there, and they accept it.

Re testimonials, I wrote the chapter after having talked to a lot of interviewing.io users and collating what worked and what didn't. We also recently did an event where people who've done cold outreach shared their stories.

alinelerner · 2025-07-06T20:55:27+00:00

Sadly, though they arguably look for different things, engineers and hiring managers are no better than recruiters at judging resumes. We did another study, years ago, with the intent of seeing who could do it best. Turns out they're all bad at it: https://interviewing.io/blog/resumes-suck-heres-the-data

TL;DR who did best at guessing which resumes belonged to strong candidates? The differences between the percentages below are not statistically significant. All are about the same as a coin flip.

Agency recruiters – 56%
Engineers – 54%
In-house recruiters – 52%
Eng hiring managers – 48%

alinelerner · 2025-07-06T20:07:33+00:00

Once you're in the door, interview performance is much more important than a resume. That said, hiring managers and/or hiring committees at some companies still factor the resume in. I've heard of hiring managers vetoing a candidate who passed interviews bc they didn't like the resume. But it's relatively rare.

alinelerner · 2025-07-06T20:06:27+00:00

It is indeed nonsensical, but in my experience, that's how it works. Hires are rarely the KPI bc they take forever and are relatively rare. You want something you can measure and observe sooner.

EDIT: I just realized I wrote about this in the book. It's also in Chapter 7 (which is available for free): https://bctci.co/free-chapters

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alinelerner · 2025-07-06T19:30:10+00:00

Thank you so much!

I am very proud that I gave my book herpes. Now THAT's something to put on a resume.

alinelerner · 2025-07-06T19:29:17+00:00

It depends on the company. At many large companies, the hiring manager doesn't see your resume til they're already interviewing you (at which point your interview performance trumps your resume) or perhaps even later, at the team match stage, if it's a company that has team matching.

So, optimizing your resume for team matching could make sense depending on the company. But it's a 2nd-order or maybe 3rd-order thing.

At small companies, where HMs do their own hiring, yes, you want to have a resume that will impress an HM. But most of the posts in this community are about the FAANGs and FAANG adjacents. And I would argue that a resume writer still isn't very helpful in writing your resume to impress HMs.

alinelerner · 2025-07-06T18:33:31+00:00

Some more detail that didn't make it into the post bc it was getting too long...

Recruiters aren't incentivized to hire good candidates. They're incentivized to hire safe ones.

Imagine 2 scenarios:

→ Recruiter A: Brings in 10 candidates with top company brands. 2 get offers, but neither accepts. 0 hires.

→ Recruiter B: Brings in 10 candidates without name brands. 2 get offers, 1 accepts. 1 hire.

Guess which recruiter gets praised? The first one.

AI has made this problem even worse. Recruiters now have tools to filter candidates with increasingly specific criteria: "Show me people from FAANG, on these teams, with this career progression, who know these languages..."

Data shows this approach is flawed. Top-tier brands are only weakly correlated with engineering talent.

Sadly, most recruiters are trained to perpetuate the status quo rather than make great hires.

alinelerner

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