Job interviews have transitioned from in-person to Zoom — and now, at least at one AI company, to Google Docs.
Interviewers are finding new and inventive ways to safeguard their candidate tests from online cheating, AI, or some plain old sweet-talking. Winston Weinberg, cofounder and CEO of the AI legal tech startup Harvey, told the “Access” podcast that he uses a shared document.
“Very quick writing samples, doing a written project back and forth, is very, very helpful,” Weinberg said.
Weinberg said that he has interviewed candidates who are good at “presenting things,” but that they “break down” when writing out responses to direct questions.
Going back-and-forth on a problem set in Google Docs is a “very good indicator of how well we’d work together,” he said.
Since its founding in 2022, Harvey has raised over $500 million. Lawyers at eight of the 10 highest-grossing US law firms use the platform, and the company was last valued at $5 billion.
The company has also grown to about 350 employees — many of whom have passed the Google Doc test. Harvey used the interview style for all recent executive hires, the company said.
“In my experience, this is the best way to separate good interviewers from good operators,” Weinberg wrote in a statement to Business Insider.
“Talent density” is one of the tech industry’s go-to phrases this year, as CEOs seek to make their teams smaller and more efficient. Identifying top talent may require employing some unconventional interview techniques. Stripe abandoned the whiteboard interview for a computer-based test and open-sourced interview questions from its staff, according to the company’s former CTO.
AI cheating tools have also disrupted the tech interview process, leading some tech companies to revert to in-person interviews to verify candidates’ truthfulness.
On the podcast, Weinberg said that a hiring problem for non-engineering roles was “folks that are really good at talking and terrible at doing.
“To me, what that’s going to turn into is that they ask for a billion one-on-one strategy questions,” he said.
Weinberg proposed starting the interview process asynchronously, because that’s what most of the company’s work looks like.
“With the reports that I work best with, it’s async,” he said. “Otherwise, we’re going to have 17 strategy meetings to do anything.”
