Karel Zikmund

Using AI in Interviews - Experiment / Mock Interviews

Created: 2025/3/1 - see also post on Bluesky.

Few of us, interested in hiring and interviewing, would like to run an experiment to determine best way how to change interviews in the world of AI.

DISCLAIMER: This is community effort, NOT official Microsoft hiring process. Interviewers will be doing it outside of their duties as Microsoft employees - as private individuals. Therefore, the result of the interview session will not get you a job at Microsoft. It will also NOT exclude you from, or otherwise impact your official application now nor in the future. Information about the result of your specific interview will not be shared or used outside of the experiment in any way.

Motivation

Leveraging AI tools in our daily job as SW engineer is becoming a must-have skill. It makes us more productive and efficient in many aspects: It helps us quickly find information we do not have and leverage it effectively. It helps us write code and save time. It gives us new ideas and options we have to be able to assess and check if they are applicable in our case.

Companies will want to hire not just great engineers, but great engineers who can be more productive by using AI tools. If we use AI tools in daily job, we should be able to use them during the interview process as well.

AI tools put an end to Leetcode-style interviews and significantly affect other types of interviews as well. Let’s embrace it and find new ways to find great colleagues we’d want to work with in future.

What to expect?

We will start with following format (we may adjust it later as needed):

  • ~1.5h interview session (over Teams with shared screen, where you use your favorite IDE and AI tools)
    • Part of interview will be 20min block without AI to establish baseline.
  • Optional: 30-60min free chat / one-off mentoring session with successful Microsoft engineer/interviewer about topics of your choice (career, insights into work at Microsoft, current hiring process, anything).
    • This is the value you can get out of this, if you are interested.

Who?

We are looking for all kind of SW developers in backend (not frontend, nor infrastructure-only at the moment), who are proficient with AI tools in their development workflow (from work, school or hobby projects).

  • Level of experience – ANY - ranging from very senior devs to university students.
  • You do not need to have prior large tech company experience, nor be top of your class. If Microsoft, or company like Microsoft, is a place you might consider applying for one day (when stars are aligned), you are eligible.
  • Language - any reasonably wide-spread programming language is acceptable (it should support OOP in some form). Interviews will be done in English (like real interviews).

Disclaimer: If we get too many applications, we might need to choose whom to pick. In such case, we would follow up with you, asking some questions, e.g. about your AI usage experience, industry experience, etc.

How?

Ping Karel Zikmund - ideally via Discord: ziki.cz, LinkedIn, or BlueSky: zikicz