Tech firms revert to in-person interviews to curb AI-assisted candidate responses

Nick Bloom, a Stanford professor who studies remote work, warned that candidates can now feed AI prompts into online interviews and simply read the generated answers, undermining traditional virtual hiring methods. To address this, a number of technology companies are moving later interview rounds back to physical offices to ensure the person being evaluated is the actual applicant, not an AI like Anthropic’s Claude. Greenhouse’s 2025 and 2026 hiring reports, covering thousands of job seekers and recruiters across the US, UK, Ireland and Germany, indicate that a sizable minority of hiring managers are adding in-person verification steps.

At the same time, firms such as Google have launched pilots that allow candidates to use sanctioned AI assistants, and startups including Cognition, Base44 and Replit are integrating AI into their technical hiring. Companies like Cisco are shifting from pure coding challenges to project-based tasks that observe candidates working within AI-enabled workflows, emphasizing human oversight and expertise.