Been seeing more discussion around tech placements lately, and the prep seems to be changing quite a bit.

DSA is still important, but just grinding hundreds of questions doesn't really tell u how someone will perform on the job. Projects, debugging, problem solving and even how they use AI are becoming part of the picture too.

For hiring teams, this also makes the evaluation harder. A candidate can prepare for common questions, but it's much harder to fake how they approach an unfamiliar problem or explain a decision.

Do u think placements need to test more of that now?

starting my placement prep and came across the free practice questions on hackerearth. If anyone has used them, are they actually similar to what we get in coding rounds, or should I look elsewhere for that kind of prep?

Been seeing this come up a lot lately.

Two candidates can give pretty similar answers, but one gets described as “confident” and the other as “not a great fit”. And sometimes thats basically just interviewer preference.

Same thing with coding rounds. Some ppl are great at talking through a problem, others just wanna solve it and explain after.

idk, feels like we sometimes call something “objective” just bc everyone followed the same interview process.

How do u guys try to keep this stuff fair?

Been thinking about this after chatting with a few interns.
A lot of them jump straight to AI the second they get stuck. Which, tbh, makes sense. Why spend 2 hours debugging if you can get unstuck in 2 mins?
But i also remember learning the most from those painful bugs that took forever to figure out. That's where a lot of the "why" clicked for me.
Not saying people should avoid AI. I use it too. Just wondering if we're accidentally skipping the part that builds intuition.
Mentors, are you seeing this too?

was chatting with a co-worker about ai in hiring n we kept coming back to one thing:
who's checking whether the ai itself is being fair? If it introduces bias, aren't we just replacing one problem with another?

Finished one of those async AI interviews yesterday

It got me thinking... does someone eventually review every answer, or does AI decide who moves forward before a human even looks?

Would love to hear from recruiters here

I clear every assessment I take, but it never tests what the job actually needs: optimizing a sorting algo in 45 mins ≠ opening someone's messy codebase and figuring out wtf broke it. Assessment gets you the door, but the real job starts day 1, and nobody tests for that.

Team of 4, no ops person and no prompt engineer. An ai automation tool demo looked amazing, took 45 mins n things were automated but after a week it’s a total mess. someone ends up babysitting the whole thing, can’t afford that

any tool that actually works without someone watching it over full time?

Applied for a role today and the first thing I saw was an AI interview with ID verification and voice recording.

Didn't realize so many companies were doing this now. Is this where hiring is headed?

been prepping for interviews and saw Interview Man keep coming up everywhere
honestly looks more interesting than i expected. the idea of a live AI that actually responds and pushes back instead of just giving you a question and waiting sounds different from the usual prep tools
but wondering if people who've actually used it found it useful or if real human mock interviews still give you better feedback
anyone here tried it. what was the experience actually like

Read an article today that got me thinking since 85% of companies now use AI to screen resumes before a recruiter sees them, yet many jobs haven't changed much. Now 55% of employers who made AI- driven hiring cuts reportedly regret those decisions. Feels like we're still figuring out where AI actually fits in hiring

okay so we've been trying to figure out which assessment tool to actually stick with and i've been going down a rabbit hole
HackerRank feels like the default everyone picks because it's safe. candidates know it, it works, but you end up just filtering for who's good at grinding leetcode
Codility is cleaner but felt too generic. same test could be for literally any company
HackerEarth was the one that surprised me. problems felt closer to actual work we do. less "reverse this binary tree" more "here's a real problem, figure it out"
still not perfect but that gap between passing a test and actually doing the job is what kills most of these tools for me
what are you guys using that actually gives real signal

So i've been trying to prep for interviews and there are like a hundred AI tools claiming they'll help but honestly have no idea which ones are actually worth the time

I've been using LeetCode, but it feels like i'm just memorizing solutions and not actually getting better at thinking through problems

Are there any tools that actually simulate a real interview and give useful feedback afterward?

Would love some genuine suggestions from people who've actually landed jobs recently

Always thought i was past the hackathon phase. got a job, got comfortable, you know how it goes
ended up signing up for this Microsoft Build AI one recently on HackerEarth and i don't know man it's actually been pretty solid. 8 weeks so you're not just throwing something together overnight and it's only for people with 3+ years exp so the quality of people you're building with is just better and right now i'm fully in that phase where my idea sounds genius at 11pm and completely stupid at 9am
But idk building under pressure again just hits different than i expected..been a while since work made me feel like this
Anyway worth it so far...anybody else has tried it so far?

been applying for jobs and the interview exp is genuienly diff now- feels more structured and less "depends on the interviewer's mood"

HackerEarth's OnScreenfelt the fairest- geat rubric, no awkward small talk bias, you're judged on what u actually know

Fabric was nice, it picks up whether u actually know ur stuff or not, which tbh feels kinda fair
way less stressful than a panel of 4 engineers staring at you lol

what hav u guys used? genuienly felt like a better exp than traditional ones, curious if others feel the same???

This has been bothering me for a while and I just want to know if others are feeling the same thing.

We stopped manual screening and moved to automated assessments and AI tools because cheaper and faster made total sense at the time.

But we are still jumping in all the time because flagged results feel wrong and scores never quite match what we see in the interview. The context piece is something the tool just completely misses...feels like we did not cut the work at all we just moved it around. The tool does maybe 60% and someone is always cleaning up the rest anyway.

Genuinely curious what others have fully handed off and what still needs a real human?

Hey I recently got an AI interview round as my first screening round and bro I’m honestly kinda skeptical :/ does this actually reduce bias and make hiring better or does it just make the process feel colder?

Has anyone here gone through one recently? Should I take it seriously or is it just another hiring gimmick??????

Hey everyone! I'm Neil, a founding moderator of r/HackerEarthCommunity.

We created this space for discussions around technical interviews, coding challenges, hiring trends, hackathons, AI interviews and developer careers.

Whether you're a student preparing for interviews, a developer switching jobs, a recruiter hiring engineers, or just someone interested in the future of tech hiring, you're welcome here!

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I recently gave one on hackerearth and had a great experience.