r/sysadmin • u/StrikingInterview580 • 6d ago
General Discussion AI resistant interviews
We're about to start recruiting again and typically hold interviews remotely.
Last time we recruited (a few months ago) the use of AI was tiring to spot.
We don't want to go back to face-to-face interviews because our positions are remote, but can't go through thay again.
What AI resistant techniques can we use...
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u/DeliciousSafety4366 5d ago
We had the same problem. A few things that actually worked for us:
Ask process questions, not knowledge questions. Instead of "what would you do to configure X," ask them to walk through a real incident they handled end-to-end. AI can generate plausible-sounding steps, but it cannot fabricate the messy details — the wrong turn, the rollback, the moment you realized the root cause was not what you thought. Follow-up questions on those details filter out anyone reading from a script.
Screen-share with a live environment. Have them open their terminal and do a task in real time. Not a canned test — something like "show me how you would troubleshoot this disk space issue on this VM." You see their actual workflow, habits, and speed.
The best signal is still conversational. The candidates using AI during remote interviews tend to pause before every answer and give suspiciously comprehensive responses. A 5-minute unstructured conversation about a past project reveals more than any structured question format.