Mercor is embracing old

Mercor's interview process is less vibe coding, more whiteboarding.

On an episode of the "20VC" podcast released on Saturday, Mercor's head of product, Osvald Nitski, said that the AI training company has moved away from take-home assignments that can be completed with AI.

"We'll do one round where we find out if the person is familiar with AI tools," he said. "We care a lot about being able to set up good experiments and understanding statistics, having good judgment, and then systems design as well," he said, referring to what is asked in whiteboarding sessions.

Whiteboard interviews, where candidates draw and explain their thinking process, became an industry gold standard in the 2010s and are part of standard technical interviews at companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft.

On the podcast, Nitski, who joined the $10 billion startup last year, said that AI makes it very easy to "offload" a lot of decision-making.

"We want to make sure that people still have the ability to have good judgment and know what they're doing and not just, like, regurgitate what comes out of Claude," he said.

While Mercor uses AI to screen candidates for its talent marketplace, its full-time job interview process contradicts what most of Silicon Valley is increasingly adopting.

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For one, work trials and take-home assessments, which Nitski said Mercor has moved away from, are quickly replacing traditional interviews, such as culture-fit screenings and whiteboarding sessions. AI coding startups like Lovable, Cursor, and Kilo say work experiments are a one-shot way to gauge whether someone has the technical and soft skills they want to see.

Mercor's low-AI interview strategy is also unique compared to peers.

Over the last few months, Business Insider reported that Big Tech companies such as Google, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, and Cisco are changing their interview to allow candidates to use AI. Some tech startups are giving candidates full access to AI tools and coding assistants.

Emily Cohen, who heads people and operations at AI coding startup Cognition, said the company has changed its interview process to account for AI and vibe coding.

"I guess this is like asking a kid to take a math test without a calculator," she said about not allowing AI use in interviews. "For the bulk of building something similar to what you would do on the role, you can and should use AI tools."