Cheat-proofing your technical interviews is less about one perfect trick and more about stacking small frictions that honest candidates barely notice while dishonest ones cannot overcome.

1. Custom Take-Homes With Live Debrief

Give a 4-6 hour project tied to your domain: maybe sanitize a log pipeline or patch a bug in a stub repo. Let candidates use Cursor, Claude, AI, Stack Overflow, coffee, or whatever they need. Then, schedule a 30-minute debrief where they share:

• Live walk-through: what they built and why.

• Reasoning: the trade-offs they weighed.

• Next steps: what they would add with more time.

A candidate who outsourced the project fumbles in these situations as they cannot back up their actions with accurate reasons. A few follow-up questions and you'll already filter through hundreds of cheaters trying to get the job.

🟩 Bonus Tip: Make sure the tests are not overly dependent on academic theory or common queries from GitHub, as candidates can easily copy or memorize answers.

2. Live Pair Programming

Nothing is worse than a situation where you end up hiring an engineer who can't even write a block of code without referring to external resources or repositories. All because you could not detect that they lied about their experience and passed the interview by copy-pasting code.

Run a 45-minute session in VS Code Live Share or CoderPad. The interviewer stays on video, asks open-ended questions, and nudges if they spot a problem. The interviewer can observe the body language and spot any suspicious actions. You also see typing rhythm, not just pasted blobs, and get to experience their collaboration style.

3. Design Chats and Diagram Sketches

Ask “How would you redesign our job board to handle 10× traffic next quarter?” a question with no single right answer. A large language model can write a generic blog post about load balancers, but it cannot keep up with deep follow-ups such as:

• “Which metric tells you the cache is too small?”

• “How would you roll this out with zero downtime on Friday?”

• “You see occasional 502 errors in one region. Where do you start?”

The back-and-forth reveals genuine depth or lack thereof.

4. Targeted Proctoring, Not a Police State

For stages that still need a timed quiz (maybe you hire a dozen interns at once), add:

• Full-screen screen-share plus webcam on.

• Code playback to flag sudden dumps of 200 lines.

• ID check at start.

Use it sparingly, because more than 66% of candidates care about the experience throughout the interview process. You are taking these preventive measures to hire a skilled candidate, but it can backfire as monitoring every small detail frustrates skilled developers. So, mitigating cheating and candidate experience is a balancing act to increase offer acceptance.

5. Open-Book AI Round

Flip the script once. Tell candidates they may use ChatGPT and any library they want for a tricky refactor. The real exam is the follow-up conversation:

• What prompts did they write?

• Which AI output was wrong, and how did they fix it?

• Would they commit this to production?

An engineer who can detect inaccurate AI outputs and solve them is an engineer who will ship faster on Monday.