Everyone’s cheating on coding tests. Can a chatbot help?

When Tigran Sloyan was at MIT, it was an embarrassment of riches when it came to recruiters. “Every single tech company [and] non-tech-company showed up two times a year, right to our doorstep,” Sloyan told IT Brew. While he acknowledges that he has math and programming skills, he understands that having MIT on his résumé fast-tracked him to jobs at Google and Oracle.

That’s why Sloyan created CodeSignal, a tool that helps companies identify the right person with the right skills, no matter what their résumé looks like. Today, CodeSignal announced Cosmo, a new chatbot that uses AI to help companies find the right candidate for their technical jobs, partly by determining if the applicant has used generative AI to cheat on their coding tests.

Why CodeSignal? “At the high-level view, we think of ourselves as a skills platform,” says Sloyan. “Skills are going to become more and more central to everything we do. Technology has always created [the need for] new skills and displaced existing ones. We used to ride horses and then all of a sudden, cars came along, and then we didn’t need to learn how to ride horses.”

Companies like Meta, Instacart, and Zoom use CodeSignal with the intention of making the process of hiring technical employees more efficient, effective, and fair, assessing candidates’ coding skills through a structured and standardized process. But skills needed for technical jobs are constantly evolving.