AI is reshaping how work gets done, but the hiring process hasn’t caught up. Employers are asking for AI skills they can’t clearly define, while application volumes hit record levels. Resumes mean less than ever because candidates can now use AI to tailor them to any job in seconds, and traditional screening methods are struggling to keep pace.
At the same time, something more interesting is happening underneath all the noise. Candidates are often further ahead on AI than the companies hiring them. Forward-thinking employers are turning to work sampling and, rather than treating AI use as cheating, are integrating it into the assessment as a necessary part of the process. Despite predictions that coding would be the first job to disappear, engineering hiring is actually up in some areas.
So how should employers rethink assessment, upskilling, and what they look for in technical talent?
My guest this week is Amanda Richardson, CEO of CoderPad. In our conversation, Amanda shares what’s really happening in technical hiring and where it’s heading next.
In the interview, we discuss:
• What are AI skills?
• How is recruiting evolving?
• Previewing the actual work in the recruiting process
• AI-assisted assessment
• Upskilling, adaptability, and curiosity
• How is AI coding changing tech jobs?
• Candidates are ahead of employers on AI adoption.
• What does the future of jobs and hiring look like?
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Transcript
Matt Alder 0:00
Tech hiring is going through a period of rapid change. Over 70% of jobs now being posted are demanding AI skills, yet most employers can’t define what that actually means. Resumes are losing their value to differentiate, application volumes are at record levels, and traditional screening is struggling to keep pace. Keep listening to find out how innovative TA teams are responding.
Support for this podcast comes from CoderPad. Here’s a question that should keep you up at night: when your next engineering hire sits down at their computer on day one, are they the person you interviewed, or are they someone who just knew how to perform for an interview? Meta discovered a dangerous gap between interview performance and actual job performance. So did LinkedIn. So did Yahoo. They all found the same culprit: their hiring process was testing for skills that no longer reflect how the best engineers actually work. AI hasn’t just changed how software gets built; it’s changed what it means to be good at building software. The companies who are winning the war for technical talent have already rewritten their interview playbook. CoderPad is the platform powering that shift, from AI-enabled live interviews to realistic project-based screens. CoderPad helps you see candidates in action, not just on paper. Meta scaled to 16,000 interviews using it. Yahoo cut recruiter screening time by over 50%. MNTN is onboarding new hires in days instead of weeks. This April, if you’re still banning AI in interviews, you’re not just behind; you’re screening out your best future hires. Visit coderpad.io/podcast to talk to the team. That’s coderpad.io/podcast.
[Archive audio] 2:14
There’s been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement, and material progress in your lifetime and mine, than in all the ages of history.
Matt Alder 2:29
Hi there! Welcome to episode 785 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. AI is reshaping how work gets done, but the hiring process hasn’t yet caught up. Employers are asking for AI skills they can’t clearly define, while application volumes are hitting record levels. Resumes mean less than ever because candidates can use AI to tailor them to any job in seconds, and traditional screening methods are struggling to keep pace. At the same time, something interesting is happening underneath all of the noise. Candidates are often further ahead on AI than the companies hiring them. Forward-thinking employers are turning to work sampling, and rather than treating AI use as cheating, they’re building it in as a necessary part of the assessment. Despite predictions that coding would be the first job to disappear, engineering hiring is actually up in some areas. So, how should employers rethink assessment, upskilling, and what they look for in technical talent? My guest this week is Amanda Richardson, CEO of CoderPad. In our conversation, Amanda shares what’s really happening in technical hiring and where it’s heading next.
Hi, Amanda, and welcome to the podcast.
Amanda Richardson 3:50
Well, thanks, Matt. It’s great to be here.
Matt Alder 3:52
It’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Amanda Richardson 4:00
Sure thing. I am the CEO of CoderPad. We are a platform for interviewing and assessing developer talent. So if you are hiring technical skills, which we can get into, has become a wider and wider category. Certainly, all those engineers who sit in the back with the lights off, those are my people, and we help you figure out who can actually do the job well and will be a great fit for your company.
Matt Alder 4:25
Let’s start with that and talk a little bit about technology changing and skills changing, because AI apparently is a thing. Everyone wants AI skills, but lots of people don’t even seem to know what they mean when they say that. So, what’s going on out there? What are people looking for, and probably more importantly, how can people test for the skills they’re looking for when they know what they’re looking for?
Amanda Richardson 4:49
It’s so interesting. So AI has certainly affected the developer job and the developer teams more than anybody. If you look at any chart on the effectiveness or sales of AI, it’s engineers, both high impact and high outcomes. So that has been interesting, but it also has meant that AI has affected every role, and people are kind of wondering, what do I do? I mean, CEOs, which I can make fun of because I am one, will stand up in all hands and be like, “We are now an AI company,” and everybody’s like, “Yes!” And then they turn around and they’re like, “What does that mean? Now, what do we do?” So, what we are seeing is that over 70% of job postings are now asking for AI skills, which is crazy. Everybody, recruiting, marketing, sales, development, no one really has defined what it is. One of the big gaps we see is actually companies haven’t even enabled it within their organization. So they want the skills, but they have no content on how to do it, maybe not even tooling. It’s a wild world out there.
Matt Alder 5:59
Absolutely. It reminds me of the time I got an internet job in the very early days of the internet. I joined an internet company and didn’t have an internet connection, which sounds quite parallel to what we’re talking about here. We want internet people, but we don’t do that yet.
Amanda Richardson 6:17
Yeah, exactly. That is 100% true out there.
Matt Alder 6:19
It’s a crazy time in recruiting in general, because obviously candidates have perhaps adopted AI quicker than a lot of employers have. Combining that with some of the economic challenges that are going on in particular markets, we’re looking at huge numbers of applications at the moment. That’s not something that’s going to go away. It’s something that is ultimately breaking the processes that are already there. What comes next? What are you seeing employers doing in their recruiting process to address that, but also just to make recruiting better and more effective?
Amanda Richardson 6:53
Yes, 100%. You know, 3,000 applicants, they’re all a perfect match in your ATS, is truly the top of funnel problem of the day. I was talking to a head of people earlier today who was saying they opened a role, and within a week they had 1,200 resumes, and they believe that about 60 to 70% of them were actually applied by bots. So no human actually even applied to the job. A candidate had said, “I want a job in, we’ll call it marketing. Here’s my resume. Go find every marketing job, tweak my resume to match the job description, and then apply to the job.” So there weren’t even candidates on the other side. It’s wild out there. I actually think the end of the resume, the end of the CV, may be here. I don’t know if we’re going to have a party or dance on the grave, it’s unclear, but the end of the CV. So what we are seeing, particularly in engineering, is people really leaning on take-home projects and assessments. I don’t really care what your resume says, because it’s probably some exaggeration of what you know, and five years of JavaScript has never meant anything anyway. I just want to see if you can actually do the work we do, and so this is where companies are taking on assessments to say, “All right, here’s the type of work we do here,” and it’s not a pop quiz for computer science. It’s a real multi-file project. I mean, the technology now allows you to send a code base. Here’s 3,000, here’s 5,000, here’s 30,000 lines of code. Build a feature in this. The candidates who have the skills and know what to do not only are able to accomplish those assessments, they find them so much more refreshing. It’s more interesting work. I was talking to a candidate yesterday who was saying, “God, I did this project for this hot AI company. It was 45 minutes. I built this thing, and it was so fun.” Remember when recruiting used to be fun, and doing the candidate experience would give you a sense of what the company was like? So I guess I challenge all the talent acquisition people who are flooded with resumes to not only embrace assessments, but embrace assessments that really show the type of work that’ll get done on the job. Not everybody will love that, but that in and of itself is a signal in the hiring process.
Matt Alder 9:16
Yeah, exactly. It’s part of that kind of brand and that fit process. I was listening to a TA leader talk about this a couple of weeks ago, and it’s really interesting because it was on a panel, and someone in the audience said, “Oh, what about using AI to cheat in tests like this?” And what they said was, “Well, actually, you need to use AI to complete this particular exercise because that’s what we do in our workflow, so it’s actually part of the test.” I think that’s a really interesting point that people miss as well.
Amanda Richardson 9:44
Yeah. What we’re seeing, you know, we work with Apple, Tesla, Meta, OpenAI. These are my people. This is San Francisco. What we are seeing them adopt is an interview where you can’t get through it unless you’re AI proficient. You have to use AI because, to your point, that’s what they do on the job. So it’s not cheating. It’s a lack of skills if you’re not using AI. But they will often pair it with a no-AI assessment where they’re really trying to understand, what is the kernel of your knowledge? How do you do critical thinking? What is the structure? And then they’ll have one that’s optional, and I think it’s the optional one that’s so fascinating, right? So you pass the AI one, you pass the no-AI one, and then you’re like, “What do I want to do here?” I think that’s part of the judgment and skill that they’re trying to assess. Can you appropriately apply AI when it makes sense, and can you not apply AI when it doesn’t make sense? When it’s just faster to do it yourself, don’t try to spin up all the agents if you can just solve it yourself in 15 minutes and fix that bug.
Matt Alder 10:47
I think the other interesting thing is what we’ve seen in every talent shift over the last sort of 20 years, and probably even further back than that. The senior people with genuine, cutting-edge skills in this space are obviously very few and far between, and are changing hands, if that’s the right word, for eye-watering amounts of money.
Amanda Richardson 11:09
Don’t try to buy a house in San Francisco. Absolutely.
Matt Alder 11:13
The like of which we’ve never seen before. So, for a lot of companies, they’re just locked out of that market, or there just aren’t enough people to do that. Thinking back again to the dot-com boom, I was running a team, and we had the same issue with some of the experienced people we were looking for, and we ended up just developing our own. We recruited people and trained them up. Is that a possibility in this tech shift? What are you seeing people do?
Amanda Richardson 11:38
So I think your point earlier about candidate adoption being higher than company adoption is real, and what we are seeing in the market is that candidates on their own, in their own free time, their personal projects, whatever it is, are embracing and adopting AI. So the skills are out there. It may not be on the resume because they don’t use it in their day to day because they’re not allowed, or somebody in governance said something, or they couldn’t get it approved, but when you ask people about how they use it in their day to day, it is accessible. So I actually don’t think the skills gap is as great from a foundational knowledge perspective. Even to your point on the internet, right? I’m old enough to remember AOL keywords and instant messenger chats, and that’s what we did. Even if you didn’t have it at work, you were on instant messenger all night. So talking to people about how they’re using it in their day to day, I think, is impactful. But also being able to use it and then upskilling in terms of how it applies to the job. We partner with LinkedIn Learning, and we’re rolling out a bunch of courses on AI upskilling, how to use AI, which models to use when. All of these are going to be things that we keep learning, and it’s changing so rapidly. We didn’t have Claude Code. I think it’s only been six months since Claude Code.
Matt Alder 13:00
About that, yeah.
Amanda Richardson 13:00
I was talking to a developer the other day who was saying their developers don’t even look at code. They take a problem, they talk about how you would build it. I mean, it’s technical language. It’s not just build a thing. There is technical knowledge there, but then Claude Code builds the code. They have an agent who checks the code. They have another agent who does the integration, another agent who does the QA, and then they release the code, and people never see the code. So I think there is just rapid change in terms of what it even looks like to be AI upskilled. So I guess that is a very long-winded answer to say yes, companies are upskilling, but yes, I think your people have more skills than you maybe have allowed them to show in the workplace. So open it up there, and then whatever they have, it’s going to be irrelevant in 12 months. So really, I think it’s on leaders, and it’s on people teams, right? This is what we do. We run talent. We drive the talent strategy for the company. If skills and talent are what we do, how are we creating a culture where the talent is experimenting? The talent is trying new things. The talent is looking at new ways to solve problems. We’re embracing curiosity. We’re embracing humility. We’re embracing experimentation. So how do we really, ultimately, recruit for and hire and reward those skills, more than can you code fast enough with Claude?
Matt Alder 14:28
Are they not really the true AI skills? That kind of adaptability, learning, curiosity. They’re really the things that are going to drive people through the next stage of their career at the moment, aren’t they?
Amanda Richardson 14:40
Yeah, and maybe those are things that we always should have been looking for, and we kind of got distracted by fancy keywords and SEO optimization and JavaScript and React. There is jargon everywhere, but I think ultimately we want people who are adaptable and curious and going to try new things and be creative and make mistakes, and then we have to create a structure and a culture that allows for that.
Matt Alder 15:04
Reflecting back on something that you said a little bit earlier around Claude Code, for example, what is this doing to tech jobs in general? Because there is this huge narrative at the moment that coding is dead as a job, and there won’t be any jobs because AI will be able to do all the things that humans do in the software engineering space, so it’s over. Is that true, or does the actual real picture look very different?
Amanda Richardson 15:29
We’re seeing quite a different picture. So our usage is up, highest interview volume ever. We also see that especially amongst the AI companies, who are the most AI forward, and I think if anybody was replacing their engineers with Claude Code, it would be them. Maybe they have replaced some, but they’re still hiring a ton. Then I think the macro data even shows that engineering job postings are way up. Interestingly, product manager job postings are also way up. And fun fact for the audience: recruiter job postings are the highest they’ve been since 2002 in the United States.
Matt Alder 16:05
Wow, that’s great news. Look out.
Amanda Richardson 16:08
Turns out we may need more humans after all. But I think what we’re finding is some of that is swap outs. So maybe the workers who have the mindset that they don’t want to try, they’re not interested in new tooling, they’re resistant to change, they’re stuck in their ways. I think those people are being traded out, and that is creating job openings. But I think we’re also seeing a lot more developer hiring, and the reason for that is so much more is possible. I’ll just use CoderPad as an example. We are hiring more engineers, and the reason we’re doing that is because we can build features that didn’t exist, or, I mean, it was technically possible, but it would have been so massively expensive to build. So we now have transcription in every single interview. That was not economical four years ago, but now AI makes that possible. We can now summarize every project that gets done and compare across candidates, because that level of data synthesis is reasonably deliverable with LLMs, whereas three years ago I would have had to staff an entire data science team to make that happen. So we are seeing so many more things be built with AI, and then AI enabling so much more to be built. It is certainly shifting the bottlenecks. If you had a long backlog of bugs, those backlogs are being worked through, and so developers are looking around being like, “What do we do now?” Maybe those companies aren’t hiring a bunch of engineers; they’re hiring more product managers, or even getting the tools into the hands of the business. But I think if you look at the data, whether it’s on some of the common feeds on Indeed or LinkedIn or even the major job sources, we are definitely seeing more hiring, and the role is producing more code on a like-for-like basis. Then ultimately, the CFO is sitting there being like, if that engineer created 10 features a year before for X dollars, and they can now do 13 because they’re 30% more productive, the ROI is up. Let’s do more engineers. So I think we’re seeing a lot more hiring for that reason too.
Matt Alder 18:12
As a final question, it’s difficult to say what the future looks like because, as you say, we hadn’t even seen Claude Code six months ago. So, what do you hope the future looks like? Where do you think we’ll be with talent and hiring and those kinds of things in a couple of years’ time?
Amanda Richardson 18:26
I think AI is making every job a technical job. I think everybody is going to be expected to be a builder. I think everybody’s also going to have the opportunity to be a builder. If you’ve been that recruiter who’s super frustrated with the manual process, but you can’t get the attention of the developer to fix the thing, or the IT ops person to fix the thing, you are now going to have that tooling in your hands. So I think this means we have the opportunity for everybody to build. At the same time, I think we will now have the expectation of everybody to be a builder. So, what does a developer job look like three years from now? I think we may all be developers in our own way, where you’re saying, “Hey, Claude,” or whoever the agent du jour is, “change this to this. I don’t like that this button is this color. Make this look like this. Add this piece here.” And then Claude saying, “But what about this? What about that?” And then we all ultimately become builders. So I think maybe what we’ve been doing in developer recruiting for 10 years now, around really assessing technical skills, judging and hiring people based on their skills and their fingers-on-keyboard capabilities, as opposed to their CVs and tell me about a time when, I think this may be the opportunity for those with skills to shine and really take over all the different functions, not just engineering. So it’s going to be a wild world, and maybe we’ll all be vibe coding together somewhere. I always laugh at the quote, I think it was John Maynard Keynes who said this almost 100 years ago, the big economist. He said, with all the technology improvements, the industrial revolution, and all the capacity we’ve created, I can’t believe my grandchildren are only going to work 15 hours a week, and I wonder what they’re going to do with that time. I suspect we’re all now his great grandchildren. Working 15 hours a week sounds great, but I think we’ll all find a way to fill the time with more creativity. I think that’s the coolest part of being a human, and I can’t wait.
Matt Alder 20:29
Amanda, thank you very much for talking to me.
Amanda Richardson 20:32
Thank you for inviting me. This has been so fun.
Matt Alder 20:35
My thanks to Amanda. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time, and I hope you’ll join me.
