I don't think this has anything to do with using AI for prep. 20 years ago I was interviewing candidates who had somewhat lied on their resume, knew some of the things that they'd written about, but had everything fall apart under a little more questioning of what exactly they'd done and why.
I think the difference is that you used to need a certain knowledge to be able to bullshit. You could still do it, but it would mainly be to embellish stuff you already somewhat know. With LLMs, it's easy to make it write a whole page of interview prep you can use to hide your tracks, without any prior knowledge. My guess is they saw that kapwing wanted experience in X,Y,Z and made an LLM create projects that sounds real in a way you otherwise wouldn't be able to do as easily.
> but it had been some time ago, and they never worked on any of the features
It appears that the candidate might have actually worked on the daycare app, but not on what they said they worked - i.e., the ratelimiting and pagination. It appears that they might have been working on the frontend, and took the liberty of "expanding" their role - this used to be extremely common in a big sample of the resumes, and I'm guessing it still is. They might have used AI to prep - they used to use google earlier, but the prep was (and is) still inadequate if you've not actually worked on and implemented it. I don't think it was an entirely LLM created project...
Well I guess if the candidate would be a little be stronger and actually trying to reason with the LLM about the decision it suggested, he would be better prepared and maybe got away with his claims.
Or as current best chess player Magnus Carlson said, "if I would cheat, you would never know". Meaning very strong candidates will get away with flexing the truth with AI. But this means maybe, you shouldn't look for a perfect fit. Or check his merit by spending time and money to get in touch with his old companies.
Yeah.. but if he didn't actually work exactly on it, but took the effort to learn from coworkers (or LLMs or google or wherever) and is able to answer my questions on what he did, and more importantly on why he decided to do something a certain way and not some other way, then he/she must have spent considerable amount of time actually learning about it and figuring things out. So I'd still hire him/her. The trouble is most people who embellish are either not competent to go deep enough to learn, or think that they can get away with some superficial knowledge of it.
Wouldn't be surprised if the whole post was actually written up by AI as a "subtle" way of promoting the company, fueled by riding out the outrage from hiring managers on linkedin
