Candidates Using AI Tools in Interviews

Our Philosophy on AI and Talent

At SandboxAQ, we believe AI is a powerful tool and a critical part of modern work. Our hiring process is designed to assess your ability to excel in a role where AI is likely to be a tool you use, but also to measure the core skills, critical thinking, and domain expertise that you bring as an individual, we want to see and assess how you think and solve problems both with and without AI tools.

Why This Guidance?

This guidance is designed to create a transparent and fair process that measures what matters most. We believe in:

• Assessing Your Core Competencies: We want to be confident in your fundamental skills, domain expertise, and critical thinking. We are looking for you to demonstrate these attributes separately from how you use an AI tool.
• Predicting On-the-Job Performance:  On the job, you’re very likely to use AI as a collaborator. Our process reflects this by allowing for its use in certain situations, and when you clearly cite AI as a Resource when used.
• Encouraging Transparency & Authenticity: Demonstrate your authentic capabilities and how you approach problems. Disclosing AI usage fosters the collaborative environment we cherish at SandboxAQ. Unacknowledged use of AI in interviews is considered inauthentic and does not reflect the collaborative and transparent work we expect from our team.

How SandboxAQ Uses AI in Hiring

To ensure transparency, we want you to know how SandboxAQ uses AI in our own hiring practices. SandboxAQ uses AI to refine job descriptions, help draft interview questions, and assist in analysing hiring metrics. When SandboxAQ uses AI in this way, there is a human in the loop reviewing the work, and making final editorial decisions. SandboxAQ does not use your data to train AI models or allow AI to make hiring decisions.

How To Collaborate with AI During Our Hiring Process

We anticipate different levels of AI usage at each stage of our hiring process to ensure a fair and accurate assessment.

When Applying

• General Rule: Use AI to refine and polish your work. For example, you can use AI to help you articulate your experience more clearly, check grammar, or tailor a cover letter to a specific job description.
• Important Note on Authenticity: Our goal is to understand your authentic story and real contributions, as such please only use AI to help articulate experiences or accomplishments that are reflective of your experience.

During Interviews

• General Rule: We want to see how you think and solve problems in real-time. We encourage you to first articulate your approach and attempt to solve the problem using your own knowledge and expertise.
• Using AI as a Tool: If you reach a point where you believe an AI tool could help you solve a problem, please first inform your interviewer.  This is akin to a coding interview where you might reference a library or a specific API.
  

• Depending on the interview and its purpose your interviewer may ask you to continue trying without an AI tool.
• We are open to you demonstrating your proficiency in collaborating with AI, provided you first share your plan and rationale with your interviewer. 
  

• AI Usage Interviews: We may have interviews where AI assistance is specifically required. We will be very clear if this is the case. For example, in an interview for a data science role, we might give you a problem and instruct you to use an AI assistant to write the initial Python script, and we will evaluate your ability to debug, refine, and interpret the results.