C-Suite Confidential—Education Market Insights: Exclusive Interview With Amanda Richardson, CEO of CoderPad

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As artificial intelligence transforms industries across the board, one area undergoing particularly rapid change is technical hiring. From how developers prepare for interviews to how hiring teams evaluate candidates, AI is rewriting the rules—and platforms like CoderPad are right at the center of this evolution.

We spoke with Amanda Richardson, CEO of CoderPad, to explore how AI is influencing candidate behavior, shaping product innovation, challenging the very definition of coding skill in today’s job market, and providing opportunities. Here’s what she had to say.

How is AI changing the way companies approach technical hiring, and where does CoderPad fit into that evolving landscape?

AI has made automating recruiting and many of the talent acquisition tasks much easier. Yet for candidates, AI has made crafting resumes, answering asynchronous questions, and getting through traditional screening questions easier than ever before. Said another way, AI is changing everything.

The companies that are very focused on hiring the best talent fastest are taking two critical steps:

1. Adding projects and asynchronous challenges for candidates early in their process. These companies are focused on projects that aren’t “ChatGPT-able” but require multiple steps, have multiple solutions, and require strategic thinking more than rote memory.
2. Upgrading their assessment questions to be based on real-world tasks, not theoretical quiz questions, so the company can see who actually knows their stuff, and who is just regurgitating words spouted out by AI.

CoderPad helps on both fronts. We help bring realism into the developer interview process through live and asynchronous software projects.

Have you seen evidence that candidates are using AI tools, like GitHub, Copilot, or ChatGPT, during live coding interviews, and how is CoderPad adapting to that?

Yes, and maybe unexpectedly—we encourage it!

Using AI tooling to increase efficiency and quality in day-to-day development tasks is becoming the norm. We believe companies should interview for the skills they need on the job, which can include AI use and skills.

Within CoderPad, we have integrated ChatGPT tools (OpenAI is a customer) to allow candidates and interviewers to get assistance during interviews. Our most thoughtful customers are adding questions to the interview process that challenge candidates to use AI to solve problems during the allotted interview time, as using AI tools to be more efficient is a critical part of the job.

How are you thinking about incorporating AI into CoderPad’s own platform—to assist interviewers, enhance candidate experience, or streamline assessments?

AI has opened so many possibilities for feature development—problems we had identified but couldn’t easily solve. Thanks to AI tooling, we can now improve the experience for candidates, engineers who run interviews, and recruiters in many ways. A few examples include:

• Using transcription and AI to summarize an interview for faster submission by the engineer interviewers, but also to add transparency to the process for recruiters.
• Adding follow-up questions to projects to ensure the candidates understand the code they submitted and can articulate why they chose a specific solution.
• Making the creation of questions around specific developer skills or coding concepts faster and easier by suggesting better, more realistic interview questions.

What’s your take on the future of traditional coding interviews in a world where AI can generate high-quality code on demand?

Companies need to embrace AI in the interview process. This sounds crazy—how do you know who can code if AI is doing the coding? Well, the developer job is not just about coding. Developer jobs are about problem-solving, breaking down big projects into achievable tasks, solving those tasks within the context of other systems and the business, ensuring comprehensive solutions including scalability, security, and other organizational needs.

As AI becomes a more critical skill for developers, understanding and assessing a person’s proficiency, being curious, and thinking holistically when applying AI to day-to-day tasks are skills you need to look for in interviews. So, what’s the future of traditional coding interviews? AI-enabled.

Can AI help reduce bias in technical hiring, or does it risk reinforcing it? How does CoderPad navigate that tension?

AI can reduce bias in technical hiring by focusing on objective coding skills and removing potentially biased information during initial screening. The reality is that humans are biased, and while recruiters are trained to minimize it, the bias still exists. Having a more automated summary and objective evaluation relative to others can be a benefit of AI.

However, AI can also perpetuate bias if trained on skewed historical data. CoderPad addresses this by using anonymized real-time coding assessments focused on actual performance and continuously reviews its systems.

To be clear, while AI features and summaries are helpful, AI should complement, not replace, human judgment in hiring.

Are you leveraging AI or machine learning behind the scenes, for example, in scoring, pattern recognition, or interviewer recommendations?

Absolutely. To be clear, we never let AI make hiring decisions. That’s for humans.

But AI can help interviewers and candidates alike in the process, from transcription and notetaking to generating new and different questions to summarizing conversations and submissions.

We have AI enabled in the interview experience to help candidates get help quickly (and interviewers too, as they get stuck on problems as easily as candidates). We summarize interviews and provide insights on talk time, participants, questions asked, and even candidate wait time, which helps talent teams understand what happened in an interview. We also summarize the interview to help developers with notetaking and candidate feedback submissions to make their lives easier after the interview and help them get back to doing what they love, which is building products.

Do your enterprise clients expect AI-native features now, or are they still prioritizing human-led technical assessments?

We will always believe in the importance of human-led assessments. Our software, in some part powered by AI, can assist with summarizing assessments and comparing them against an established rubric. However, much of the developer’s job needs to include human assessment of skills like collaboration, communication, resilience, curiosity, etc. CoderPad focuses on real-world coding tasks, live pair programming, and even system design sessions—contexts where nuanced, in-the-moment problem-solving matters, and relying solely on AI is hard to fake.

While I love what AI can do, I don’t think AI will ever be able to appropriately capture and assess the emotional and human parts that help us all get our jobs done each day.

How is CoderPad helping clients stay one step ahead in the AI interviewing arms race?

We are here to help! From talking about the best practice process to up-leveling interview questions to embrace AI to supporting screening needs on basic skills, we partner with our customers to be at the forefront of the skills they may need today for their teams and will need tomorrow for their teams.

We support multiple postures for our customers. We enable companies to stay ahead by detecting when candidates copy and paste code or responses during assessments, signaling potential use of external tools. We leverage AI to help interviewers generate tailored questions, automate test creation, and suggest follow-ups based on candidate code, allowing teams to raise the bar and diversify question pools faster than ever.

Ultimately, CoderPad equips clients with detection tools, robust interviewing environments, content agility, and the ability to evaluate real-world engineering skills, ensuring companies continue to hire genuine talent, not just those who can game automated assessments or outsource answers to AI.

What risks do you see in over-relying on AI for hiring decisions,and how do you communicate the value of human judgment to your customers?

AI is most effective when it complements human judgment, not as an absolute decision-maker. Humans add the critical depth for success in every role, from culture fit to passion to long-term potential.

Don’t forget—candidate experience is critical and only getting more important as the best developers are able to deliver more output than ever. If you want to attract the best candidates, you need to give them the best experience and sell them on your company and your teams.

One other lesson we have learned is that candidates with nontraditional backgrounds, unconventional experience, or transferable but not perfectly articulated skills may be overlooked if AI systems prioritize rigid criteria. It takes a human to see someone’s potential, talk with them to understand how they think and problem-solve, and bring unique and valuable candidates to a company.

So, humans will always be important, and we’ll probably also need good recruiters.

Looking ahead, what role do you see CoderPad playing in a future where AI is deeply embedded in both the creation and evaluation of software talent?

We can’t wait! As Marc Andreessen famously said, “Software is eating the world.” It seems that overnight, every company became a software-making tech company, and we see that with AI. What was once cheating is now a tool for creating leverage in every role. I wouldn’t be surprised if soon, every role requires AI skills—and when you need a technical assessment for that, we’re here for you.

Final Thoughts

As AI continues to change how technical talent is sourced, evaluated, and hired, platforms like CoderPad are redefining what fairness, rigor, and skill measurement mean in an AI-enhanced world. For private equity investors and acquirers, this is more than a product story—it’s a window into how the future of work is being built, one line of (AI-assisted) code at a time.

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