Technical Interview Integrity Checklist for Engineering Hiring

Most engineering hiring teams have a process for evaluating technical competence. Very few have a documented process for ensuring that what they evaluate is actually the candidate's own work. This checklist fills that gap — covering everything from pre-interview setup to post-interview debrief.

Use it as a starting point and adapt it to your pipeline. A checklist that is too long gets ignored; one that is too short leaves gaps. The items below are ordered by where they fall in the interview timeline.

Before scheduling the interview

• Define your AI-use policy in writing: what tools are permitted, what constitutes covert use, and what the consequence is.
• Decide on a monitoring approach — integrity monitoring, all-display share, or both — and document it so all interviewers apply it consistently.
• Prepare a candidate disclosure that explains what will be monitored, what will not be collected, and how to opt out.
• Calibrate your questions to require reasoning, not recall. Questions that can be answered by pasting a Wikipedia definition or an LLM summary are not testing the skills you care about.

In the calendar invite

• Attach or link the monitoring disclosure so the candidate has read it before the day.
• Explain what software the candidate needs to install (if applicable) and include a test link they can verify in advance.
• State the permitted tools explicitly — IDE of their choice, standard library docs, specific reference URLs — so there is no ambiguity on the day.

At the start of the session

• Confirm consent verbally — a brief "you received our monitoring disclosure and are happy to proceed?" is sufficient.
• Verify screen sharing shows the expected environment — coding IDE visible, no obvious second tabs in the title bar.
• Note any atypical setup the candidate mentions (network issues, older hardware) that might affect signal interpretation later.
• Confirm integrity monitoring is running and the session ID is recorded against the candidate record.

During the interview

• Note the timing of questions asked — this context helps a reviewer interpret signal clusters in the report.
• Follow up on suspiciously fluent answers with a "walk me through your reasoning" — not as accusation, but as standard practice for all candidates.
• Do not coach or react to integrity signals in real time — let the monitoring system collect them and review after.

After the interview

• Review the integrity report before the debrief, not during it — signals should inform the discussion, not dominate it in real time.
• Treat the score as one input among technical score, interviewer assessment, and follow-up question quality — a high integrity score does not override a poor technical performance.
• Document your decision alongside the report — if a signal was reviewed and judged benign, note why, so the record is defensible.
• Store the signed report in the candidate's ATS record per your data-retention policy.

For the policy template that sits behind this checklist, see Building an Interview Integrity Policy: HR Template. For the full recruiter playbook, see The Remote Hiring Integrity Playbook.