Your Interview Game is Weak: Gamifying Technical Interviews through Role-Playing

The talk argues that many technical interviews test the wrong things. The speaker, an application security manager with a development background, cites published data and an informal survey of security engineers. The findings included poor candidate experience, interview content that often did not match the job, arbitrary challenges, memorized definitions, and processes that ran for five or more hours. Skills missing from the job posting were frequently ignored, and interview formats sometimes punished candidates who used tools they would use on the job.

To address this, the speaker built a role-playing interview kit set in a fictional skateboarding-themed security startup. Candidates work through about four job-relevant challenges, such as threat modeling, code review, a secrets management decision, and a penetration test of an open-source tool. Interviewers take on non-player characters with motivations, alliances, and budget concerns, so responses vary and rote preparation is less effective. Candidates receive the materials in advance, and the kit is meant to be adapted to a team's own context rather than copied.

The speaker reported that after the second version of the kit was used for a hire, the process took two months instead of six, the candidate pool shrank fivefold, and several candidates gave positive feedback. Advice for hiring teams included investing time in the process, involving stakeholders from adjacent teams, and assessing both technical and interpersonal skills. Advice for candidates included volunteering, speaking, seeking mentorship, and asking questions during interviews.