Canva now insists job candidates use AI during actual interviews

Australian graphic design service Canva has redesigned technical job interviews for the new era, saying candidates now have to demonstrate that they can use AI tools if they want to be chosen.

Canva, a company founded in 2012 that grew quickly enough to compete with Adobe in the graphic design market, serves more than 220 million monthly users with a $3 billion annual revenue in 2024.

Undoubtedly, the firm is large enough to have a pretty smart job interview process in order to find the best candidates, especially for developer positions.

Previously, the interview revolved around computer science fundamentals. Candidates had to write code using only their actual human capabilities.

Now, however, Canva expects candidates for frontend, backend, and machine learning engineering roles to prove their mettle with tools like Claude, Copilot, or Cursor during technical interviews.

“Yes, you can use AI in our interviews. In fact, we insist,” Canva’s head of platforms, Simon Newton, wrote in a blog post, adding that almost half of the company’s frontend and backend engineers are already daily active users of an AI-assisted coding tool.

“Our engineers leverage AI to prototype ideas, understand our large codebase, and generate code. This allows them to focus on what matters most: Empowering the World to Design,” rhapsodized Newton.

That essentially means that Canva’s old interview process was asking candidates to solve tasks without the tools they would use if they got the job, he added: “This dismissal of AI tools <...> meant we weren’t truly evaluating how candidates would perform in their actual role.”

Moreover, according to Canva, candidates are already increasingly using AI assistance during technical interviews, sometimes covertly through tools specifically designed to avoid detection.

Initial experiments confirmed what Canva suspected: AI assistants can indeed trivially solve traditional coding interview questions.

“When we tested our Computer Science Fundamentals questions with AI tools, they produced correct, well-documented solutions in seconds, often without requiring any follow-up prompts or clarification,” explained Newton.

The company needed to rethink its approach to technical interviewing to gain a meaningful signal about a candidate's problem-solving and coding abilities.

Now, candidates have to solve challenges that “require genuine engineering judgment even with AI assistance.” They can’t be solved with a single prompt anymore. Instead, candidates need to show they can guide AI effectively and improve their output.