Technical interviews
A technical interview where candidates do the job.
Swap 45 minutes of questions and a gut feeling for the real work. Candidates investigate, hunt and fix in real environments, and every answer comes back scored, side by side, with the reasoning underneath. Build it from your job spec in minutes, or have our team build it with you.
Why this hurts
The live technical interview tests the wrong thing.
- 01
It rewards talking, not doing.
Describing how you would investigate a suspicious logon is easy to rehearse. Finding the one malicious account among the legitimate ones in a real log set is the job, and a conversation never shows it.
- 02
No two interviews are the same.
Different interviewers, different questions, different days. By the end of the week you are comparing impressions, not evidence, and the strongest candidate can lose to the most confident one.
- 03
It costs your most senior people.
Every live technical round is an hour of someone you cannot spare, for every candidate and every interviewer on the panel.
How we fix it
Your technical round, as hands-on work.
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Deep, realistic investigations.
Multi-step labs in a live shell, a Sentinel-grade KQL editor, Windows event logs, packet captures, cloud configurations and real code. Deep enough to show how someone works, not just what they know.
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Scored the same for everyone.
Every candidate sits the same tasks and is scored the same way. Investigative cases take free-text answers, so there is nothing to guess between.
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A report you can act on.
Per-skill breakdown, the answers underneath, time taken, integrity flags and the areas to probe when you meet them. Read it in two minutes and forward it to the rest of the panel.
What you can actually test for
What a technical interview can include.
- KQL lab: MFA bypass and token replay detection
- Windows event log: Kerberoasting investigation
- Threat hunting: DNS beacon pattern detection
- Sigma rule triage: true and false positives
- Emergency firewall change: approve or reject
- Group Policy audit: insecure domain configuration
- PCAP analysis: DNS tunnelling detection
- Secure code review across languages
- Incident write-up for a non-technical stakeholder
Honest comparison
Hands-on technical interviews vs the live round.
| CyberHire | Live technical interview | |
|---|---|---|
| What it measures | The work, done in real tools | How well they talk about the work |
| Senior time per candidate | Minutes to read the report | An hour or more per interviewer |
| Consistency | Same tasks, same scoring | Varies by interviewer and by day |
| Scheduling | Candidates take it when it suits them | Calendar juggling across the panel |
| Evidence afterwards | Scored answers and integrity flags on file | Interview notes, if anyone wrote them |
How a technical interview runs
- 01
Start from the role
Paste the job specification and set the tier you are hiring at, or pick a ready-made assessment. Rather not? Our team will build it with you.
- 02
Go deep where it matters
Choose the investigations that match the work the role owns. Review the whole assessment and change anything before it goes out.
- 03
Invite your candidates
A link, a secure bulk upload, or straight from your ATS.
- 04
Candidates do the work
In real environments, in your branding, with integrity monitoring switched on. No interviewer, no calendar to coordinate.
- 05
Meet the best, with sharper questions
The report shows who performed strongest, where each candidate is thin and what to probe. Your final conversation goes on judgement, communication and fit.
Technical interview questions
Can an assessment really replace a live technical interview?
It replaces the part most teams run as an unstructured conversation: different questions, different interviewers, a decision made on impressions. Every candidate does the same work and is scored the same way. It does not replace meeting people. The research says a well-structured interview adds to a work sample rather than competing with it, so keep a final conversation with the same questions for every finalist, on judgement, communication and the areas the assessment flagged.
How long does it take candidates?
It depends on the challenges you choose. You set the depth to match the role and the tier you are hiring at, so a Tier 1 analyst and a senior engineer get very different assessments.
How do we know they did not get help or use AI?
Every attempt is monitored for time away from the test, pasting from outside, fullscreen exits and second screens, and location is recorded. Proctor mode adds webcam snapshots with consent. The investigative cases also turn on data only the candidate can see, which an AI model cannot answer from memory. Every signal appears next to the score for you to weigh.
Does it fit our existing interview panel?
Yes. Results are written back to your ATS, and the report forwards to anyone on the panel, including people who never log in to CyberHire.
How is this different from applicant screening?
Applicant screening is a short check of core skills for everyone who applies. The technical interview is the deeper hands-on assessment for the candidates who pass it. You can run both on CyberHire, one after the other.
How we think about technical interviews
The method behind the assessments is written up in full. None of it is gated.
Stop guessing.