As the Talent Partner at WeBuild-AI, I’m constantly looking for new talent. We’re in a high-growth phase at WeBuild-AI, making sure we scale our teams effectively to provide customer results fast. Part of scaling start-up teams means hiring the best possible talent to build a great team and a welcoming culture.

Almost every company in the market currently uses take-home tasks as part of their interview process for engineers - so, why don’t we?

As an AI-native company, we value deep technical skill, creative problem-solving and collaboration.

Our conscious decision not to use take-home tasks has led us to hire top talent, so we must be doing something right. Here’s why we decided not to include take-home tasks in our engineering interview process.

Respecting Candidates’ Time

We believe great candidates shouldn’t need to prove their worth through extra unpaid work. Respect for time is respect for talent.

We work as a team to collaborate (and we want to see that in interview)

Our work is deeply collaborative: we build and deploy AI systems through teamwork, shared problem-solving, and iteration.

A take-home task isolates candidates, evaluating how they perform alone, without access to the resources, discussions, and context that real-world projects require.

Instead, we prefer live, structured problem-solving sessions where candidates can:

Ask questions
Share their reasoning in real time
Collaborate with us, the same way we’d work together day to day

This helps us assess not just technical ability, but communication, curiosity and cultural fit; the skills that make AI teams thrive.

Fairness and Accessibility

Not all candidates have equal access to time, equipment, or ideal working environments. In our experience, take-home tasks can unintentionally bias hiring toward those with fewer outside commitments or more free time.

By focusing on real-time, guided evaluations, we create a fairer and more inclusive process that measures skill, not circumstance.

We want to know the thought process

We don’t learn much about a candidate from how polished their code is after a weekend.

But we learn a lot from a 60-minute conversation that dives into:

How they approach ambiguity
How they reason about trade-offs
How they communicate complex ideas clearly

As an AI-native company, we also want to collaborate and discuss how candidates use AI, from where they optimise their process to how to skip long, repetitive tasks.

Our interview process is built to be transparent, conversational, and respectful, not exhaustive or extractive.

Building Trust From the First Interaction

By removing take-home tasks, we’re saying:

We trust your time. We value your expertise. We’d rather build together than test in isolation

How we do approach interviews - Our engineering interview process

Stage 1 – Introductory Chat

You’ll start with an informal conversation with me, our Talent Partner. This is a chance for us to get to know you, talk through your experience, and share more about who we are and what we’re looking for.

Stage 2 – Technical Deep Dive

Next, you’ll meet one of our Engineers for a technical interview. We’ll explore your technical background in more depth and discuss how you approach problem-solving and collaboration.

Stage 3 – Team Conversation

You’ll then have a second interview with another Engineer. This stage focuses on your experience, the kind of work you enjoy and gives you plenty of opportunity to ask questions about our projects, team culture, and what day-to-day life is like here.

Final Stage – Meet the Founders

The final stage is an in-person meeting with one of our Co-Founders, Ben or Mark. It’s a great opportunity to connect directly, learn more about our vision for the company and see how you’d fit within the wider team.

People & Culture