Guidelines for AI use in Mercury interviews
At Mercury, we actively encourage thoughtful use of AI tools in our day-to-day work. However, interviews serve a different purpose. They help us understand your baseline thinking - how you solve problems, communicate ideas, and make decisions independently.
Although AI is an important part of how we work, our interviews are designed to assess your thinking, quality, approach, and reasoning without external assistance.
We want every candidate to have a fair, consistent experience, and to know that the work they share represents their own ideas and abilities.
In Practice, This Means:
The use of AI tools (such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Cluely, Claude, or any others) during your interviews at Mercury is not permitted unless explicitly stated and confirmed by your recruiter.
There are a few select interviews where AI use may be permitted. If that’s the case, your recruiter will make it clear in advance and provide any relevant guidelines.
We totally understand the temptation to use AI - this said, if we determine use outside of these guidelines, we reserve the right to remove candidates from the interview process.
How and when to thoughtfully collaborate with AI in each stage of the recruitment process:
Stage | Examples | Is AI permitted? |
|---|---|---|
When applying | Using AI to edit your resume or refine your cover letter | Yes |
Interview preparation | Leveraging AI as a tool to help run through practice questions or to refine the questions you’d like to ask our interviewers prior to your live interviews | Yes |
During take-home assignments | Using AI to draft or generate content for your take-home | Not permitted unless explicitly approved by your recruiter |
Using AI to polish a completed take home assignment. Polishing should be focused on grammar, clarity, and formatting, it’s not generating new ideas, arguments, code, or structure | You are permitted to use AI to polish your work, but should be prepared to speak to everything in a live review | |
During live interviews or technical exercises | Using AI to answer questions, whether behavioral, technical, or otherwise during a live interview | Not permitted unless explicitly approved by your recruiter |
If you have any questions about these guidelines, please reach out to your recruiter to discuss directly.