How to hire for AI fluency: Zapier's complete interview kit
Learn to spot candidates who 10x output with AI. This kit includes Zapier's fluency rubric, interview questions for six startup roles, and a framework for assessing AI capability at each stage.

If you’re not screening for AI fluency, you’re paying full salary for partial output.
Think about it. You have two same-resume candidates: one ships with AI, one doesn’t. Hire the wrong one, and you just burned a headcount slot and created a shadow headcount to cover their velocity gap.
Tracy St.Dic, Global Head of Talent at Zapier, proactively built a way to spot AI fluency in candidates, from engineers to accountants to marketers.
"The way we define AI adoption is that it’s an add-on of the current workflows that we already use. Helping us save a few hours here, a few hours there,” Tracy says. “That obviously supercharges the work and is important. But what we want to do is move to AI transformation when you're actually questioning the who, the how and the what of the work itself."
Scanning for company-transforming hires, Tracy took a magnifying glass to Zapier’s candidate funnel, starting with how AI fluency is tested in the interview process.
“The goal is to make AI adoption feel more tangible in the hiring process AND to see how candidates lean into learning and up-skilling themselves throughout the interviews, if they come to us less advanced,” she says.
We’ve adapted Zapier’s strategy into a 5-minute playbook that any founder can snag. It includes:
Foundational artifacts. Clear definitions that codify exactly what you mean by AI fluency. Anyone in your org should be able to pull up a doc that clues them in on the bar you are looking for and what that looks like for each role. (More on how to do this later.)
A cadence for reviews. This good hygiene is meant to squash any interview tactics that aren’t working. Think: using LLMs to analyze which interview questions produced the richest results and which caused confusion.
Guardrails. Safety checks like a disclosure policy, eval prompts to catch copy/paste hallucinations, etc.
With this in mind, this complete guide will you get you up and running to start scanning for AI fluent talent as soon as your next interview.
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