Interviews
How to Prepare for an Interview With AI
AI is genuinely useful for rehearsal: it will generate more questions than you would think of, follow up harder than a friendly interviewer, and tell you where an answer is vague. It is not useful for pretending.
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What AI is genuinely good for
- Generating the questions you were not expecting, especially for the second half of a long interview.
- Asking follow-ups until your answer stops being vague.
- Turning a job description into a technical or competency question list.
- Preparing you to talk about your weaknesses and gaps without sounding defensive.
- Rehearsing your salary or notice-period answers.
All of these are rehearsal tasks. None of them require the assistant to know anything true about you that you have not told it — which is exactly why they are safe to use well.
The rehearsal loop that works
1Supply the real material
Paste the job description, the role’s top three requirements, and your actual experience in plain text. Everything the assistant asks you will be grounded in that.
2Ask for questions in rounds
Start with: “Give me the eight questions I am most likely to be asked, hardest last.” Then ask for four more you would not expect.
3Answer out loud, then get attacked
Type or speak your answer, then ask: “Ask me a harder follow-up about this. If any part is vague, unsupported or sounds generic, tell me exactly which part and why.”
4Repair and repeat
Fix only the specific weak point, then answer the question again from scratch. Three cycles is usually enough.
Use AI for company research, then verify
Research is where AI saves the most time, and where it is most likely to confabulate. Models will happily invent funding rounds, product names and customer counts.
- 1Use AI to generate the questions you should be asking, not to answer them.
- 2Read the company’s own site, recent announcements and job postings directly.
- 3Check any specific claim — headcount, funding, product — against a primary source before you repeat it in an interview.
- 4Prepare two real questions about the team or the role, based on what you actually read.
The line not to cross
The temptation is to have AI write you a polished “personal story” that sounds impressive in the abstract. Do not. Interviewers probe for specifics, and a beautiful surface with nothing underneath ends the interview in about ten minutes.
The night before
- Re-read your three strongest STAR stories until you can tell each in ninety seconds.
- Check who you are meeting and what their role is.
- Prepare two questions to ask them. Always two, even if you run out of time.
- Re-read your application so your answers match it.
- Stop rehearsing at least an hour before. Sleep is worth more than one more practice answer.