Interviews are the hardest part of the job search process. But AI can help you prepare — and get you one step closer to landing the job.
I’m a former leader of LinkedIn’s Education Team and was an OpenAI partner on the ChatGPT launch during my time at Khan Academy. These days, I help students and career coaches tap into the power of platforms like LinkedIn and tools like ChatGPT. I partner with top universities like Harvard, Stanford, and NYU, and I help job seekers land offers at companies including Google, Apple, Amazon, and McKinsey.
To understand how I’ve used new artificial intelligence tools to help candidates get jobs with some of the world’s most selective employers, it helps to start not with the AI algorithm, but the human one.
To get hired, show 2 key traits in an interview
We’ve focused so much attention recently on the black box of Large Language Models. I’m still much more interested in the human decision-making process.
When it comes to forming first impressions — the essence of interviews — our brains tend to focus on two key criteria:
- Competence: Can you do the job?
- Warmth: Would I want to work with you?
It’s not enough to prepare for an interview the same way you’d cram for a test, memorizing answers to regurgitate on demand. Because your interviewer is a human and not a Scantron machine, you’ll need to think about what you say, how you come across, and how you react and adapt in the moment.
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You can use AI to prepare to project both competence and warmth in your next interview. Here’s how.
Prep with AI to project competence
As great as your accomplishments may be, if you share them in a haphazard manner, your interviewer will assume that you’re haphazard. They won’t see you as the organized, logical, and competent professional they’re looking for.
Behavioral interview questions typically start with telltale phrases like, “Tell me about a time …” or “Describe an experience when ….” The single best framework you can use to formulate compelling answers is the STAR method. You’ll lay out the:
- Situation: What was the context for your experience?
- Task: What was your specific responsibility and goal in the situation?
- Action: What steps did you take?
- Result: What was the impact of your work? What did you learn?
It’s Human Storytelling 101. Now that you know it, you’ll recognize it everywhere. Take the movie “Star Wars” for instance:
- Situation: Imagine a galaxy far, far away, where Darth Vader is going around blowing up planets.
- Task: He must be stopped.
- Action: Young Luke Skywalker heroically takes out the Death Star.
- Result: Peace and prosperity are restored!
It can take a lifetime to master storytelling. But you can use ChatGPT to help you practice shaping and perfecting your STAR answers.
Start by generating a list of likely interview questions with a prompt like: “What are the 10 most likely interview questions for this job description: [paste job description here].”
Take any of the behavioral questions on the list and ask ChatGPT to generate a sample answer. You can use this prompt: “Generate a STAR answer for #X based on my resume: [paste in resume here].”
The point is not to memorize and regurgitate the exact answer ChatGPT gives you. It’s to hone your ability to give a complete, succinct, and powerful response using the STAR method.
You’ll want to review the answer for accuracy, since AI tools tend to hallucinate, and for style, so that you sound like you, not a robot.
Remember too that you have plenty of stories and examples to draw on that aren’t necessarily on your resume. And you are better at identifying the most relevant details and analyzing the impact of your specific experiences than AI.
Prep with AI to project warmth
Interviewers get the sense they’d want to work with us when we make eye contact, smile, speak with the right tone of voice, and use other pro-social gestures and expressions. And yet so many of us fail to deliver on these warmth-driving behaviors in the crucible of the interview room.
I suspect that much of the blame lies in the fact that humans are terrible at multitasking. When we have to juggle listening, thinking, and speaking — all at the same time — we’re bound to forget these best practices.
To solve this challenge, we can look to pro athletes. They face a multitasking struggle as they try to assess the competition, execute their desired play, and improvise all at the same time. There’s no mental capacity left to explicitly remember how to shoot a basketball or throw a football. Which is why they automate these skills ahead of time through a massive amount of practice.
You can similarly get a massive amount of interview practice — even without a team of coaches and trainers. LinkedIn offers a free, AI-powered interview prep tool I recommend for the task. You can:
- Choose the questions you want to practice. There are options for both general interview questions, like the iconic “Tell me about yourself,” and for more specific ones, like “How do you communicate a complex concept as a data analyst?”
- Record yourself answering the question. Pro athletes draw on this kind of taped review as a learning tool all the time.
- Get automatic feedback. LinkedIn’s AI offers feedback on all sorts of things that contribute to your warmth, including your pace and pitch variation.
Through repetition and feedback on the behaviors you need to fine-tune, these warmth-building techniques can become muscle memory. That way, they’ll be there when you need them — and you can focus on having a great conversation with your prospective boss or teammate.
Jeremy Schifeling is the founder of The Job Insiders, which provides career technology training for hundreds of top universities and business schools. He is also the author of “Career Coach GPT: The Complete Guide to ChatGPT Resume, Cover Letter, Interview, and Job Search Success″ and shares his latest career and AI hacks on LinkedIn.
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