Artificial intelligence won’t pass the interview for you. But it can help you prepare brilliantly for the meeting with a recruiter or hiring manager.
In this note, a couple of lifehacks for doing it well.
Play the recruiter’s role
Open your favorite LLM (Claude, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, or Gemini) and write this prompt:
Prompt 1
(attach 2 PDFs — your resume and the job description)
You are a recruiting expert who advises HR managers on hiring. Here is a job description and the resume of a candidate for this role. Please help me, as the recruiter, prepare to interview this candidate.
1. Assess how well the resume matches the job.
2. Highlight the strengths and weaknesses, the pros and cons.
3. Draft a list of questions I should ask the candidate in the interview.
4. Point out what to watch for in the candidate's answers.
5. Suggest 2 AI-related questions I should ask, and what to look for in the answers.After that, take the list of questions and answer each one out loud, in turn. Send your answers back to the LLM, saying which question you were answering, and ask it to point out the strong and weak spots. Better to mess up 10 times with an AI playing HR than to mess up in the real interview.
By the way, the odds go up every day that the recruiter will prep for the interview with you the same way — using an LLM. “To get past the recruiter, think like the recruiter” takes on a whole new meaning.
Rehearse “Tell me about yourself”
After the small talk, “Tell me about yourself” is the most important question. The answer creates the first impression of you and lays the foundation for the entire interview.
Let’s ask AI to prep us:
Prompt 2
(attach 2 PDFs — your resume and the job description)
You are a career consultant and a storytelling expert.
Here is the job description and my resume. I'm preparing for an interview.
Please offer me some options for answering "Tell me about yourself" for this role. My story should be short, but clear from a storytelling standpoint. It should make it obvious that, having walked my whole professional path, I've become the ideal candidate for this role at this company.
Offer 3 different versions of the story and explain the difference between them.A tip for PRO members: also attach info about the company as a PDF. Yes, you’ll need to gather that yourself. Pay attention to the company’s values, and to anything on their site that strikes you as important.
The best “about yourself” shows the path you walked, how you grew, and why right now you’re the perfect fit for the challenges of the new role.
After the interview
An interview is stressful. And under stress we can’t always reflect well on what just happened. No problem. We have the recording. We do have it, right? You are recording your interviews, aren’t you? So here’s the move. Load the recording (or the transcript, but the recording is better) into an LLM and ask it to find 10 mistakes and 10 strong moments.
Prompt 3
You are a career consultant and an expert in verbal communication. I've attached a recording of an interview I did for the role of {role} at {company}. Please highlight 10 strengths and 10 weaknesses of my interview. What can I improve next time? And be sure to praise me at the end.This way, even if you didn’t do great the first time, your interviews will get more effective over time. Besides, it’s nice to be praised. Even if it’s only by an LLM.