Using AI to prepare for an IT job interview

Should candidates for IT jobs use AI to prepare for job interviews? And if so, how?

Paul Bingham, SVP and executive dean at WGU School of Technology, told IT Brew that AI can help when preparing for questions or specific types of interviews.

“It allows an applicant to really hone what their pitch is going to be and essentially do a dress rehearsal as many times as they want for free, which is absolutely appropriate and super helpful,” Bingham said.

But potential candidates should be careful that their use doesn’t lead to them misrepresenting themselves in interviews.

Martyn Redstone, head of responsible AI at Warden AI and a recruitment practitioner, told IT Brew that candidates shouldn’t allow AI to help falsify a technical competency: “If you come along to a job and you get through a technical interview process by using AI to produce a level of competency that isn’t there, you will get found out very quickly when you’re on the job.”

Practice makes perfect? During a practice question-and-answer session, Redstone said the AI could analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the candidate’s responses. For example, he said, when a candidate describes a project they worked on or a situation they handled, a chatbot could mention that an interviewee didn’t mention the project’s outcome.

“That’s really important because we want to see that not only do you understand the situation and what needs to be done, but you could actually demonstrate that it was an effective solution to that problem,” Redstone said.

Technical details For years, candidates for IT and technical jobs, particularly software development, have turned to websites like LeetCode that offer practice questions, sample tests, and more. In theory, AI can provide candidates with a more tailored version of these websites’ offerings.

There’s always the potential for a chatbot to hallucinate or provide the wrong answer to a question. Redstone said that using the tech in place of testing websites isn’t without risks, adding that a candidate’s ability to troubleshoot an AI’s mistakes is also a “litmus test” for finding hallucinations in code or errors in what AI produces.

“It’s your job as a technical professional to be able to point out those potential errors, and actually find the errors, and potentially coach AI through an iteration process to make the code better,” Redstone said. “Technical candidates, technical job-seekers, technical professionals, they’re very much becoming the orchestrators of AI authoring the code, but also the editors of that code, as well.”

TL;DR. Experts agree that AI, when used correctly, can help IT professionals prepare for interviews.

• Double-check the results that an AI produced, Redstone said, by continuing to question the model and examining the reasoning behind its answer.
• Force yourself to “actually articulate answers” to questions that you may be asked in an interview, whether after prompting questions from an LLM or interacting with a video-generated interviewing exercise, Bingham said.
• Since organizations are looking for IT professionals who can effectively and responsibly use AI to augment productivity, Redstone said that using AI in an interviewing context could become “part of your story” around how one takes advantage of AI.