How do you use AI to prepare for a job interview?

Most interview advice says the same thing: practise out loud, with someone who asks real questions and tells you honestly how you did. The trouble is finding that someone the night before. ChatGPT can fill the role reasonably well if you set it up properly. Without setup it produces a generic list of "tell me about yourself" questions. With the right context it becomes a patient interviewer who has read the posting, asks one question at a time, pushes back when your answer is vague, and explains what to improve.

The setup follows the same three moves A Beginner's Guide to ChatGPT recommends for any important prompt: give it a role, give it context about you and the task, and say exactly what output you expect. Then improve the session round by round.

Before you start: what to share

You'll get better questions if you paste the actual job posting and a few lines about your background. You don't need to paste your full résumé with your address and phone number; a summary of roles, years and two or three achievements is enough. If you'd rather your session not be used to train OpenAI's models, you can turn off chat history in ChatGPT's settings first. Conversations started that way don't appear in your sidebar, aren't used for training, and are deleted after 30 days.

A worked mock-interview prompt

Here is a full prompt for someone applying to be an office manager at a dental clinic. Replace the bracketed parts with your own.

You are an experienced hiring manager running a 30-minute interview for the job below. Interview me for it.

JOB POSTING:
[paste the full posting]

ABOUT ME:
Six years as administrative coordinator at a physiotherapy clinic. Set up an online booking system that cut phone calls by about a third. Supervised two receptionists. No dental experience.

HOW TO RUN IT:
1. Ask one question at a time and wait for my answer.
2. Mix question types: two about my experience, two behavioural ("Tell me about a time..."), one about a weakness or gap (such as my lack of dental experience), one about the clinic itself.
3. After each answer, give feedback using this rubric, scoring 1 to 5:
   - Relevance: did I answer the question asked?
   - Evidence: did I give a specific example with a result?
   - Structure: situation, action, result, in that order?
   - Length: about one to two minutes when spoken?
   Then name one thing to keep and one thing to change.
4. Then ask one follow-up question a real interviewer might ask about my answer, before moving on.
5. At the end, list my three strongest moments and the two answers I should rework first.

The rubric does most of the work. It turns "that was good!" into something you can act on, and the forced follow-up imitates the moment in a real interview when someone says, "Can you give me a number for that?"

A typical exchange might go like this (illustrative): the interviewer asks how you handled an angry patient; you answer in general terms; the feedback scores Evidence a 2 and asks for one concrete case; the follow-up asks what you would do differently. You try again with a real example, and the score rises. That second attempt is where the learning happens.

Adjusting the session

If the questions are too easy, say so: "Ask the hardest version of these questions, the way a senior panel would." If the feedback is too kind, ask for a stricter interviewer. If you're changing fields, tell it which skills you think transfer and ask it to test whether you can prove them. You can also ask it to switch roles at the end and play a candidate answering the same question, so you can compare approaches, but treat that answer as a sample, not a script.

One caution applies throughout: ChatGPT can state details about the employer or the industry with confidence and still be wrong. Use the company's own website and recent news for facts you plan to mention.

How do you practise without sounding scripted?

Practise ideas, not sentences. After a session, write down your best examples as three or four keywords each ("booking system, a third fewer calls, trained staff in two weeks") rather than full paragraphs. In the interview you'll rebuild the sentence naturally from the keywords, which sounds like thinking rather than reciting.

Speak your answers instead of typing them. Typed answers tend to be tidier than anything you'd say aloud. In the ChatGPT mobile app, voice conversations let you talk to it hands-free and hear its questions spoken; Plus users can switch them on in settings. The transcript is added to the chat afterward, so you can still ask for feedback on what you actually said. Note that voice requires chat history to be on.

Vary the questions. Ask for the same topic phrased three different ways ("Tell me about a conflict," "Describe a disagreement with a manager," "When did a colleague let you down?"). If your answer only works for one phrasing, you've memorized it. If it adapts, you know it.

Finally, end with a real person if you can. A friend reading the AI's questions aloud adds the pauses, interruptions and facial reactions that a chat window can't. The AI gets you prepared; a human run-through gets you comfortable.