Businesswomen talking in the office
Looking to get hired? AI can help in ways you might not expect.
A TikTok video by a user named Hanna Goefft shows how easy it is to use AI to help you prepare for an interview. It’s a novel idea and actually seems to work.
In the clip, Goefft starts off by showing a real job description and does a quick copy-paste. She says it can work for any job, although it made me wonder what would happen if the job was more technical — say, for a hardcore web developer.
She then pasted the job description into ChatGPT and instructed the AI app to generate questions based on the job qualifications.
Seconds later, we see a series of questions pop up that could help someone prepare for an interview. Many of them looked like they were perfect examples of real questions.
I decided to try this myself with a few job descriptions, including one for a marketing role and one for an editor. After finding one on a Google listing, I copied the text into the bot interface and asked ChatGPT to generate the interview questions.
Right away, the bot wrote up 20 questions including a few that seemed like they would actually come up in an interview. One was about website experience: “Have you worked with website agencies to develop and maintain effective websites, e-commerce storefronts, campaigns, and content?”
Goefft explained how target keywords can help as well. The idea is that the bot can generate important keywords from the job description, and then when you reply to the questions, choosing those words can help you prepare.
In my tests, I answered a few of the questions using the keywords the bot provided. To be honest, I sounded a bit like a chatbot myself. I chose words like “search engine optimization” to show I could answer adequately, but felt a bit staged.
I decided to skip using the keywords and just answered in a more natural way and it seemed to work better.
Will it help you actually land a new job?
I think it could. Practicing for an interview is a smart idea, and the generated questions match up perfectly with the job. Too often, when people interview for jobs, they focus on their own experience and interests as opposed to answering the way the interviewer might expect. The AI-generated questions can help you maintain focus specifically on what the job entails.
Although the keywords didn’t help me as much (e.g., it seemed like I was trying to optimize my replies for a search engine not for an interview), I could see how they could help. Dropping in relevant words does show expertise.
Someday, bots might conduct interviews instead of humans. That’s likely already happening. Hopefully, this TokTok hack helps people land a job more than it turns them into robots.
