How artificial intelligence can help you find your next job
When preparing for a job interview, the first place I go is Google. After all, Google’s search engine is a launching pad to learn more about your potential company, answer potential questions, and leave feeling well-informed and prepared. Today, Google is stepping up its interview game even further by implementing an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered interviewing tool. Before calling your friends for interview advice, check out Google's solution.
Anyone can use Google's AI to practice interviewing
This piece of artificial intelligence is called "Interview Warmup", a simple yet powerful programme that you can use to practice common interview questions for different professions. Google currently offers six different job types, including Data Analytics, E-Commerce, IT Support, Project Management, UX Design, and General (in case the previous five don't match your job). Whichever programme you choose, the core experience is the same: an AI-powered interview coach helps you answer questions as efficiently as possible.
When you first choose a career to interview for, you'll be greeted with a series of five common interview questions for that role. Using your voice or keyboard, you can answer these questions any way you want. The point here is that when you're done, Interview Warmup's artificial intelligence will analyse your answers and highlight aspects of your answers in three key areas: job-related terms, most-used words, and talking points.
How Google's AI helps you improve your interviewing skills
For job-related terms, the Interview Warmup distinguishes any words you used in your answer that it deems applicable to the job you're interviewing for. For example, when I was preparing for a "general" position, it highlighted my use of the word "focus". You can also click the "See all terms" button to see a dictionary of job-related terms the program searches for. If any of them seem particularly relevant to the role you're trying to achieve, keep them in mind.
Another useful section is the most used words, highlighting terms you use frequently. Interview Warmup shows that repetitive words are not necessarily a bad thing, especially if they are work-related; however, you should check to see if you're using the same unnecessary word over and over again.
Finally, we have the talking points: Interview Warmup analyses your answers for anything that seems relevant to your experience, skills, lessons learned, goals or interests. In my answer, the program only detected one sentence that applies to the lessons learned, so I guess I need to work on my talking points. For each category, you can see examples of the types of talking points you can include in your response. For experience, you can mention previous work experience or education, while for goals, you can talk about what success means to you.
You can review this information at the end of each answer and edit your answer accordingly. However, once you've gone through all five questions, you'll be able to review all of your answers at once and see the entire "interview" from a broader perspective. Don't be afraid to relive that experience. While the program only gives you five questions at a time, it has so much more in the bank:
• Data analysis: 66 questions
• E-commerce: 49 questions
• IT support: 41 questions
• Project management: 42 questions
• UX Design: 50 questions
• General: 14 questions
Interviewing for a job is tough: you need to summarise your experience and skills and show how you can apply them to new challenges in this potential role. The best thing you can do to prepare for an interview is practice, and the Interview Warmup is a great place to start. Getting in the habit of talking about yourself or answering these types of questions out loud can greatly improve your abilities and confidence. If you are looking for a new job or curious about how you would work under pressure, give this app a try.