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How to use AI to prepare for a job interview

Leave a reply Christopher Roberts

AI isn’t just for big organisations, there are many ways you can use AI tools to help improve your speed and effectiveness at completing everyday tasks too.

One example is to help you prepare for a job interview. It can be difficult to know how to spend your time effectively, so why not enlist the help of an AI chatbot like Bard or ChatGPT to come up with ideas, and better still, get it to do some of the work for you?

Job Spec

Where to start? First, try feeding ChatGPT the job description you’ve been given, and ask it to suggest how you should approach interview prep. Here are a few examples of prompts to try:

Prompt 1

I've got an interview for the attached role, could you give me a 50 word summary of how you'd advise I prepare?

If you can’t upload documents, just copy the text after the prompt instead.

Prompt 2

I need to prep for an interview tomorrow. I only have 20 mins. Please read the background info doc (attached) and give me a list of 5-10 bullet points walking me through how to use the 20 minutes to get ready. The list should take me no more than 3 minutes to read.

The more specific you are on your requirements, the better the answer will be. For example, you could ask for it to answer in a numbered list, or to display it in a table. You could ask for it to be no more than 50 words, or for it to be written so that it could be easily understood by a five year old.

Prompt 3

Help! I've got an interview and I'm really out of practice. Could you read the job spec and give me some pointers on what I should be doing?

Sometimes being more creative with your prompt can lead to a more interesting response from the AI.

An example conversation you could have with ChatGPT

Gather More Info

Don’t forget, if you don’t get the response you want, or you need more information, try using follow-up prompts. For example, if it tells you to check out the organisation’s website, ask it to do the legwork for you, here are some examples of how you can ask that.

Follow-up prompt 1

That's great, thanks. Here's the library's website, could you read it and provide me a consise summary that I can use to quickly get up to speed before my interview? www.example-library.org/about

Follow-up prompt 2

I don't know if they have a website actually. Could you search the web and see if you can find one? If they don't, how would you suggest I research the libary more, in the most time effective way, given I've only got 20 minutes to prepair?

Most AI chatbots are designed to understand natural language, so write back as though you were talking to a person. Good spelling and grammar will help you get a better response the first time around, but don’t be afraid to be creative with the instructions you use.

Caution: be mindful not to share personal information with an AI chatbot. If you wouldn’t tell something to a random stranger, don’t type (or paste) it into a chatbot either.

Questions

In any interview, you’re going to be asked questions, so why not practice with the help of AI?

Question prompt 1

I haven't interviewed for this sort of position before, could you give me a list of 5 questions that you think I could be asked, based on the job description?

Question prompt 2

Let's role play the interview, you ask me a question the interviewer is likely to ask, and I'll type my reply. You can then give me feedback on my answer and tips to improve.

Question prompt 3

Could you provide a list of the 5 most common interview questions and 2-3 bullets on how to answer them?

It’s also a good idea to turn up with a few questions of your own. You can ask the AI to help you format these, or if you’re running short of ideas, ask it to give you some suggestions!

Follow-up questions prompt

What questions could I ask the interviewer to help them see I'm interested in the role and want to work for this organisation?

Sharing Ideas

Do you have any tips on how to use ChatGPT to prepare for an interview? Why not help others too, by sharing your prompt ideas below.

If you’re early to this post and the comments section is a little empty, why not ask Bard to come up with some ideas for you instead!

Asking Bard how to prompt ChatGPT to get ready for a job interview

Ecosia 🌍

Leave a reply Christopher Roberts

What is Ecosia?

Simply put, Ecosia is a search engine that plants trees with its profits.

💻📱 👉 💷💲 👉 🌱🌳

Which Search Engine Does Ecosia Use?

Ecosia is an organisation and search engine in its own right, but its results are powered by Microsoft Bing. Bing itself is carbon neutral and the whole of Microsoft are looking to go green by committing to be carbon negative by 2030.

How Green is Ecosia?

Ecosia recognise the impact the internet has on the environment of our planet. Ecosia runs on renewable energy, meaning your searches aren’t negatively impacting the planet.

“If the internet were a country it would rank #3 in the world in terms of electricity consumption” – Ecosia, 2018

In fact, searching with Ecosia is actually positively impacting the planet, with each search removing CO2 from the atmosphere. How? Because they plant trees with their profits.

As mentioned above, Bing (which powers Ecosia) is carbon neutral, so searching using Ecosia is a win-win from the perspective of your carbon footprint 👣

How Does Ecosia Make Money?

Like Google, Ecosia don’t make money from search results, they make their revenue from the ads that sit alongside the results.

Every time you click on an advert on Ecosia, you contribute to their revenue, which ultimately leads to trees being planted somewhere around the world

Ecosia tree tracker

They have a helpful counter on their search results to show you how many trees you’ve personally contributed towards.

So far they have planted over 100 million trees worldwide, supporting projects in 15 countries.

Why am I Promoting Ecosia?

The reason I wrote this article is because I think Ecosia awesome. They’re an organisation trying really hard to do the right thing and they’re clearly having an impact.

Congrats Ecosia on your success and thank you for what you’re doing for the world 🙏🎉🎊

Ecosia.org 🌍 give it a go 😊

Business advice from industry experts

Leave a reply Christopher Roberts


This is a sponsored post on behalf of Microsoft Cloud who have been working with The Economist. To find out more about sponsored content on Technology Bloggers, please visit our Privacy Policy.

Multinational business magazine The Economist has been working with Microsoft Enterprises business solution, Microsoft Cloud, to create a micro site called Empowering Business.

The site contains some very interesting bite-sized video snippets of business advice from industry experts. In this article I’m going to explore some of the advice that is offered on the site.

Marketing

Professionals in a meetingIn under 30 seconds, the CMO of technology news site Mashable, Stacy Martinet, explains how businesses can control their own publicity channels. Historically, businesses have been dependant upon buying advertising, or relying upon the media to cover their brand. Now however they can control – to a much to a much greater extent – what messages they send out, when they send them and how; through the use of blogging, social media and other forms of new media. This has fundamentally changed the way we (consumers) perceive organisations, and also how they market themselves to us.

On the Empowering Business site, Stacy Martinet also explains what she believes is the biggest mistake made by marketing professionals. She believes that thinking about marketing campaigns in an old fashioned way – running a project for a set period to achieve specific results – is a mistake. She suggests that businesses today should focus on constantly and consistently building and improving their brand(s) on a 24 cycle, rather than focusing on producing a specific return every 3 or 6 months.

Technology

Liz Crawford, CTO of beauty subscription service Birchbox believes that having a good understanding of your market and then being able to use technology to your advantage, to make your organisation more efficient, more effective and more innovative, is the key to being a successful Technology Officer.

Economist Advice Centre screenshot

The Economist in Partnership with Microsoft Cloud – Empowering Business

Leadership

Senior Lecturer at MIT School of Management, Claus Otto Scharmer, suggests that self-leadership is a skill that every leader needs. He states that before you can lead others, you need to be aware of how to lead yourself. If you can assess yourself to enable to you understand what you do and how you could improve, then you can transfer this knowledge into how you can make other people better too.

Human Resources

HR Consultant Jessica Miller-Merrell, from Xceptional HR, explains how company culture is a bottom-up phenomenon. She suggests that many high level mangers believe that they can dictate company culture from the top-down. Jessica states that because the employees are the culture, managers must get employee buy-in for an organisation to change how it operates.