My Three Favorite Ways to Use AI The Right Way for Job Interview Prep

Two people can walk into the same job interview with the same resume and get wildly different results. The difference usually is not charisma or luck. It is whether you practiced the right way and built a clear strategy around what the hiring manager actually needs. I lay out a simple, repeatable approach to AI interview prep that helps you show up calm, specific, and ready to communicate your value without sounding robotic.

First, I explain how to use AI to decode any job description into the top skills and competencies you must prove, then how to push beyond the obvious with follow-up prompts about first 90 days challenges and what success looks like. That context makes your stories sharper, your examples more relevant, and your interview preparation far less random. You stop guessing and start aiming.

Then we get practical with my favorite move: using AI as a mock interviewer. You practice behavioral interview questions out loud, get blunt feedback, and tighten your “tell me about yourself” until it lands clean. I also flag a common trap: letting AI generate polished answers you memorize. Instead, you build muscle memory, keep your voice, and use AI to stress test your thinking.

We finish with the part most candidates waste, the end-of-interview questions. I walk through the SHOW method so you can bring real research, share an opinion, invite theirs, and keep the conversation going in a way that feels natural and memorable. If you want to prepare smarter for your next interview, listen now, share this with a friend, and subscribe, rate, and review so more job seekers can find it.

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Transcript

Prepared Vs Prepared Right

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Welcome to the Equipped Interview Podcast, where we turn confusion into confidence. I'm your host, Josh. I've learned an important truth. The best candidates don't just prepare, they prepare the right way. I'm all about helping you do exactly that. Let's get you equipped. Okay, let me paint a picture for you here. Two candidates, same job, same qualifications on paper, right? Candidate one, let's call her Maya, spends the night before her interview, scrolling through the company's About Us page, rereading the job description for the third or tenth time, and hoping she can think of a good example on the spot. She walks in prepared-ish. She knows her resume. She's got a couple stories ready, and honestly, she she does fine. She does okay. Candidate two. Let's call him Marcus. He also spends time the night before. But he does something a little different. He uses an AI tool to run a mock interview, let's say. He pastes in the job description and asks the AI to quiz him on the top behavioral questions a hiring manager might ask for his specific role. He gets feedback on his answers, he refines his tell me about yourself twice until it's tight, confident, and hits all three skills the hiring manager is looking for. He walks in with a plan, not just a hope. But hey, both candidates are nervous, both are qualified, but only one of them has actually practiced out loud with feedback more than once. Who do you think gets the offer? Here's the thing. I've been talking for years about the difference between being prepared and being prepared the right way. And right now, AI might be the single biggest unlock most job seekers aren't taking advantage of. We're not talking about having AI write answers for you, obviously. That's not your move, and I'll explain why, if it's not obvious in a minute. We're talking about using AI as a tool to get sharper, faster, more confident before you ever walk into that room. Most people don't know how to use it right. Today, hopefully, I'm going to change that for you. I've got my three favorite favorite. I've got my three favorite ways, so let's get into it. But first, a quick pause, real quick. Something big is coming to equippedinterview.com, a suite of AI-powered tools built specifically for job seekers. Mock interviews, answer coaching, personalized prep plans, a tool where you can interact with the ebook of mine if you have it, and more. So I'll have details coming soon, so stay tuned. Keep an eye on equippedinterview.com. But in the meantime, if you need something now, remember confidence isn't just luck, it's preparation. So if you want a shortcut to prepare smarter, grab my equipped essentials ebook at equippedinterview.com forward slash books. Alright, let's jump back in. Okay, three ways. Let's go one by one. Way number one that I liked to use AI. First, use AI to decode the job description and build your strategy. Okay? Sounds a little little vague maybe, but let's dive in. Here's something I say all the time on this podcast. Before you prep a single answer, you need to know the top three to five skills the hiring manager is looking for. Because if you don't know what they need, you're just guessing. And guessing is not a strategy. Normally, figuring this out takes some real work. You've got to read between the lines sometimes on the job description, maybe research the company, do some digging on LinkedIn. It's doable, right? But most people either rush through it or skip it entirely. AI makes this dramatically faster for you. Here's what I want you to try. Take the full job description, copy the whole thing, and paste it into any AI tool. Then ask it something like based on this job description, what are the top five skills or competencies this hiring manager is most likely looking for? And what are the two or three things I should make sure to highlight in my interview? So what comes back to you is going to give you a clear, organized, at least a starting point, a short list of the skills you need to anchor to throughout your entire prep and in your entire interview. But don't stop there. Focus on additional follow-ups. You know, make it work for you. Follow up by asking, what are the most common challenges someone in this role would face in the first 90 days? Or, I don't know, what does success typically look like in a role like this over the first week, six weeks, year, whatever it is. Now you've got some context around those skills and what someone is most likely looking for as the hiring manager. You understand not just what the job is, but what the hiring manager is actually worried about or thinking about. And that's awesome because you can use that to shape your answers, your stories, and especially your questions at the end of the interview. And that's the exactly the kind of research I talk about when I talk about my show method. If you've if you remember that or have been listening long enough, you know about that, the SHOW, where you use what you've learned over the course of period of time, you know, even during your prep alone, but what you've learned to have a real, intelligent conversation with the hiring manager instead of just asking generic questions. I want you to stand out always, and this is a a method that you can do that to kind of act as a trigger in your brain as you're going through it. One important note here: treat what AI gives you as a starting point, not gospel. Use your own judgment, obviously. You know things about the company and the role that maybe AI doesn't, but as a first pass to build strategy, it's certainly incredibly useful. So, bottom line for this first of my three favorite ways to use AI, use AI to quickly decode the job description, identify the top skills you need to highlight, and build context that makes you sound like you've already been thinking like someone in the role. All right, way number two, use AI as your mock interviewer. So you have the skills now. Now let's put it into practice and actually practice and find a new way to do that. This one's probably my personal favorite. I think it's the most underused thing you know we can do right now as we seek new jobs and practice and prep for interviews. I've always said, and I'll keep saying it until I lose my voice, that the first time you answer an interview question out loud cannot be in front of the hiring manager. You have to practice out loud multiple times. Most people know this, right? Most people don't do it though. Why? Well, time consuming, it's awkward, it can be awkward to practice by yourself, or you don't have a place to do it, find a place. But most of us, we don't have a coach, a friend, someone who is a hiring manager, or has been, or someone willing to run us through a full mock interview on a Tuesday night as we prep for these things. Either someone we don't have someone or just someone who's not skilled in this area. So enter AI, whatever it is for you. ChatGPT, Claude, something. Here's what you do. Prompt it. I'm preparing for a job interview for fill in the role at fill in the company or the industry. I want you to act as the high-mary manager and ask me behavioral interview questions one at a time. After I answer each one, give me honest feedback on what was wrong, what was missing, how I could improve, what was right, and what I should keep doing. Okay, that's a great starting point. You can expand on that, etc., right? You get the gist, but it's a great starting prompt. Then actually answer it, right? Answer the question out loud, ideally, or if you're in a place where you can't do it, at least bare minimum, get a question and type it out. You know, type it out if that's if that's where you're at. But ideally that's it's out loud, and that's gonna give you the biggest bang for your buck. And then read the feedback. Read through it multiple times. This is a game changer for a few reasons. I mean, first, it forces you to actually form an answer, not just think about kind of conceptually the concept of an answer, but legitimate answer, start to finish. There's just a massive difference between having a story in your head and being able to deliver it clearly under pressure. So uh AI is a tool that helps you get into that practice mode without the awkwardness of asking your roommate or family member to pretend to being your the hiring manager for you. Uh, second though, the feedback is genuinely useful, right? It's actually helpful not just for the the actual practice itself, but the answers you're going to get. I mean, ask it specifically did my answer clearly demonstrate a skill? Which one? Did I connect the dots for the hiring manager, or did I leave them to figure it out? That last question, I talk about that a lot, one of my core frameworks around connecting the dots. Don't assume that the hiring manager or the person interviewing you is going to do that for you. AI can actually help you audit your own answers against that, essentially. So, third, you can do this as many times as you want, right? You're run through your top five behavioral examples, practice your tell me about yourself two times, three times, whatever, until it's under two and a half minutes, like we talk about, and hits everything that you need to hit. There's no judgment, no time pressure. Now, here's a caution I want to flag, and this is important. Do not use AI to generate your answers and then just memorize them word for word. That's not what I recommend. That's not a good move. I can guarantee you a memorized AI written answer sounds like that. It sounds memorized and AI written. So someone's gonna notice that, especially if you know if it's uh egregious, but by and large they'll probably notice. So it'll it'll come across just kind of flat, generic, not really you, especially if you're just trying to memorize. I don't even recommend that to memorize your own answers typically, uh, whether it's you writing it or AI, it's just you gotta have some bullet points, talking points, and and sound natural as you're going through an answer. So the goal is to use AI to really just sharpen your own answers, not just swap them out and replace them. So you bring the stories, you know your experience. I always say you know you better than anyone else knows you. So you bring all that, the personality, AI will just help you kind of stress test and refine those answers and give you things to think about you might not have been thinking about. So to sum up, my second favorite, well, I said it was my favorite, but my second of the three favorites, the second one, uh the second way, use AI as a mock interviewer to practice out loud, get honest feedback on your answers, and to show up on interview day with hopefully muscle memory instead of just memorization and nerves. So, way number three, third and final way to use AI. This one I would say use AI to prepare smarter questions for the end of the interview. So I kind of alluded to that a little bit earlier, but excuse me, we're gonna dive in a little bit more now. If you've listened to this podcast for any amount of time, you know I feel very strongly about this portion of the interview. So you have the beginning of the interview, right? Where you tell me about yourself, the pleasantries, your first impression. Very important too. Middle of the interview, it's the bulk of it, it's kind of that messy middle where you don't exactly know what to expect, but you have to go in with a plan, a strategy, and you got to make sure that you're telling the stories and the narrative that you want to tell, not just be reactive. So you go in with the plan, right? That's the biggest part of the interview in terms of time, anyway. But this last, this this end of the interview is not just filler time when they say, All right, what questions do you have for us? That that's not filler time, it's your last impression, right? It's the end of the interview. Most candidates waste it completely. So the show method that I have that I talked about earlier, it's my framework for transforming the do you have any questions moment into one of the more memorable, hopefully, parts of the interview. Just as a quick recap, if you haven't, if you're new here, but the S stands for share. Share something that you've researched, you've learned about the industry, the job, the company, the direction that the department's going, what have you. An article, a video, podcast, whatever. Something like that. Something you've learned and researched. The H for the word show is have an opinion. Have an opinion on it. You gotta now comment on that thing that you learned that you're aware about. O, S-H-O-W, the O is opinion, but get theirs this time. So that's where the question comes in in this method, right? If they say, hey, do you have any questions for us at the end of the interview? Yes, but you're gonna use this method instead to tee up a conversation back and forth because that's more memorable, and it gets them to feel more like you're already in the role, but you still have to actually ask a question in there. So that's this O part. So you've shared something that you've learned, you have an opinion on it, you give your take. Now you ask them, get their opinion on it. That's where the question comes in to get them talking. And the W is writing it down and wondering. W and W write and wonder. So that's about staying curious, keeping the conversation going, staying actively engaged, whether you're virtual or in person in an interview, jotting something down shows active engagement. And then the wonder part is the curiosity. So if they give an opinion, don't let it just die on the vine and be flat. Ask a follow-up question. Be curious. So say, oh, really? Oh, that's interesting. Because I wonder if this little nuance of it changed, would you still feel the same way? Or I wonder about this element of it. Could you expand on that? The wonder is just kind of a mental mental trigger to be curious and keep the conversation going. So how does this all play out now? The whole thing starts with research. You have to start with that S, the share something that you learned, right? What do you research? You need to find something interesting, relevant, and specific, maybe timely, to bring up. Could be something in the news, could be something you learned about the department if it's internal, but something that shows you've been paying attention, you can think critically, and you're thinking ahead. So AI is perfect for this, right? Just throw it in there. Like here's here's how I'd use it. Ask something like, I'm interviewing for fill-in-the-blank role at a company in fill-in-the-blank industry. What are the most important trends, challenges, or shifts happening in this space right now that I should be aware of? So read what it gives you and then dig deeper on the ones that sound interesting to you. And you actually have a wants to have a conversation with the hiring manager about. Maybe follow up with, this is in AI now, follow up with something like, how might this trend impact the day-to-day priorities of someone going for this role or someone in this role? Now you have something real to bring to the table. It's not just a basic question like what's the job like or what are the challenges? It's a conversation starter that shows you're already thinking about the role, the industry, and the company's future. So you can use AI to help you know frame up that show question, right? Try something like this, this prompt. I want to bring up, fill-in-the-blank topic at the end of my interview and share my opinion on it. Can you help me phrase a question that invites the interviewer's perspective without being confrontational or presumptuous? Something like that, if you're like worried about that given the nature of the question you might bring up. So see what it says. Make it your own, right? You know your style. You know, it needs to match how you would actually talk to somebody. But that kind of preparation is what separates the candidate who ends the interview with, so what does a typical day look like? From the one who walks out of the room having had a genuine, memorable conversation with the high-reman manager. So bottom line for this third of my three favorite ways: use AI to service relevant trends and intelligent talking points, then use the show method to turn them into a real conversation at the end of your interview. So quick recap. Three ways real fast. One, decode the job description, use AI to identify the top skills the hiring manager is looking for and build your strategy around them. Two, run mock interviews, practice your answers, get feedback, and build that muscle memory you need to stay calm and clear when it counts. Three, build smarter end-of-interview questions. Use AI to research, then show, right? The show method, then show them the real you by turning that research into a conversation that you you learn about, that leaves a lasting impression. None of this obviously replaces your prep. It can't do it all for you, right? This is a tool in your tool belt. It doesn't replace your stories, your actual experience, your personality. What it does is make your prep faster, sharper, and more intentional along the way. And intentional preparation is everything we talk about here. Alright, so let's make this practical before we wrap up. I want to give you a challenge this week. And yes, I want you to actually do it. Not just file it away. Pick one of these three ways that we just went over and recapped. Pick one of these three ways and actually try it before your next interview. Or even if you don't have an interview scheduled yet, do it anyway. Because remember, you should always be prepping for an interview. You should always be ready. You never know when the opportunity is going to come up. You really don't. So here's your challenge. Grab a job description for a role you're interested in, even if you're not interviewing for it yet. Something you might go after one day. Could be something you're actively applying for, right? Or just a role that represents where you want to be in the next year or two, whatever. Paste it into an AI tool and do two things with it. First, ask it to identify the top five skills the higher manager is likely looking for, and just write them down, right? You have it now. Second, ask it to run you through three behavioral interview questions based on that role. Answer them. Out loud if you can, then ask the AI for feedback. That's it. That's the challenge. It'll take you maybe 20-30 minutes, but I promise you, you'll learn something about how you come across that you maybe didn't realize before. Or at least maybe even differently, it'll give you confidence that some of the things you were thinking about are the right path to go down. And maybe just you have some tweaks around the edges. So if you do this, I definitely want to hear about it. Definitely shoot me an email. I'd like to hear a little bit about like, hey, what did maybe what did it flag that surprised you? What did you realize you needed to work on? I don't know, something, something that stands out to you. Shoot me a message. You know my email, Josh at equippedinterview.com. You can check it out there. You can always use the contact me on the website at equippedinterview.com. But the easiest way is shoot me an email. I may even feature your story in a future episode. Hey, before you head out, if this episode gave you a few ideas or a boost of confidence, share it with someone who's getting ready for their next interview. And if you want to go deeper, check out my ebook Equipped Essentials at equippedinterview.com. It's full of the same strategies we talk about here, plus a bonus prep worksheet you can use right away. Thanks for joining me on the Equipped Interview Podcast. If this helped you, drop a review, share it with a friend, and hit follow so you never miss an episode. Go into your next interview with confidence, because you're not just prepared, you're equipped.