Last December I've just finished two recruitment rounds for Senior backend positions that I had applied. I got an offer in both cases. Unfortunately I had to decline one of them, and I can tell you it was a really hard decision, because both were presenting me interesting challenges (engineeringly speaking).
In both rounds I had used ChatGPT for the prep weeks, alone in my apartment, and not at all on the live calls. The reason for that split is the rest of this post.
ChatGPT does not hear the interviewer through the microphone. It waits for typing. On a Discord mock the week before that Amazon round, a guy had a stopwatch out. Average gap from end of question to start of my answer was twenty two seconds. Twenty two. Around the forty five minute mark he said I looked like I was getting instructions from another room. He was right.
Then there is screen share. Zoom shows the browser frame, Teams shows it, Meet shows it. HackerRank already has its own visual furniture on the page, CoderPad has it. I tried the second desktop alt tab routine exactly once and the loop was hide, type, wait, read, look back at the camera, act normal. Acting normal is hard when you can see your own face in the gallery view.
So in February I switched to InterviewMan for the live part. It listens through the microphone, so no retyping. The overlay arrived in two to three seconds on my machine. Nothing in a browser tab so nothing in the share. Stealth was in the price, not sold separately like the other tools kept doing. Twelve a month on annual, one forty four for a year, 57,000 users on the public counter, 4.8 stars from 257 reviews.
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Try InterviewMan FreeThe other tools were each broken for me in their own way. Final Round AI was one forty eight a month and I clocked four to five seconds before suggestions arrived, which is enough lag that you feel it in your chest while you wait. Cluely showed twenty until you noticed that stealth was a seventy five dollar add on. Business Insider tested Cluely at five to ten seconds of lag, which lined up with what I got.
I am sure there are a lot of other opinions about using AI around interviews. My focus on this post was mainly the software engineer field, on real rounds, not on hypothetical ones. The only suggestion I have on the tool side is: be honest about which step you are on. Don't pretend a textbox in a browser is going to keep up with a real person on a call.
A recruitment process is time consuming for a candidate. I spent many hours preparing, and I don't have any problem assuming that. Probably there are people who don't need any kind of preparation. Not me. It worked for me. It doesn't mean it will work for you.
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