Original: Lenny Rachitsky · 24/02/2026
Summary
The article explores how AI is transforming job interview preparation for candidates, offering insights from over 30 tech professionals on effective AI workflows.Key Insights
“The best candidates had built interconnected systems to arm themselves for every step of the interview process.” — Discussing the unique approaches successful candidates took in preparing for interviews.
“Youre prepping blind, and the post-interview experience is mostly confusing.” — Highlighting the issues with traditional interview preparation methods.
“Participants who landed roles at top companies all closed the feedback loop themselves by building AI tools.” — Describing how successful candidates utilized AI to improve their interview outcomes.
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Full Article
Hey there, Im Lenny. Each week, I answer reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. For more: Lennys Podcast | Lennybot | How I AISubscribe nowP.S. Get a full free year of Lovable, Manus, Replit, Gamma, n8n, Canva, ElevenLabs, Amp, Factory, Devin, Bolt, Wispr Flow, Linear, PostHog, Framer, Railway, Granola, Warp, Perplexity, Magic Patterns, Mobbin, ChatPRD, and Stripe Atlas by becoming an Insider subscriber.One of the most frequent questions Ive seen bubbling up in this community is how AI is impacting the interview process, both for interviewees and for hiring managers.To find out, my Community Research Lead, Noam Segal, interviewed dozens of current and recent job seekers as well as hiring managers to learn how AI is transforming both sides of the hiring process.Part 1 of the results from this research (below) focuses on job seekersand the approach Noam took here is quite extraordinary. When he started analyzing what hed learned, he realized the findings didnt condense into tidy advice or tips. The best candidates had built interconnected systems to arm themselves for every step of the interview process. So Noam did something unique with this post: he encoded the results of his researchthe successful techniques from over 30 participantsinto a Claude Codebased coach you can plug-and-play into your interview process today.Once you give it a go, if you have any feedback or suggestions to make this even more useful to you, feel free to email Noam at noam@lennyrachitsky.com (or ping him in our community Slack, @Noam Segal).Lets get into it.For more from Noam, find him on LinkedIn. You can listen to this post in convenient podcast form: Spotify / Apple / YouTube.Logan hadnt interviewed for a new job in eight years. Hed been at one of the hottest companies in San Francisco, been promoted several times, and never felt the need to look elsewhere. When he decided to pursue a senior architect role at Anthropic, he hit a wall experienced engineers know well: interviewing is its own skill. Day-to-day, Logan solved architecture problems with full context and ample time. Interviews required him to grind LeetCode, whiteboard system designs on the spot, and compress years of expertise into rehearsed stories that fit a rubric.Normally, preparing for senior engineering loops takes months. Logan had two weeks.But Logan got the job. When I asked what mattered most, he pointed to his AI workflows as the primary reason he pulled it off.Hes not alone. I interviewed over 30 tech professionals about how they use AI throughout the interview process. What I found went far beyond polishing resumes. People had built entire systems tailor-made for their own situations: ways to get feedback on what they actually said in interviews, methods to predict questions before walking in, workflows to surface stories they didnt know they had. Each person I spoke with had figured out how to use AI for one or two pieces of the interviewing puzzle.I started pulling together a research report from these conversations, but I quickly realized that most people on the job market are stressed and anxious enough. The best value I could offer wasnt a list of tips but, instead, a way to plug-and-play the hard work these participants have already done. So I changed direction and took every interview AI technique that worked for these participants. Then I added a layer of professional coaching techniques and built a Claude Codebased coach that guides you through how to prepare for job interviews and reach your peak performance.The Interview Coach Im offering in this post will give you the critical feedback and real-world reps you need to confidently walk into your next interview roomand succeed.But first, lets talk about whats broken about interview prep today, and how AI solves it.Interviewing before AIInterview prep hasnt changed much in the past decade. You rehearse your stories, maybe run through a mock interview with a friend, and walk into the real thing, hoping everything clicks. But afterward, were left with nothing more than a vague sense of how it went, guessing at what to fix. Companies dont tell you why they passed. Your friends and mentors dont know what your interviewers were looking for. Youre prepping blind, and the post-interview experience is mostly confusing. Theres simply no usable feedback loop in the interview process.Of the issues that participants raised in my conversations, three stood out (and all stem from a lack of feedback):The impostor spiral. Lindsey, a senior PM whod been at the same company for 10 years, sent out applications and heard nothing. I started having creeping impostor syndrome, she told me. Am I actually a good PM? Whats going on? Without feedback, you cant tell if its your resume, your approach, your skills, or just bad luck.The blind grind. Charles spent hours tailoring each resume, hoping to highlight the right experiences. Joan researched companies thoroughly but had no way to know if she was focusing on what interviewers actually cared about. Neither had any signal that their effort was pointed in the right direction.The practice gap. You cant get better at something you only do once every few years. And the common adviceto interview at companies you dont care about to get your reps inis bad for everyone.How the most successful candidates used AI to close the feedback loopParticipants who landed roles at top companies all closed the feedback loop themselves by building AI tools.Greg fed his interview transcripts to Claude, trained it on best practices, and got line-by-line feedback on answers he thought went well but didnt. Ella built a workflow where shed paste a job description alongside her resume and have ChatGPT surface the exact gaps a hiring manager would flag and then help her close them before the review. Sean stopped guessing which experiences to highlight. Hed simulate the interview beforehand, test which stories landed, and refine them before the real thing.Some participants systems overlapped; some didnt. All took real work to build. The problem: assembling those puzzle pieces for yourself would take weeks, and turning them into a successful system is a challenge most people cant or wont take on.The tool youll find below pulls all that research together into an AI job interview coach that also leverages best-practice coaching techniquesself-reflection before feedback, powerful questions over prescriptions, co-creation over telling.Until now, this level of coaching was reserved for those of us who could afford $300-an-hour career coaches. But even a great coach has limits: they cant analyze a full interview transcript in minutes, track your weak spots across every session, or be there at 11 p.m. when youre anxious about tomorrow. AI has no such limits, and its essentially free.An AI job interview coach:Is always on. An AI coach is free, instant, and omnipresent, whenever you need it.Remembers everything. AI tracks your patterns across sessions, from your weak spots to your standout strengths.Keeps it real. You can feed call transcripts of your interviews and get feedback on what you said, rather than what you think you said.So lets get you set up with an AI interview coach and help you land your next role.The AI Interview Coach: a free tool to put all this into practiceThe Interview Coach is a Claude Code project: a set of instruction files that turn Claude into a rigorous interview coach. You run it by opening the project folder, and it takes over from there.The coach handles everything that the participants I interviewed were doing (and much more):Scores your interview responses and tells you exactly what to fix, based on what you said, not what you think you saidRuns a quick company research brief (culture, interview style, and whether the role is a fit) before you even have an interview scheduledGenerates company-specific prep with predicted questions, story mapping against your story bank, interview format guidance, and likely concerns about your backgroundRuns full mock interviews (4-6 questions, no feedback until the end) and targeted drills that push back, interrupt you, and force you to think on your feetMines your experience for stories you didnt know you hadCoaches you on standing out so you dont sound like every other candidate who prepped with AIHelps you strengthen weak stories and retire ones that arent landingDebriefs rejections so you learn something from every noRewrites your weakest answers at interview-winning quality, side by side with the original, so the improvement is concretenot just add more detailTracks your self-assessment accuracy over timethe gap between how you think you did and how you actually didCoaches post-offer salary negotiation with exact scripts and fallback languageLets get it set up (5 minutes)Well use the Claude desktop app to run our AI interviewing coach.Heres how to get started:Install the Claude desktop app.Download the project from GitHub (click Code Download ZIP and unzip, or Git clone if you prefer).Rename SKILL.md to CLAUDE.md (just right-click Rename in your file browser).Open the Claude desktop app. If youre already using Claude or Claude Cowork on desktop, youve probably encountered Claude Code. Select the Code tab.Open the relevant folder.Type kickoff and your coach will load.Claude walks you through the rest, one question at a time.The whole setup takes about five minutes, and Claude writes a coaching_state.md file that tracks everything across sessions: your stories, scores, patterns, and progress.Need help using the coach? Type help and youll get this:Lets take it for a spin!Once youve run kickoff, everything else works through simple commands. Heres how to use the coach for an upcoming interview.Basic setupQuick Prep vs. Full System: Decide if you want to quickly use it for an upcoming interview or want to spend a bit more time setting it up as a comprehensive interview system.Role selection: Tell it what kind of job youre looking for.Feedback directness: Tell it how direct you want feedback to be (1-5 scale, default: 5).Interview timeline: Share where youre at in the interview process.Interview history: Share whether youve been interviewing already, how many interviews youve done, and how theyve gone.Biggest concern: Finally, brain dump whats stressing you out right now.At this point, youre done with the configuration, and Claude Code will ask to learn about your candidate context. Specifically:Once you provide these details, Claude Code will write an update to its memory and share a summary:Explore a company earlyInterested in a company but dont have an interview yet? Type research [company name]. Claude pulls together a quick brief on the companys culture, interview reputation, and how your background maps to what they typically look for. Its a lighter version of prep, useful when youre still deciding where to apply or when you want a read on fit before investing in full prep.Prepare for a specific interviewIn the same conversation where you ran kickoff (or a new one):Type: prep [company name]Youll be prompted to attach a job description if there is one and be asked some follow-ups.Claude Code may request additional information from you. Insider intel is always helpful.Claude generates a one-page prep brief with what this company optimizes for (based on the JD and their values), your unique positioning for this specific role, 7 to 10 predicted questions tagged by competency with story mapping (which of your stories to use for each, and where the gaps are), likely concerns about your background with one-sentence counters, a culture read on what this company rewards in interviews, and questions for you to ask them.During prep, you can optionally share LinkedIn profile URLs for your interviewers. The coach needs actual LinkedIn URLs; names alone arent reliable enough due to false-match risk. You can include the URLs up front or provide them when the coach asks.For each interviewer, the coach produces an Interviewer Intelligence card covering: their functional lens, career path signals, recent public interests, what you have in common, predicted focus areas, rapport hooks, and watch-for signals (likely interviewing style based on seniority and function). Each card includes a confidence rating so you know how much to rely on it.If you have a story bank, the coach also maps specific stories to each interviewerwhich story to deploy for which person and why. This interviewer intel then flows into other commands: mock calibrates its persona to match the interviewer, hype references their likely focus area, thankyou personalizes your notes, and questions tailors rapport-building questions.Analyze an interview you just hadRecord your interviews using a tool like Granola (available as part of Lennys Product Pass) or built-in transcription within Zoom or Google Meet. Then:Paste your transcript into the chatType: analyzeClaude starts by asking how you think it went. Which answers felt strong? Which felt off? Then it scores each answer on five dimensions: substance, structure, relevance, credibility, and differentiation, on a 1-5 scale.After scoring, it triages: identifies your primary bottleneck, diagnoses the root cause (narrative hoarding? conflict avoidance? status anxiety?), and branches the coaching accordingly. You get a delta sheet with whats working, what to fix, and which stories to sharpen or retire. If you want, itll also give you a side-by-side rewrite of your weakest answer, bringing it up to a quality rating of 4-5.Then it asks which growth area feels most within your control to change by the next interview. You pick what to work on. This builds the kind of self-awareness that actually shows up in the room.Over time, it tracks the gap between your self-ratings and the coachs scores. If you consistently rate your structure higher than it actually is, the coach names that pattern. This calibrationknowing where your blind spots areis often more valuable than any individual score.Go deeper: Build a system that compoundsThe commands above handle one interview at a time. The commands below, which also come with the coach, build a system across your entire job search.Build your story bank. Type stories. Claude uses reflective prompts to surface career stories you might overlook. Questions like When were you at your best at work? What made it different? and Whats a decision youd make differently with hindsight? It indexes each story by skill, impact, and strength. Most people discover they have more usable material than they thought. Once you have at least 8 stories, you can run a rapid-retrieval drill: Claude throws 10 interview questions at you in rapid succession, and you have 10 seconds per question to name the right story and deliver your opening line. A well-organized story bank is useless if you cant access it under pressure.Practice under pressure. Type practice. Choose from eight drill types in progression order: constraint drills at 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 90 seconds, and 3 minutes (practice ladder), handle skepticism and so what? pressure (practice pushback), redirect when a question doesnt match your prep (practice pivot), handle I dont have an example for that moments (practice gap), face role-specific specialist scrutiny (practice role), manage multiple interviewer personas (practice panel), high-pressure simulation (practice stress), or rapid-fire story matching under time pressure (practice retrieval). Drills are gated: you advance when you hit scoring thresholds, not just when you feel ready. After each round, Claude asks what youd rate yourself before sharing your scoresstrengths first, then gaps, then one specific change for the next round.Run mock interviews. Type mock behavioral Stripe (or whatever format and company youre prepping for). Unlike drills, which build individual skills, mocks simulate a complete 4- to 6-question interview. Claude delivers questions one at a time with no feedback between them. At least one question targets a known gap in your story bank. Afterward, you get holistic arc feedback: how your energy shifted across questions, whether you reused stories, how you adapted to interviewer cues, and where you were strongest and weakest across the full session. Individual drills build skills. Mocks test the whole package.Please note that this is the most limited feature of the coach. Interview processes differ across companies, and interviews are changing. Theres no way to support all interview types. Therefore, the coach elicits as much information as possible from you and tries to be helpful, with clear caveats. If youre in product, I highly recommend reading Ben Erezs product sense and analytical thinking articles, or check out his PM interview copilot.Stand out. Type stories. Beyond building your story bank, Claude coaches you on differentiation so you dont sound like every other candidate who prepped with AI. It extracts earned secrets from your experience (insights you can only claim because you lived them), sharpens your point of view, and helps you retire stories that arent landing.Anticipate concerns. Type concerns. Claude asks what concerns you expect the interviewer to have, validates the ones you got right, and surfaces the ones you missedeach with counter-evidence and the best story from your story bank to deploy.Prepare questions to ask. Type questions. Claude generates 5 tailored, non-generic questionseach with why its strong, who to ask it to, what the interviewer might ask back, and a prepared response for the reversal.Track your progress. Type progress. Claude asks what patterns youre noticing before showing you the data: which competencies are improving, where youre stagnant, and what to drill next. It closes by asking what youve learned about yourself as a communicator, because that self-knowledge is what transfers to the interview room.Before you walk in. Type hype. Claude generates a 60-second hype reel (your biggest wins and strongest metrics, formatted to read aloud), a 3x3 sheet (3 likely concerns with counters, plus 3 questions to ask), a 10-minute physical and mental warmup routine, and mid-interview recovery scripts for when you bomb an answer or get a question you have no story for.Send a strong follow-up. Type thankyou after an interview. Give it context on what you discussed, and it drafts a thank-you note that reinforces your strongest moments from the conversation.Negotiate your offer. Type negotiate after you get an offer. Share the details, your ideal outcome, and your walk-away point. Claude helps you interpret the market data you bring (from sources like Levels.fyi and Glassdoor), identifies the most negotiable components, and gives you exact scriptsnot just strategy, but the specific words to say, including fallback language for when they push back.After a rejection. Type debrief. Tell Claude what happened, and it runs a structured debrief to extract what you can learn and carry forward, including what proof points to reinforce and what questions to ask the recruiter.Done with your job search? Type reflect. Whether you accepted an offer or decided to stay put, Claude runs a retrospective on your full journey: what improved, what patterns persisted, what you learned about yourself as a communicator, and what to carry into your next role when the time comes.One more thing: Make the coach yours Read moreRelated Articles
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Originally published at https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-use-ai-in-your-next-job-interview.