Google launches Interview Warmup to help you practice answering interview questions

Being interviewed is probably one of the most pressuring parts of securing a job you really want. If you are a first-timer in a particular field or have decided to try another profession, realizing you’ll face unfamiliar questions can mess you up. However, even the simplest questions when you’re already in an actual interview can make you stutter when you’re unprepared. To address that, Google launched a new Interview Warmup website, a part of the company’s Grow with Google and Career Certificates initiatives. It is already available in Google Chrome for Mac, Windows, Android, and Safari on iOS.

The objective of the website s pretty simple. You will be presented with interview questions, answer them, and get insights. This way, interview-conscious individuals could get a chance to be aware of how they answer interview questions and see if there are some areas they can improve before going into an actual interview session.

Users will enter their responses to the questions by delivering them verbally. It uses artificial intelligence to transcribe your answers in real-time, though its capability will focus more on the context of your answers and not on your delivery (e.g., sound, intonation, pauses, etc.). According to the company, the website is specifically meant for Google Career Certificates but is still “available for everyone to use and has general questions applicable to many fields.”

The Interview Warmup website indicates that its questions can be applicable to a wide variety of professions and fields, such as data analytics, e-commerce, IT support, project management, UX design, and general.

The questions that will be asked will be divided into different categories, like background questions, situational, and technical. They will be presented to you one by one. You need to click the Answer button to provide your input (which will be transcribed automatically for you), and then you can choose to either move to the next one or repeat it.

The answers will then be shown to you. Google pronounces that none of the responses would be graded to help you “build your confidence in a judgment-free zone.” They’ll come with insights divided into three types: Most-used Words, Job-related Terms, and Talking Points. The first one will check if there are redundancies in the sentences you provided to give you the chance to find other alternative words to use. (There will be suggestions!). The second one, on the other hand, will highlight the terms related to the job you are applying for to help you be more aware if you are using a sufficient number of words to make your responses more reliable. Talking Points is much more complicated yet information-rich. The category gives “suggested talking points for answering background questions” and comes in five more sub-categories: Experience, Skills, Leason Learned, Goals, and Interests. They should help you be informed if you have ticked the boxes when answering a particular question.

The said pieces of information and insights will be provided after the questions. “Try to reflect on what you said from the perspective of an interviewer,” the prompt reads. “Identify what you’d like to improve, then practice again.”

Users can copy the transcribed answers and even save the answers through a particular button in the prompt message. Google, on the other hand, emphasized that it is not saving the audio or any data from the website in respect of the user’s privacy.

Interview Warmup isn’t the only website produced by a company like Google aimed at assisting individuals in finding jobs. Microsoft also recently led 50 other companies to create the Neurodiversity Career Connector, a site with job listings by different employers in the US. The place is specifically designed for employers looking for workers with neurodivergent conditions. The companies belonging to the group are known for having their own neurodiversity hiring programs and support systems for such individuals.