Helping job seekers prepare for interviews

Jun 02, 2022

[[read-time]] min read

Jesse Haines

Director, Grow with Google

A young man is sitting on his couch with a laptop.

Right now, according to Burning Glass’ Labor Insight, there are over 1.5 million open jobs in the U.S. in fast-growing fields like data analytics, digital marketing & e-commerce, IT support, project management and UX design. We launched Google Career Certificates to help people learn the skills they need to qualify for roles in those fields, helping drive economic opportunity and mobility. Today, more than 70,000 people have earned a certificate and 75% of graduates report positive career impacts within six months of graduating, based on graduate survey responses in the U.S. in 2021.

But just as important as learning the skills to perform a new job, is learning the skills to land that job. This means knowing how to network, apply, build a resume and nail one of the most intimidating parts of a job search: the interview.

Interviewing in a new field can be hard, especially if you don’t have access to friends, family or mentors in the field who can help you practice and prepare. That’s why we’ve been collaborating with job seekers to start building a new tool called Interview Warmup that lets you practice answering questions selected by industry experts, and uses machine learning to transcribe your answers and help you discover ways to improve. Preparing for interviews will always take a lot of work, but we hope this tool can make it a little easier for anyone to become more confident and grow comfortable with interviewing.

On a white background, a waving hand emoji bounces next to text that reads “Hi! Let’s practice a job interview.” The view zooms out to show the interface of the Interview Warmup tool. A white pointer scrolls through six career fields, selects “IT Support” and is prompted to answer an interview question. The tool transcribes the user’s response and analyzes it. The pointer clicks “most-used words,” highlighting words used multiple times. The pointer clicks one of those words to get suggestions about other words to use instead. The backdrop is plain white once more and text reading “Interview Warmup'' bounces on screen.

With Interview Warmup, your answers are transcribed in real time so you can review what you said. You’ll also see insights: patterns detected by machine learning that can help you discover things about your answers, like the job-related terms you use and the words you say most often. It can even highlight the different talking points you cover in each answer, so you can see how much time you spend talking about areas like your experience, skills and goals. Your responses aren’t graded or judged and you can answer questions as many times as you want. It’s your own private space to practice, prepare and get comfortable.

Interview Warmup was designed for Google Career Certificates learners, so it has question sets specific to each of the certificates. But it’s available for everyone to use and has general questions applicable to many fields. Every question has been created by industry experts. We’re sharing the tool in its early stages so we can get feedback from the community, find ways to improve it and expand it to be more helpful to more job seekers, especially as one in four U.S. workers seek opportunities with new employers.

We’re excited about tools like Interview Warmup because they show how new technologies have the potential to help more people practice the skills they need to grow their careers and, as a result, support the development of the U.S. workforce. Alongside training programs like Google Career Certificates, these tools, resources and trainings can help increase economic mobility and make it possible for more people to make the move into fast-growing fields.

Try Interview Warmup now at grow.google/interview-warmup.

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