Built by the online resume builder and job-search company Hiration, according to a news release, the new tool is powered by ChatGPT and offers video lessons and quizzes for students to learn the basics, a virtual environment to practice interviews, the option to get feedback from AI, and the ability to share recorded interviews with counselors and peers. Users can also share job descriptions with the AI to get tailored questions and feedback. The AI tool rates overall answer quality, highlights a user’s strong suits and areas that need improvement, then gives ideas of what they might change. AI analyzes both the content and delivery of the user’s answers, tracking speech rate, pitch, filler words, eye contact and posture. Because it’s online, students can get feedback whenever their schedule allows.
Other institutions using Hiration’s interview preparation tool include the University of Arizona, Brandeis University and the City University of New York.
“Because AI technology simulates a wide range of interview scenarios and questions, students will enter their job search prepared to face any number of situations. This helps to reduce anxiety, increase confidence and ultimately lead to more successful outcomes,” Elizabeth Lintelman, director of career services at Rasmussen, said in a public statement.
According to Hiration’s website, individual schools can customize the interview preparation tool and incorporate it into curriculum or extracurriculars. University staff can create cohorts of students and assign practice interviews with custom parameters and scoring metrics. They can also create cohorts of reviewers, consisting of faculty, staff or administrators with expertise in different career fields, to provide additional feedback on video interviews that students upload.
Interview preparation represents an expansion of other services Rasmussen offers through Hiration tools, such as an AI-powered resume builder and Handshake, the university’s online career management platform that helps students and alumni find work and volunteer opportunities.
While Hiration’s ChatGPT-powered tool is novel for Rasmussen, the idea of using AI to coach students on interview etiquette is not new. In an email to Government Technology in 2022, Sunny Saurabh, CEO of the video-interview software company Interviewer.AI, said AI might relieve an administrative burden on faculty.
“Career services [at universities], which usually consists of less than 10 faculty members, is required to coach hundreds of students from the same batch and target 100 percent placement,” he wrote. “This can be an arduous task, especially when most of the companies that youngsters in college want to join are multinational companies that typically have an asynchronous video interview before a human recruiter can evaluate the candidates.”
Rasmussen Senior Career Services Adviser Stephanie Daniels said in a public statement in 2022 that digital tools like Hiration’s could help students compete in a hiring environment where companies are increasingly using AI and automated tools to filter applications.
“It’s even more crucial now to have your resume set up and specifically aligned so that you can get through that application tracking system to get to a person,” she said.
