Updated
Reading interview answers off a page and saying them out loud are two different skills. On paper your answer about the failed product launch is tight. Said out loud, with someone watching, it wanders for three minutes, and nobody asks a follow-up because there’s nobody there.
An AI mock interview puts somebody there. On LlamaCalls you set up an interviewer for the exact role you’re going for, call them from your browser, and answer out loud. The interviewer listens, replies in about a second, and presses on the parts of your answer that were vague.
Why practise out loud
Most interview prep is silent. People write answers in a doc, read lists of common questions, or type into a chatbot that waits patiently while they edit. None of that rehearses the moment when you’re asked something and have to start talking.
A spoken mock interview does. You hear yourself say “um, so, basically” four times. You notice the answer that sounded fine in your head has no ending. And because the interviewer has a voice and, if you want, a lifelike face, it feels close enough to the real thing that the nerves show up too, which is the point.
Set up an interviewer for the actual job
Generic question banks prepare you for a generic interview. You describe the interviewer instead: “A hiring manager for a senior product manager role at a fintech, who cares about how candidates make decisions with incomplete data.” LlamaCalls drafts a role card from that, and you edit it. The parts that matter most for interviews:
- Steps of the call. The order the interview runs in. An introduction, two behavioural questions, a product case, then time for your questions.
- Rules. What the interviewer always and never does. “Always ask for a specific example when an answer stays general.” “Never move on until the candidate has said what they personally did.”
- Tone and mood. A friendly screen with a recruiter is different from a final round with a sceptical director. Set the one you’re dreading.
- What it knows. Paste in the job description or what you know about the team, and the interviewer works from it.
The follow-up is where interviews are won
Real interviewers rarely stop at the first answer. They ask what you did, not what the team did. They ask what you would change. They ask for the number. Candidates who have only rehearsed their first answer get caught here.
Because the interviewer reacts to what you actually said, you can make it do the same. A good rule set for behavioural rounds looks like this:
- Ask one behavioural question at a time and wait for the full answer.
- If the answer says “we” throughout, ask what the candidate personally did.
- If there’s no result, ask how they knew it worked.
- If the answer ran long, ask for the one-sentence version.
That last one is uncomfortable, and that’s useful. Being asked to say it again, shorter, happens in real interviews, and it’s better to find out how you handle it on a practice call.
Kinds of interview you can rehearse
| Interview | How to set up the interviewer |
|---|---|
| Behavioural round | Rules that push for a specific situation, your own actions and a result |
| Recruiter screen | Short, friendly, with salary expectations and notice period as information to collect |
| Case or product interview | A scenario in what it knows, and a rule to challenge assumptions |
| Final round | A sceptical mood, and a rule to ask why you want this job over others |
| Interview in another language | Set the interviewer to one of 13 languages |
Interviews in 13 languages
If the interview is in Spanish, German, Japanese or Hindi, practising in English only gets you halfway. Each interviewer is set to one language and listens and answers in it: English, Spanish, French, German, Hindi, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, Italian, Dutch, Chinese, Malay or Tamil.
Watch it back
Every mock interview is saved to your history with a full transcript. Turn on recording and you also get the video. Reading your own transcript is humbling in a useful way: the filler words, the answer that never got to the point, the question you didn’t actually answer. Fix one thing, then call again.
For teams that run interview prep
Career coaches, bootcamps and university careers services can build one interviewer per role or company and run practice rounds with it. The coach stops playing the interviewer for the hundredth time and spends that time going through transcripts with the student instead.
What it costs
No subscription. A voice interview is $0.03 a minute, and an interviewer with a video face is $0.08 a minute. A 30-minute video mock interview costs $2.40, billed by the second, from credit that never expires.
Getting started
- Sign up and describe your interviewer in a sentence, including the role you’re applying for.
- Edit the steps and rules, and paste in the job description.
- Pick a face and a voice, or keep it voice only.
- Call it from your browser and answer out loud. Read the transcript, then go again.