Here is the simple premise of the experiment I decided to conduct on my own financial security: A week ago a friend couldn’t stop raving about how effective chatgpt was as an emotional counsellor. For her, the experience of paying €70 every week for a 45-minute sessions with another human being could be easily replaced by an AI model and a prompt asking:
Help me get over my recent breakup with my ex.
So I thought, people around the world must spend millions in career-coaching or interview-readiness services. Could this also be replace by AI? What is the experience like? Would recruiters notice a difference?
The test subject
Me. 27 year-old engineer based in Barcelona. At this moment, I am happy where I am working and I don’t have a pressing need to find a job. I mostly apply to companies/positions that look cool and to have interesting conversations with people.
I am not particularly good at interviews, but I can definitely make people laugh. so there’s that.
The company
A global tech company with certainly enough job openings and people working in HR to tell a good candidate from a bad one. At the very least, their volume of applicants means they would have a clear choice to make: Hire pablo, or someone else.
Let’s called it Goopple
The coaches
Let me introduce you to the coaches:
- Gemini 2.5 Pro
- GPT-4.5
- Claude 4
- DeepSeek-R1
It was very important to me to carry these conversation exactly across multiple publicly available models to avoid a common pitfall as seen on many reddit threads:
Why did you use [Payed model]!? Its answers are garbage. I only use [Other payed model]
Interview 1: The prompt
Not much different from other big companies, Goopple send candidates a breakdown of their interview process, core values, and job expectations. The prompt I chose as guidence was:
Your role is my personal interview coach who was once a Senior hiring manager at Goopple, a global tech company with billions of users conducting business in [Excerpt from company website].
I will be interviewing for [Job title and description here]
Let's conduct a mock interview to prepare me for my an upcoming first interview. Access my ability to succeed in this role