What is Interview Coach?

Interview Coach is an AI-powered tool that helps your job seekers prepare for interviews. When you turn it on, it shows up on your career center homepage and in the Career Resources menu. Job seekers use it to get practice questions tailored to a specific role, see example answers, and refine their own responses before the real thing.

Think of it as a practice run: they tell the tool what job they're aiming for (and optionally the company and job description), and it generates a set of interview questions in categories like technical skills, behavioral fit, problem-solving, experience, and company-specific questions. They can click Example Answer on any question to see a sample response, then use My Answer to write and score their own. It's all designed to build confidence before they step into the actual interview.

How it works

Here's the flow in a bit more detail, in case you need to explain it to a member or your team:

  1. Job seeker opens Interview Coach — From the homepage or Career Resources, they land on the Interview Coach page.
  2. They enter details — Job title (required), and optionally company name and job description. They can also choose an interview difficulty (easy, medium, difficult).
  3. The tool generates questions — Our AI uses that input to build a custom set of questions, grouped into categories (e.g. Technical Skills, Behavioral Fit, Problem-Solving, Experience and Achievements, Company-Specific).
  4. They practice — For each question they can view an example answer and/or write their own. The tool helps them prepare in a low-pressure way before the real interview.

Job seekers need to be signed in to use Interview Coach. If you've limited it to members only (see below), only members can access it; everyone else sees a clear message that the tool is for members and how they can learn more.

Your options: turning Interview Coach on and who can use it

You control Interview Coach from Smartway → Settings → Career Tools. There are two settings.

1. Use Interview Coach

What it does: This is the main on/off switch. When it's on, Interview Coach is available to job seekers and is linked from the homepage and the Career Resources menu. When it's off, the tool is hidden and not linked anywhere.

When to use it: Turn it on when you want to offer interview preparation as part of your career center. Leave it off if you don't use that feature.

2. Limit Interview Coach to members only

What it does: When this is on, only association members can use Interview Coach. Non-members who try to access it see a dedicated message explaining that the tool is for members and how they can learn about membership or upgrade—no confusing redirects, and the button copy is correct whether they're signed in or not.

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Important: This option only works if Single Sign-On (SSO) is enabled for your site. SSO is how we know who is a member. If SSO isn't set up, the "Limit to members only" setting won't have any effect—everyone who can see Interview Coach would still be able to use it. So: turn on Limit Interview Coach to members only only when SSO is already in place.

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