The competitive edge

GREEN BAY – As its graduating students are facing an increasingly competitive job market, UW-Green Bay is using an AI-powered interview coaching program, Big Interview, to offer personalized preparation.

“The job market is changing,” Voss said. “There’s less positions available and there’s more applicants, but there’s also a shift with entry-level work where our students who are graduating in May are going to be competing against people who’ve been in the workforce. How do you level up to that? How do you impress them and have some confidence as you go into those interviews?”
The answer to those questions? Personalized preparation with immediate, holistic feedback.

“The system will give them interview questions, they can record their response and they can listen back and re-record it,” Voss said. “After that, they can use the AI feature to see feedback. It’ll look at things like tone, eye contact, did they answer the question — things like that. It will actually tell them, ‘This is how you answered, and this is how you could have answered it better. These are the things you did well and these are the things that could use some improvement.’”

“I can tell students that it’s their first time and this is nerve-wracking for them and employers that are on the other side can tell, too,” Voss said. “It comes down to a different way to prepare. In the past you would have asked to sit down with a professional or you would have stood in front of a mirror and tried to practice yourself or talk with a parent or a roommate. But this is another way.”

Using Big Interview, students can practice answering industry-specific questions curated from more than 1,000 professions across more than 200 industries; get instant feedback on things like tone, pace, eye contact, vocabulary and filler words; build stronger responses; and prepare with confidence anytime, anywhere.

Big Interview is intended to compliment in-person coaching students receive from career advisors on campus, filling the gap when students need some last minute preparation for an interview or can’t make it to campus during regular hours.

“It allows [students], at any time of the day, to be able to go in and prepare for an interview,” Voss said. “A person might call them today and say, ‘Hey, can you come in for an interview tomorrow?’ And they might not be able to connect with us [before the interview] so it gives an opportunity to go onto the platform and get some feedback at that time and practice those interview questions… We have students all over the country and all over the state that take our courses, so it provides an opportunity any time of the day to go in and practice those interviews and get that feedback. It also allows us to scale our services. We have a team of career advisors, but we don’t have availability with every single one of them, just because of the way that our calendars are and we have a smaller team as well.”

By taking advantage of Big Interview, students can take steps to prepare before they ever step foot in an actual interview.

“The hard conversations we have to have with students is when they say, ‘I’ve been interviewing and I haven’t gotten a job offer,’ and we’re like, ‘Okay, well that tells me there might be something wrong with your interview,’” Voss said. “And when they’ll usually be the ones to say, ‘Oh, I should have answered that differently,’ or, ‘Now I see that I should have had better eye contact’ — whatever it happens to be. It makes them realize that they should have done this before, rather than after interviewing a little bit and missing out on those opportunities… Don’t interview for a couple of places and realize it’s not going well because you’re not getting job offers and then come to us because those are all missed opportunities. We’re here to help, Big Interview is here to help.”

At UW-Green Bay, Big Interview is being integrated into courses as well, helping faculty prepare students for post-graduation life.

“As part of my capstone course, students have to make a professional development portfolio, so they do resumes, they do job searches, they draft letters to faculty asking for letters of recommendation and there’s an interview component to practice some interview questions,” said Danielle Sneyd, assistant teaching professor in the psychology department. “When the class was smaller, I’d do little live phone interviews with the students. As the class got bigger, they became written drafts, which is not the same thing as when you’re actually doing an interview… [Big Interview] allows me to pick the interview questions… And I record myself asking the interview questions and then they get to use the platform… They get to use that AI feature to get the feedback and then for their final portfolio they write up a draft of how they would incorporate that feedback that was given into future questions.”

By using Big Interview in her classroom, Sneyd said her students are receiving feedback well beyond what she could provide herself.

“There’s an ‘um’ counter, filler words, their use of strong vocabulary, how much pausing there was,” she said. “Those are things that I could never actually do myself live. I could only give feedback on the actual answers that they provided, so this allows for a lot more niche feedback that they can work on, which is quite nice.”

“It gives us access to something that might not have been available,” Voss said. “I could give you feedback on a one-on-one practice interview, for sure, but you might not remember it all or I might forget to say something or we might go off on a different tangent. Being able to use AI to really look holistically at how that student is answering a question and how they can do better… It really kind of lets them level up one more step to realize that it could be better.”