This article is part of a series featuring insights from Impactpool career coaches.
Use AI as a practice partner
One of the most useful ways to use AI is to simulate an interview.
Give an AI tool the job description and ask it to generate questions based on the competencies, responsibilities and experience the role requires. You can then practise answering those questions and use the tool to challenge your responses.
As Merlijn Angad Gaur, Impactpool Senior Executive Consultant and experienced HR and talent acquisition professional, puts it:
“AI can help you prepare questions that you can practice. It can also give you feedback on your answers, which is genuinely useful for interview preparation.”
The important part is practice, not producing a perfect answer.
Impactpool's Interview Questions Database is another useful starting point, with competency-based questions used by international organisations. Preparing examples against the competencies in the vacancy can help you walk into the interview with a much clearer sense of what you want to demonstrate.
Ask AI to challenge your examples
AI can be particularly useful when you already have real experiences to work with.
Instead of asking:
“Write my answer to this interview question.”
Try asking:
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What is missing from my answer?
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What evidence demonstrates the competency?
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Where could an interviewer ask a follow-up question?
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Have I clearly explained my own contribution?
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Is the result or impact of my actions clear?
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What assumptions am I making?
This shifts AI from the answer generator to your thinking partner. That distinction matters. Impactpool's guidance on Interview Questions You Should Always Prepare For, recommends preparing frameworks and examples rather than memorising scripts. The same principle applies when using AI.
Use AI to research — then go deeper
AI can also speed up your initial research. You can use it to help you understand an organisation's mandate, summarise long reports, identify recurring themes in its strategy, or generate questions you should investigate further.
But don't stop with the AI-generated summary. Go back to the organisation's own website, strategies, reports, and recent publications. Check important facts yourself. Then use the time you have saved to develop a deeper understanding of the organisation and the role.
Your goal is not to know everything.
Your goal is to be able to explain why this organisation, why this role, and why you.
Don't let AI turn you into a script
There is a real downside to overusing AI in interview preparation: your answers can become too polished. If you practise until every response sounds perfectly structured, you may find yourself trying to reproduce an answer rather than having a conversation.
That can make it harder to respond naturally when an interviewer asks a follow-up question, changes the wording, or takes the conversation in a direction you didn't expect at first.
Prepare your examples and key points, not a speech. For competency-based interviews, frameworks such as STAR — Situation, Task, Action, and Result — can help you structure an answer without dictating exactly what you should say. Impactpool's [interview guidance]Interview Trends: What's Changing and How to Prepare covers this approach alongside other changes in international-sector recruitment.
AI doesn't know your story
This may be the most important limitation. AI can analyse what you give it. It cannot replace the reflection required to understand your own career.
It doesn't know what it felt like to manage a difficult project, work across cultures, navigate a conflict, lead a team through uncertainty or learn from a mistake unless you explain those experiences.
And it certainly cannot manufacture genuine motivation.
Your strongest interview material is usually already there: what you have done, what you learned, what changed because of your work, and why the next step matters to you.
AI can help you uncover and organise that material. It shouldn't invent it.
A simple way to use AI before your next interview
Try this four-step process:
1. Understand the role. Identify the key responsibilities, competencies and experience the organisation is looking for.
2. Build your evidence. Choose real examples from your career that demonstrate those requirements.
3. Practise with AI. Ask it to challenge your examples, generate follow-up questions and identify gaps in your responses.
4. Put the AI away. Before the interview, practise explaining your examples naturally — in your own words.
You can also get personalised support through Interview Coaching, where experienced coaches from the international development and humanitarian sectors help professionals prepare for interviews and competency-based questions.
The goal isn't a perfect answer
AI can make interview preparation more accessible and more structured. It can help you practise when you don't have a colleague, mentor or coach available. It can also help you spot things you might otherwise miss.
But the goal of preparation isn't to sound perfect.
It's to walk into the interview understanding the role, knowing the evidence you want to share, and feeling confident enough to have a genuine conversation.
Use AI to sharpen your preparation. Then make sure the person sitting across the screen still meets you — not the AI.