NAIROBI, Kenya — As Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools quietly embed themselves into everyday work life, a subtle transformation is unfolding inside one of the most consequential spaces of modern careers: the job interview.
Across industries and continents, shortlisted candidates are increasingly turning to AI, not just to polish CVs or write cover letters, but to simulate interviews, refine answers, manage nerves, and shape how they present their professional identities.
The shift is raising a fundamental question for employers and applicants alike:
Is AI revolutionising the interview process, or merely changing how candidates prepare for it?
The new interview coach
For many candidates, AI has become a 24-hour interview coach.
Applicants now rehearse with large language models that generate mock interview questions, analyse responses, suggest improvements in tone and structure, and even predict follow-up questions based on job descriptions.
Some tools provide real-time feedback on clarity, confidence, and coherence, while others craft tailored talking points around a candidate’s actual experience.
This technology offers something previous generations of jobseekers rarely had: private, personalised, and unlimited practice.
“It’s like having a professional career advisor in your pocket,” says one Nairobi-based marketing graduate who recently secured a multinational internship after weeks of rehearsing with AI tools. “It helped me articulate what I already knew about myself, but in a way interviewers actually understand.”
Levelling the playing field
Supporters argue that this shift is democratising access to opportunity.
Candidates from under-resourced backgrounds; without professional networks, career coaches, or elite university training, can now prepare to the same standard as those who have always enjoyed those advantages.
AI can decode corporate language, translate technical requirements into everyday explanations, and help candidates structure their achievements with clarity and impact.
In this sense, AI is not replacing talent, but amplifying the ability to express it.
For employers, the result is often more confident candidates, better-structured interviews, and clearer conversations about competence.
The authenticity dilemma
Yet the transformation is not without tension.
Critics worry that AI-assisted preparation risks blurring the line between genuine self-expression and scripted performance.
If candidates are coached by the same algorithms, will interviews begin to sound alike? Will originality and raw thinking be diluted by optimisation?
There is also a deeper philosophical concern: What does authenticity mean in an age of machine-mediated communication?
Human beings have always prepared for interviews; through books, mentors, mock sessions, and experience. AI simply compresses and accelerates that learning process.
But the scale and precision of the assistance forces hiring managers to rethink what they are really evaluating: knowledge, delivery, confidence, adaptability, or integrity.
Fairness in a digital hiring market
The emergence of AI in interview preparation is also reshaping debates about fairness.
Those with reliable internet, modern devices, and AI literacy gain a new competitive edge.
Meanwhile, some employers are quietly adapting their interview methods, introducing more spontaneous problem-solving, behavioural assessments, and scenario-based questioning to distinguish real competence from rehearsed responses.
Rather than making interviews obsolete, AI is forcing them to evolve.
A new social contract in hiring
Ultimately, AI is not removing the human element from recruitment, it is renegotiating it.
The interview remains a space of judgment, trust, and mutual evaluation. But both sides now enter the room better prepared, better informed, and more self-aware.
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What is changing is not the purpose of the interview, but the tools candidates use to reach it.
AI is not the interviewer. AI is the mirror candidates now practise in.
Revolution or reinvention?
AI is not replacing interviews. It is redefining preparation.
It empowers candidates, challenges recruiters, and compels institutions to update their understanding of skill, fairness, and authenticity.
As with every major technological shift, the outcome will depend less on the tool itself, and more on the values guiding its use.
The modern interview is no longer just about who you are. It is about how effectively you have learned to communicate who you are, in a world where intelligence is no longer exclusively human.
