Article
How to prepare for a job interview in the age of AI
Recently I have interviewed many candidates for well-paid roles: managers, team leaders and advertising specialists. I have to say that with most of them, the conversations would have made sense in 2024 or 2025, but not today.
The candidates have not tried any methods of making their work more efficient beyond the most basic ones, such as a basic analysis of information and data. It is even worse than that. When I find out that they do not automate the routine, repetitive tasks in their work, I ask whether they at least have an idea of what they could make more efficient or automate in the near future. The vast majority of answers do not take into account today's technology and what it can do. They do not take into account anything I have been writing about here for years. Very often every single part of their work could be automated or made dramatically more efficient, but they do not even see that it is possible. If you already automate these things yourself, such answers come as a big surprise.
These candidates did not prepare for the interview. They did not even do the bare minimum. They did not ask an AI model, or Google, how their work could be made more efficient.
Instead, they answer: "I use AI to tell me where to click. At my previous job, the boss used more advanced tools, but we did not understand them."
Or when I ask a candidate for a management role about a hands-on approach to some area of their work, the answer is: "Yes, if it is needed, I can click the buttons myself." The candidate does not realise that this work is no longer done by clicking.
With answers like these, it is very hard to continue the conversation. I recommend that anyone preparing for a job interview should study how the role they are applying for can be automated and made more efficient. Managers should do the same for the activities they will be responsible for.
This is the most basic step. If you have not tried these things yet, you should at least know what the options are.
If you have any thoughts, questions, or feedback, feel free to drop me a message at mail@richardgolian.com.
LinkedIn
Related articles
Are you a content creator playing by the rules of YouTube, Instagram or Google? Are you a small business owner whose business model depends on how often Amazon recommends you, how expensive Facebook ad impressions will be or how expensive Google Ads clicks will be? If all or most of your contact with your audience or customers depends on a big platform showing you to them, you are not in a strong position.
What AI can do, how I use it, what effect it will have on the world, how I try to adapt to the new world. I have written a lot about it. I need to arrange all those thoughts somehow, to simplify them. So that I have one compass that shows me the direction.
When you hear that artificial intelligence still does not deliver good enough output, that it is unusable for certain tasks, it is worth realising that this may no longer be true today. And even if it were, the most intelligent minds on this planet are working on making AI more useful. Most work activities will be automated. To understand where this is heading, some questions have to be asked.
More articles
The development of artificial intelligence changes how we look at which paths in life make sense. Which studies and which profession to choose.
It was Thursday, 31 March 2022, when I handed over the last of my responsibilities to my colleagues, closed my laptop and went to the library. I left my job for several months and immersed myself in philosophy. And I am immensely grateful for it. Today I am, like most people, on a merry-go-round, and it is hard for me to stop and think about the fundamental questions of my own life.
It was September 2023. My life, my work, everything was completely different from now. It was simpler. I owned almost nothing. I needed to film an advert, I went up to a floor inside the company where the product I needed for that advert was, and there I noticed her for the first time. She laughs at me when I describe it like this, but at that moment the universe told me, that is her.
How and why I am gradually leaving social media and the big platforms. When I read that Meta is testing a new way to charge for organic posts that link outside its platform, it confirms how right I was to become steadily less dependent on the big platforms and on social media. It does not mean I have left them completely. It means that whether or not I stay in touch with my readers depends on them less and less, and today almost not at all.
One of my family members described a firm that has its data in several different tools, and its employees still join it by hand, in spreadsheets. That is the ordinary state of firms. When somebody tells such people not to do it by hand and to use AI, they will not understand. Most firms do not even have the basic connectors between the tools they use. These firms need help with AI transformation.
The same task, two models. Fable 5 against Opus 4.8. On paper Fable is the better model, with a larger context and stronger specs. And still it lost. Opus handled the task with a single round of checking for 721,000 tokens, while Fable needed nine rounds and burnt through 2.78 million tokens. The difference was not in the model, but in how I set the task. And I know it, because I measured it.
A few weeks ago I installed a small local AI model on my laptop that watches a live camera feed. I turned the webcam on in the dark, and in near total darkness it recognised me and the objects in the room. That such things exist, I have known for a long time. What opened my eyes was the accessibility. I installed it in one prompt, free, and it runs entirely on my machine, sending data nowhere.
I once wrote about building my own privacy-friendly analytics tool. It had bot detection from the first version, yet it was not enough. Direct visits took a strangely high share of my traffic. When someone claims that 20% of their visits are bots and 80% are humans, I used to think the same. Today I would say the opposite ratio is closer to the truth. This is how I got there.
I have Heidegger and my notebook beside me. I am asking where all of this is heading, where artificial intelligence is taking us.
Four days in Catalonia. No computer, no AI, almost no social media. I bought this notebook so that I could write down what I would think about, and what I would come across and learn on the trip.