Helping African job seekers prepare for interviews

Over the next five years, 300 million people will come online in Africa. Many of them are young, creative, and entrepreneurial, ready to drive new innovation and opportunity across the region. That’s why, in 2017, we committed to help 10 million Africans get the digital skills they need to grow their careers and businesses. So far, we’ve trained six million people through Grow With Google programs, including Google Career Certificates, which help people learn the skills they need to qualify for roles in fast-growing fields like data analytics, digital marketing & e-commerce, IT support, project management and UX design.


But just as important as learning the skills to perform a new job, is learning the skills to land that job. This means knowing how to network, apply, build a resume and complete one of the most intimidating parts of a job search: the interview.


Interviewing in a new field can be hard, especially if you don’t have access to friends, family or mentors in the field who can help you practise and prepare. That’s why we’ve been collaborating with job seekers to build a new tool called Interview Warmup. It lets you practise answering questions selected by industry experts, and it uses machine learning developed by Google Research to transcribe your answers and help you discover ways to improve. Preparing for interviews will always take a lot of work, but we hope this tool can make it a little easier for anyone to become more confident and grow comfortable with interviewing.

With Interview Warmup, your answers are transcribed in real time so you can review what you said. You’ll also see insights: patterns detected by machine learning that can help you discover things about your answers, like the job-related terms you use and the words you say most often. It can even highlight the different talking points you cover in each answer, so you can see how much time you spend talking about areas like your experience, skills and goals. Your responses aren’t graded or judged and you can answer questions as many times as you want. It’s your own private space to practise, prepare and get comfortable.


Interview Warmup was designed for Google Career Certificates learners, so it has question sets specific to each of the certificates. But it’s available for everyone to use and has general questions applicable to many fields. Every question has been created by industry experts. We’re sharing the tool in its early stages so we can get feedback from the community, find ways to improve it and expand it to be more helpful to more job seekers.


We’re excited about tools like Interview Warmup because they show how new technologies have the potential to help more people practise the skills they need to grow their careers. Alongside programs like Google Career Certificates, Google Africa Developer Scholarships, and Digital Skills for Africa, these tools can help support the development of the African workforce and create more opportunities for African job seekers.


Try Interview Warmup now at grow.google/interview-warmup.






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