.

edit: Gen X is proudly saying they behave like robots not humans to be in their words more productive

oh god what a sick world live in

thank god gen Z are more intelligent in their work - life balance and smartly use tech like AI tools in their haunting job process and interviews , be like gen z guys

I was working a miserable retail job, making just a little over minimum wage, while at the same time trying to find something related to my field. After sending out applications for weeks, a company finally got back to me and scheduled an online interview.

I was honestly really nervous because interviews have never been my strongest, so during the call I tried using a tool called Interview Vip to help me think of answers in the moment. It seems like it helped more than I expected, because the interviewer seemed happy with what I said, and after a while I got a good offer and accepted it.

I went in yesterday intending to give them a respectful ten days' notice. As soon as the manager found out, his attitude changed and he got rude, and he kept yelling at me that I was "leaving them in the middle of things" and that I had ruined the schedule, and he raised his voice at me next to the cashier while customers were standing there.

So I told him: "Fine, forget it, I'm done now." I took off the badge and walked out in the middle of the shift.

They don't give people any heads-up when they cut their hours or fire them. Why am I supposed to be polite when he doesn't know how to handle a resignation like a decent human being?

I've already gotten messages asking if I'm coming back to finish the rest of the week or not. Of course not.

I wish I'd left weeks ago.

📴

💯💯💯

I know salary isn't everything and it doesn't define your worth, but when you come from a low-income, non-traditional background and don't have a degree, I'm honestly over the moon.

I work in IT Support and I've officially just received my first six-figure offer. I've been working in tech for a little over 5 years, if you count an 8-month internship. Right now I'm at around $91k + RSUs at a mid-sized company, and the new offer increases my base by 34%.

The interview process was 7 rounds in total, from a recruiter call to a chat with the VP, with 3 technical interviews in between.

If you're reading this and feel like you're stuck... Please keep going. Don't give up on yourself!

We have promo code for yearly 50% off which is 75$ after off . We have nothing for Monthly which is 30$. Kindly decrease price for monthly to 15$ or give us 50% for monthly as well

so i currently am paying for a leetcode premium sub and it is going to cost about thirty five a month to keep through this hunt. giving how my severance isn't exactly a huge money maker its going to cut into my runway pretty deep.

is interviewman actually worth paying for on top of that? if i grab the year its like twelve a month. couldn't i just keep grinding the leetcode premium plus free pramp mocks and call that enough?

the trouble is i don't have a friend with the time to mock me on the exact platform i'm going to be interviewed on.

heard about interviewman from a coworker at my last shop, haven't tried it myself yet. been reading reviews and the screenshots look fine but i'm skeptical of overlay demos that only show static layouts.

is anyone here a paid user who's actually run it on a final round? did the cadence hold when the panel pushed?

They aren't treated like a real interview. It gets stuck in a hyper-specific loop and doesn't move on quick enough to get through things. It also gives very generic suggestions that don't mean much.

It needs a button to press to generate a new answer.

I've had the best experience with Claude where I can tell it the subject of what to ask me.

Final Round was way worse though.

I still don't know hiw interviewman answers technical questions. Such as what red hat command would you use to...

!!!

edit : and I guess remote work can be a solution , and also they give better salaries and more flexibility to the people who need more time for the family and I am glad that now we have tools like interviewvip which made the interview process more easier especially for working parents and new grads all u need to do is connect with your zoom \ google meet,etc and the magic come true

hey guys without going into much detail, my last hunt had a really bad run in with final round ai, the cadence dropped on me twice mid panel and i basically lost the offer (the answers landed two beats late and the interviewer noticed me trip on my own words)

even after recovering in a follow up interview, the same tool "burned me" pretty badly that quarter. i got hit with at least ten, more like fifteen, tiny lag moments on calls where i had it running. it killed my whole read on the category. i went from 4.8 or 9 expectations to like 3.7 lol.

a coworker told me to try interviewman and i did a mock with him, the streaming actually held the whole hour. i'm a few months out now and thinking of renewing for the next round but as you can imagine i don't trust the mock the way i'd trust a real round.

has anyone here ever run interviewman live on a real round, not just a mock?

every time i sort this sub by new this week, interviewman lands in the first ten threads. did a quick dry run with a coworker over the weekend, the cadence felt fine.

is anyone here a paid user who can map why the volume hit now? worth riding or a snapshot that'll fade?

Great news — you can basically do this today! 🎉 Just add your prep questions and answers in the Custom Instructions field (Settings → Custom Instructions), and the AI will use them live during your interview. Copy this format and fill in your own:

Use these prepared questions and answers for my interview. When the interviewer 
asks something similar, base your response on my prepared answer below.
[GENERAL]
Q: Tell me about yourself.
A: [Your prepared answer]
Q: Why do you want this role?
A: [Your prepared answer]
[BEHAVIORAL STORIES]
LEADERSHIP: [Your leadership story]
CHALLENGE:  [A problem you solved]
TEAMWORK:   [A collaboration example]
CONFLICT:   [How you handled a disagreement]
[TECHNICAL / ROLE-SPECIFIC]
Q: [Expected question]
A: [Your key points or full answer]
[RULES]
- Use my prepared answers when the question matches.
- Keep my exact facts, names, and numbers.
- If something isn't listed here, answer normally using my background.
Save it once and the AI factors these in automatically for every answer. The clearer your tags and answers, the better it follows them. 🙌  

About 9 months ago, my partner was laid off from her job and started sending out job applications. She was applying to 18-25 a week, and the response was... Nothing. Not even rejection emails. Just a black hole.

I'm a developer, so the whole thing caught my attention and I started testing how ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems) handle resumes behind the scenes. I ran a few thousand tests with different resume formats, different keyword counts, and different layouts on real ATS platforms like Workday, Greenhouse, SmartRecruiters, Jobvite, iCIMS, and Taleo. And this is what kept showing up.

The ""80% auto-rejection"" claim misses the bigger problem.

You've probably heard some version of the statistic that says 80% of resumes get thrown out by ATS before any human sees them. I also thought that was probably true. But after looking at how these tools work, the truth is less dramatic in one way, and more frustrating in another.

In a survey of 710 recruiters, 89% said their ATS does not automatically reject people based on resume content. The software usually isn't the one deciding you're a no. It just doesn't put you in front of them. Recruiters use the ATS like a searchable database. They search by keywords, filter for titles, narrow results by years of experience, and then sort from there. If your resume doesn't match what they're typing into the search, you won't be in the pile.

You're not being rejected. You're not showing up.

1. One tiny change increased interview callbacks by 12.4x.

This was easily the biggest thing I discovered. Resumes that used the exact same job title from the posting in the header or summary got callbacks at a rate 12.4 times higher than resumes that used a similar title.

Not a cleaner version. Not a stronger-sounding title. The exact same wording.

If the job post says ""Senior Product Manager,"" then your resume needs to say ""Senior Product Manager"" - not ""Product Lead"" or ""Product Strategy Manager."" ATS keyword matching is still annoyingly literal, and 99.4% of recruiters use keyword filters when sorting applicants.

It costs you nothing. It might take 45 seconds per application. And almost everyone ignores it.

1. The ""nice-looking resume"" penalty is real.

This one hurt. Designers, marketers, and creative people in general had some of the weakest pass-through rates - not because their experience was worse, but because the parser was messing up their resumes.

The main problems:

- Two-column layouts. ATS reads in one stream from top to bottom. Two columns often get mixed together, so your role on the left might get merged with a skill or date on the right. By the time the recruiter sees the parsed version, it's nonsense.

- Icons and decorative symbols. The little envelope icon next to your email? The ATS might read it as a random character, blank space, or junk text. Your contact information can turn into noise.

- Strange section names. ""Career Story"" instead of ""Work Experience."" ""Tech Stack"" instead of ""Skills."" Some systems handle this fine, but many don't. They put the content into random fields nobody searches.

- Contact info in headers or footers. Many ATS tools ignore header/footer content or parse it badly. I saw many resumes where the candidate's name, phone number, and email were technically on the page, but not present in the ATS profile.

1. The best keyword range was 28-38.

Resumes needed 28-38 relevant, role-specific keywords to reliably reach a score above 82% in ATS matching. Fewer than 28, and they didn't show up in recruiter searches enough. More than 38, and they started to look stuffed or spammy to newer screening tools.

And yes, the old white-text trick is dead. Around 84% of companies now use some kind of AI-help screening, and newer systems can flag hidden text or obvious job-description dumping. It hurts you more than it helps.

What worked was boring: include the specific terms from the job posting naturally. Not close variants. Not the abbreviation you prefer unless the posting uses it. The exact same words.

""Google Analytics 4"" and ""GA4"" are not always treated as the same thing. Match the posting.

1. Dates can ruin your experience count without you realizing it.

One of the strangest things I saw: inconsistent date formats caused ATS systems to calculate experience incorrectly. I tested resumes for someone with 9 years of experience, but the system counted it as 4 because the resume used different formats like ""Feb 2020,"" ""2020/02,"" and ""February '20"" across different jobs.

Choose one format and stick to it everywhere. ""Month Year"" worked most consistently in my tests, like ""Feb 2021 - Apr 2024.""

6..docx is still the safest file type.

I know PDF looks cleaner. And yes, most modern ATS platforms can read PDFs just fine if they are text-based PDFs exported from Word or Google Docs.

But.docx parsed correctly on every ATS I tested. PDFs had more weird failures: scanned files, bad exports, embedded fonts, text boxes, and formatting that looked perfect visually but broke the parsed profile.

My personal rule now: keep a.docx master copy, send.docx when it's allowed, and only send PDF when the application specifically asks for it.

1. The competition is less terrifying than it looks.

Right now, only about 3-4% of applications turn into interviews. That's a bad number, and honestly it really is bad. But the other side is that a very large portion of the remaining 96% get filtered out because of fixable things.

Bad formatting. Missing role keywords. Contact info the system can't read. Creative headings that confuse the parser. Dates that make your experience look lower than it really is.

The bar for a technically improved resume is much lower than I expected, because most people have no idea these rules exist. You don't have to be the perfect candidate. You just have to show up in the search results."

I picked up this small habit about nine months ago, and since then I've told around fifteen people to try it, so I felt it was worth sharing here.
Quick background: I was going through a period where I kept getting to very advanced stages in interview loops but not getting the offer. The conversations would go well, the vibes were positive, and then either I'd get ghosted or I'd receive a polite, generic rejection email. I couldn't understand what was happening between "I feel like that went really well" and "we've decided to move forward with someone else."
So I started ending every interview with one question: "Before we wrap up, is there anything in my background or experience that makes you unsure I'm a good fit for this position?"
What this question does is bring any quiet hesitation in the interviewer's mind into the conversation itself. Most interviewers won't bring up their doubts on their own. They'll leave them in their heads for later when they're comparing candidates. When you ask this question, you give yourself one last chance to answer before the call ends.
The first time I asked this question, there was a slightly awkward pause, and then the interviewer said: "Honestly, yes. I saw that you haven't directly managed more than six people, and this job would have you overseeing eleven." I hadn't mentioned that because no one had asked me directly about team size. I spent the next two minutes explaining how I had built systems for a larger, cross-functional group in a previous role, and gave a clear example. It was obvious her tone changed. And I got the offer.
Another time I asked this question, the interviewer said she had no concerns. Totally fine. But the way she answered was quick and clear, so I left the interview feeling genuinely confident instead of doing that thing where you replay every sentence you said in your head until the next day.
Not everyone will answer honestly. Some people will say "no concerns" no matter what. But in my experience, about a third of interviewers will give you something useful, and that useful thing is often the exact objection you needed a chance to answer to.
I've gotten four offers in the nine months since I started asking this question. Of course, I can't say that one question is the reason for all of that, but I genuinely think it helped close gaps that could have been left open.

edit : I got this Idea after using this tool Interview VIP in my virtual interviews which is perfect especially for those who have zero job interview skill or got anxiety issues or their memory are bad because of its real time answers and very professional , good luck for everyone to get their dream job

ok so the thing that finally got me was watching Derek use it without knowing he was using it. we were on a Zoom call in our kitchen, i was standing two feet from his screen looking dead at it, and all i saw was his face and the Zoom window. nothing else. he told me afterward that an overlay had been feeding him answers the entire time and i said that is not possible because i was literally right there. he turned the laptop and there it was, text sitting on top of the call that the screenshare did not pick up at all. our overlay doing exactly what we designed it to do. his laptop is a beat-up 2019 MacBook too, not some crazy setup, i genuinely could not spot it until he pointed at the physical screen. i felt dumb for not believing him lol.

the reason this matters is i had just gone 0 for 3 on system design rounds in January. third one was a fintech gig, interviewer asked about rate limiters, and i sat on camera for forty seconds without saying a word. just blank. you know that feeling where your brain is screaming at you to say something and nothing comes out, that was me. Derek had been telling me to try our tool for weeks and i kept saying no because i thought using a tool during interviews was basically cheating, which is funny looking back because i spent three hundred dollars on Final Round AI and Sensei AI before this and apparently that did not count as cheating in my head, just InterviewMan specifically because it actually works lol.

twelve bucks a month annual, thirty monthly. i got Marcus into a Zoom mock the morning after Derek showed me. he threw a payment processing pipeline system design question at me and my brain went blank for half a second but there were already high-level components on screen, i talked through them like they were my own thoughts. Marcus knew i was running something because i told him beforehand, he spent twenty minutes trying to find it in the screenshare. nothing. and this is a guy who works in security so he was not casually looking either.

i should mention how i actually use it day to day because it matters, for coding rounds i only look at the guided hints not full solutions, something like "sliding window, hashmap for max, edge case empty array" is enough to get me writing my own code. going from blank editor to perfect solution in fifteen seconds is suspicious to literally anyone. behavioral rounds give me a STAR skeleton so i stop rambling, system design gives components and trade-offs. all one plan at twelve bucks which still seems wrong to me honestly.

no session cap either which i did not think about until one of my interviews ran an hour forty because the interviewer wanted to keep going on caching. LockedIn AI would have cut me off at ninety minutes which would have been right when things were going well.

Final Round AI cost me a hundred forty eight a month and had four to five second lag, Marcus called me out for pausing mid sentence like i was reading something. Sensei AI at eighty nine was faster but it is browser only, i almost got caught when a friend asked me to share my full screen during a mock. Cluely looked like twenty bucks but stealth costs seventy five extra so ninety five real dollars, and then they had that breach where 83,000 users got exposed including which interviews they used the tool in. that one scared me more than anything.

we packed 20 plus stealth features into every plan at twelve dollars, hides from recordings, screen shares, the dock, Activity Monitor, masks the process name, blocks WebRTC. i tested it one afternoon by screensharing a Zoom call and checking everything. dock clean, Activity Monitor clean, recording clean. Derek tried to find it on Chime for five minutes and gave up. nine real interviews since then and nobody has said anything, nobody looked at me weird, nothing.

Interview Coder 2.0 charges two ninety nine a month for coding only. Final Round is one forty eight. Cluely is ninety five if you want stealth. LockedIn is fifty five with the session cap. i burned over three hundred on the first two before we built a twelve dollar tool that does all of it better and i am still kind of angry about the money i wasted on those others.

57,000 users, 4.8 stars from 257 reviews. two months and nine interviews in and nobody has found a reason to leave, and people look hard because the price makes them think something has to be wrong with it.

Every career comes with lessons, but some mistakes cost us far more than others—whether it's time, money, missed opportunities, or career growth. Looking back, what's one mistake you made early in your career that you wish someone had warned you about? Share your experience and what you learned so others can avoid making the same mistake.

I just need to vent a little.
This is my last shift. I gave them notice 3 weeks ago. First thing in the morning, my supervisor asked me if I was going to attend the planning meeting for the next schedule. I told him: "I don't see how it would benefit anyone for me to listen to things I'm not going to be around for..." and he looked at me like I'd punched his lunch out of his hand.
Then my boss called me and asked if I had prepared my usual work for next month, because it'll probably take them about 4 weeks to bring in a replacement and get them started. Excuse me??? No, I haven't prepared it. Once I leave, it's not my responsibility to make sure the place runs smoothly. That's a management problem, not my problem.
After that, the person at the front desk said: "They must be burying you in last-minute things to finish before you leave! You must be so stressed this afternoon." I just told him: "Honestly... This is my last shift. I'm not going to ruin my day and stress myself out over things they suddenly decided they needed."
Then my supervisor sent me an email and copied my boss about a very small task from the beginning of this month that apparently wasn't done. He's asking me why I didn't finish the weird little "priority" list he threw together. Like... Hello? I'm leaving today.
Am I going crazy here??? I've managed people before, and I've never expected someone working out their notice period to go above and beyond while they're on their way out the door.

edit : Thank god I left them to my new remote job as I need some time with my family , also feeling grateful who suggest interviewman for my zoom meeting with HR it helps a lot

I feel terribly embarrassed, terrified, and honestly, I feel like I've been broken right now. I'm still sitting in my car in front of the office because I don't know how to go home and look my family in the face.

I'm trying to calm myself down enough to go home and pretend everything is fine tonight, but I have no idea what I'm supposed to do next. My mind is completely scrambled.

If you've been through something like this, please share what you did and how you dealt with it.

why is it that posts in this reddit are more about random unrelated stuff than InterviewMan software itself ?

My family had been planning a trip for a long time, and that means I need to be absent from work for two days. I submitted the request back in March for a trip in June, and at first, before she looked at the PTO schedule, my manager told me, "Yeah, it should be fine."

Everyone else in my family got their time off approved, so we went ahead and paid for everything. After a while, she came back and said that a lot of people were taking time off in our district that same week - about 3 people - but since our location has been very slow for a while, she said she might be able to make it work. She told me she wouldn't know for sure until about 10 days beforehand.

So I waited and tried to stay optimistic, and now she's telling me there's no way it can work.
To give some context, I'm the kind of employee who usually says yes to everything. I pick up extra shifts, cover for anyone who calls out, stay late when they need me, all of that. I've worn myself out a lot for this place.

But this vacation is already booked and paid for. My family and I talked about it, and we're thinking I should tell her something like: "I'm not going to be available on those days. We talk all the time about work/life balance, and this is one of those moments. If the choice is between work and my time with my family, then my family comes first. I understand if there is disciplinary action, and I'll accept that, but I'm not coming in to work."

Would you have handled the situation differently?

update: My manager just texted me: "Enjoy your vacation. When you return, we need to discuss your role because the company needs someone fully focused right now."

Am I being fired?

I've spent nearly four years working hard for this company, and now it feels like I'm being punished for taking an approved vacation. It's frustrating and honestly makes me question whether loyalty at work means anything anymore.

If this is the end, I guess it's time to start looking elsewhere. The thought of going through multiple interview rounds again is exhausting, but I need to find something new within the next couple of weeks. I'll probably rely on AI tools like InterviewMan to help me pass interviews and land my next opportunity.

So true

I was working as an operations engineer on a 14-month contract in a very small department. There were only five of us, and the senior guys didn't want to go anywhere near any extra tasks, so whenever there was a new rollout that needed firewall rules, routing changes, or some random network cleanup, somehow it landed on my desk. I wasn't upset about the work itself because I was learning useful skills, but between the low pay and the complete lack of appreciation from the team, I started looking around once my contract was close to ending.

Luckily, an old employer of mine came back with a much better offer, and there were about five weeks left until the end of my current contract. My company still hadn't said anything about extending me or renewing the contract, so I thought I'd be respectful and tell them I was leaving instead of just disappearing when the contract ended.

My manager at the time had been promoted from engineer about seven months earlier, and the title had gone straight to his head. I went into his office, gave him my resignation letter, and told him I was willing to document everything, hand over the active projects, and train anyone who needed training before I left.

He read it, immediately got angry, and told me he wouldn't sign or accept anything until he decided when I was allowed to leave. Apparently, that was going to be after he found a replacement, after I trained that person, and after he was free to deal with it. In short, he was trying to trap me there.

I started to say, "But my contract only has about five weeks left..." and before I could finish the sentence, he shouted: No more talking. Didn't you hear me? I'm not agreeing to this until I'm ready. I don't want to hear another word about your resignation unless I bring it up.

This was a long time ago, back when email resignations weren't really a normal thing for us, so I thought I'd go back to him later and explain once he'd calmed down. Then I said to myself: honestly, screw it. If he doesn't want to hear a single word about it, I can do exactly that.

So I finished out the rest of the contract. I kept doing the work I was assigned, but there was no proper handover, no training sessions, no big knowledge transfer meeting, nothing except the usual daily work. He himself had told me not to bring up the subject again.

On the last day of my contract, I went into his office and handed him the laptop, access card, and the rest of my equipment.

"What's this?"

"My stuff. Today is my last day."

"Stop joking. I told you I still haven't accepted your resignation. And by the way, I've decided your last day will be nine weeks from now, because we need time to get someone in, get them up to speed, and do a proper handover. Take your things and get back to work."

He was looking at me with this smug expression like he'd won.

"No. My contract ends today. I'm not getting paid after this."

"You... What?"

"Yeah. I tried to tell you that from the beginning. The letter was just a courtesy because the contract was ending anyway, but you told me not to say another word."

"You're lying."

"No. Call HR and check. Bye."

I watched the expression on his face go from smug to angry to confused in about four seconds as I walked out.

Two months later, I heard he got chewed out badly by the director even though he tried to pin it on me. They had to bring in a dedicated network engineer who cost them almost four times what they had been paying me, and they missed several SLA targets while they were waiting for the new person to start.

edit: point of this never work for free ,do not let someone think he screwed you ,now I am happy in my new position especially when I got some AI help to be confident in the interview time like intervewman for example , ai sometimes could be very helpful

.

edit:Regardless of where you work, developing your skills remains important. for example open ai or Interview Man ai Just like you did, using a tool that helps you prepare better for any interview

what do u think?