Employ Ready user guide

Employ Ready prepares you for a specific interview rather than interviews in general. The workflow is: paste the job description, review the competencies it implies, then rehearse against them under time pressure.

1. Add the role

Paste the full job posting — responsibilities, requirements and the "about us" section. The parser reads all of it. A three-line summary produces a thin prep plan; the full text produces a specific one.

2. Review the competency list

The app extracts the competencies the posting is really testing: stakeholder management, incident handling, prioritisation under ambiguity, whatever the role emphasises. Edit this list. You know things about the company and the team that a job posting does not say, and every later step is generated from this list.

3. Build your story bank

Before practising answers, collect five to seven experiences you can draw on: a project that went well, one that went badly, a conflict you handled, something you changed your mind about, something you shipped under a deadline. Each story is stored once and can be mapped to several competencies. Interviewers ask different questions; strong candidates re-cut the same small set of real stories to fit them.

4. Draft with a framework

Each question opens with a STAR or CARL scaffold. Fill the fields rather than writing prose. The scaffold exists to stop the most common failure in interview answers: three minutes of context and fifteen seconds of result.

5. Rehearse out loud, on the clock

Move to a mock round once your drafts exist. Reading an answer and saying it are different skills, and only one of them is tested in the interview.

A note on beta

Employ Ready is in development. The parser, the scoring model and the question bank are all still being refined, and we would rather hear that an answer score felt wrong than not hear it. Use the contact page.

A mock round is a timed rehearsal: questions arrive one at a time, you answer out loud, and you get structured feedback afterwards. It is the part of preparation people skip, and the part that changes performance most.

Setting up a round

Choose the length (a 20-minute screen, a 45-minute competency round, or a full loop), and which competencies to draw from. The app selects questions from your role's competency list, mixing ones you have rehearsed with ones you have not — surprise is part of what you are training for.

During the round

The question appears with a timer. Speak your answer aloud; the app records so you can play it back. There is no pause button during a round on purpose. Interviews do not have one, and the recovery skill you need is continuing after a bad sentence, which you cannot practise if you restart.

If you go blank, say so and move on. That is also a rehearsal: "let me take a second to think about that" is a legitimate, professional response and it is worth having said it out loud before you need it.

Feedback afterwards

Each answer is reviewed against three things interviewers reliably mark:

• Structure — is there a situation, an action and a result, in that order, without a three-minute preamble?
• Specificity — named systems, real numbers, actual decisions rather than "we improved things".
• Outcome — did you say what changed, and can you defend the figure?

You also get length and filler-word statistics from your recording. Most first-round answers run long; the target for a competency answer is roughly ninety seconds to two minutes.

Reviewing your recordings

Play back one answer per round — the worst one. Listening to yourself is uncomfortable and it is also the fastest correction available. Note one change, then run the round again.

Building a routine

Two short rounds in the days before an interview beat one long session the night before. Rotate competencies so you are not only rehearsing the answers you already like giving.