#595 How to Answer AI Questions in Job Interviews

0:00Hi, I'm Sarah and I'm Helen and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast where every week we borrow some brilliance from letters, objects, people, places, something we've read. Those ones feel like a very standard episode now. Just a book. I'm actually looking forward to a book episode. I've not done a book episode for a while. And what we try to do is turn that curiosity into useful action for you in your career. So today we are borrowing brilliance from our listeners. it's exciting i'm not sure i'm friends with based on what we're about to have to do okay let us just explain this um so quite a lot of our listeners have been in touch we have whatsapp groups we have linkedin conversations with people um about interviews and what they're having to prepare for in interviews and what advice we've got for them um and it's particularly around the context of ai ai in interviews and so we went out and asked our audience what questions about AI are you getting asked in interviews and we we I am going to put those questions to Sarah to see how she would respond now the reason we think this is useful for you is AI is having a much bigger impact both on the experience of the interview which I would love to talk about a little bit and then also the what you're what you need to be prepared to answer in an interview and I think it is much better to be informed about this than being in an interview and thinking oh yeah that noise that internal noise I don't have an answer to this but if you even if you are not going for an interview right now like I don't know I don't know where my next interview is I still think these questions that I'm going to put to Sarah are actually just useful questions to ask yourself to be honest like if you haven't got answers to these questions I think you might be missing a trick with what I could do for you right now.

1:52And I would say having done some interviewing, which I definitely prefer to what I'm about to have to do, which is be interviewed. I have been asking some questions about AI. You know, how do you use AI in your leadership? How's AI changed how you work? And people don't find them that easy to answer. Interesting. And so I also wonder, and you'll probably hear the same from me today. I'm not saying that you're now going to hear some incredible case today but I then wonder whether if you have got good answers that helps you to stand out um because actually I think people are really interested in you know specifically like what does this look like to you you having a point of view on this and I think if you haven't it's such a it's having such a big impact on our work it feels like a real miss but then I was actually quite surprised having done some interviewing I I was like, oh, people maybe weren't as, I don't know, clued up or experimenting, perhaps as much as I would have imagined.

2:48And that was both proper interviews. But I've also been doing some like listening boards with people of loads of different ages. And I've had the same experience, like very mixed. Sometimes people blow me away when I ask about AI. And then sometimes people are like, oh, yeah, I just don't really just don't really use it. I'm like, oh, wow. I feel like I should caveat as well. before I interview Sarah with these questions, I think it is unlikely, unless you are going for a job where, you know, like it's got AI in the title kind of thing, that level. I think it's unlikely that you're going to, I'm going to ask Sarah for back-to-back questions about AI.

3:20And I don't think that's going to happen, but I think you should be prepared to answer. There'll probably be one, right? Yeah, there'll probably be one. In every interview? These questions have come from our listeners. So they've actually been asked them. Yes. In fact, let me give credit to those people. So I put a request out on LinkedIn. I said, what, you know, what questions are you being asked? and Ed, Edeje, Amy, Karen and Yojesh all came back with these are things that I have been asked that I, you know. That's who I need to blame for today's questions. So before we get onto the questions, I wanted to zoom out for a moment and think beyond just what you get asked, how might AI be changing the interview experience?

3:57And I've got three areas that I think is just useful for people to be aware of. So the first thing is who interviews you? so because of ai and now actually your first interview might not be with a person are you real is this you is you telling me you're a hologram i'm a hologram imagine how efficient i could be if i had like helengrams everywhere that'd be great no it sounds like that would not be great cancel that idea uh but in all seriousness um it might not be a real person you might have that kind of like an avatar based interview as part of the first screening process um or the ai might answer ask you follow-up questions and it's just it might be worth practicing with some of those tools to make that easier um people using that already yeah yeah for interviews yeah actual and so if people want to i knew they'd be using it for like screening of cvs and those kind of things but i didn't realize our based interviews as part of the um yeah it's part of the process not sure i feel about that well i think it's to the point that we're seeing a lot from people about it's so hard to get through this stuff now because first of all lots of people are using ai to generate their cvs yeah and so actually getting it past like ai filters is harder when there's people are just all using and also apparently ai favors ai right i didn't okay yeah so i read something about that the weekend so if you've used ai for like your covering letter your cvs i think this or something on Radio 4.

5:23It feels quite Radio 4. And so the AI almost like has a bias towards itself. Oh gosh. I know. So you're like, oh. Yeah, I know. So that is just, I think it's an interesting, I mean, it must feel really hard. So you've got the CV thing to get through, like the CV hurdle and lots of people applying for lots of jobs and using kind of AI to help that to happen. Then you might hit the next hurdle, which is like an avatar based interview, which you're like, when do I get to speak to a human? about what I can humanly do for you. That's the process. So that's the first thing to be prepared for. The second is, even when you get to speak to a human about what you humanly can do, you might be asked to do more than you've done before at this stage.

6:07So what interviewers are doing is because there's all this like AI going into the application process, they want to test that you've actually got the skills, that you've actually done the thing that your CV says. And so there's a lot more like case studies. Yes. And those sort of... I have seen that. Scenarios, what would you do if, problem solving tasks. Again, like this is not just a conversation. This is like you've actually got to do a bit of application, a bit of effort. You've already gone through all these. Not just can you tell me about a time when. Yeah. It's more here is the situation.

6:37Like we did for the Adaptability podcast that we've just recorded where I was like, okay, here's a scenario, Helen. Like what are you going to do? So you're more sort of on the spot thinking. Yes. more critical thinking and also more ambiguity like it's harder to prepare for yeah just you can probably imagine some of the situations or things stories and examples you want to bring up in an interview I always think if you prepare you can do a good job of that but if someone just throws in right here's a curveball or here's a situation you're like wow it's a lot of on the spot reaction I just saw a video on LinkedIn it was in the context of people applying for creative jobs and it was it was basically like a slight um satire on this situation of going through all of these things and getting through to like the 10th round and someone saying oh we've got another case study for you to do and the person just going no thanks you know because it's just so hard to get through all of this because of the like the new hurdles that ai is putting in place for people and then the last one is about what happens after the interview which i think is really interestingly so a lot of interviews now you might have ai running as a transcript because other people might be part of that decision making process and so you know they are matching what you have said in a room to the criteria for the role so that they have a more objective um decision i can see as being quite valuable i agree and it might mean that that can be shared with other people so people that aren't the conversation can be part of it that the thing to be aware of is if you if your energy and your gravitas is part of what you bring that doesn't it's not like at the end of the transcription it goes she had great energy Helen also had lots of gravitas and charisma and she could bring it doesn't it doesn't it's not sort of saying what it's seeing it's just saying what you said yeah though the other upside because I did do some interviews recently where we didn't do that and I would have liked to have done is I realized that it's really hard to take brilliant notes and listen really actively and intently and also in a way where you're trying to make someone feel comfortable when they you want someone to do their best right when you're interviewing them and so I would have really appreciated having that like transcript come back to but I still think I want to do the scoring myself um but you know like I might have referred back to things also you know because people's facts versus feet like feelings and bias and stuff I think it might reduce some of that because you go back to well what did Sarah say in response to this um and often when I was writing notes I'd write specific phrases that someone had said that I thought I was like oh I want to come back to that I really liked that that point but also it's really hard to remember you know when you're kind of talking to kind of lots of different people um so I I think like half of that would be helpful but then I think you still need the there are like you said there are probably some things it could score on and then there are some things that it couldn't because it's just but maybe it could if it was also video you know if it was videoing you yeah that's not that hard to imagine right and then it was like it probably then could look at energy gravitas and body language yeah oh my god I know I know so I do think um practicing could be useful there are two there might be more than two but two tools that I know of where you can practice being interviewed by an avatar and you can get live feedback um not just on ai based just skills interviewing but actual general you can kind of go through that experience and just get some feedback uh one is called real talk um oh yeah which is toby's um tool and then the second one is called udely.ai um and you kind of put in what role you put in what role you want and it sort of interviews you as if you were going for that role um toby's has quite a lot of flexibility because you can kind of design the situation and scenario but it might I think it's probably just worth practicing and then getting some feedback otherwise the first time you're getting feedback is it's quite a high I also like um James Healy who's sort of one of our friends he always talks about the difference between practice and rehearsal and you can practice what you might say in um an interview you know you might jot some things down or be like oh I want to talk about that but rehearsing because that's an avatar that you're talking to you've sort of got to rehearse properly it feels closer to then the situation you're going to find yourself in and I do always find the closer to rehearsal I am versus sort of low pressure practice that's where you really you know spot gaps in what you're saying tell yourself you're like that's rubbish I went on for too long there um but really I'm mainly delaying you asking me questions so you should probably ask me questions i was just gonna say these questions i'm gonna ask you we will put them in the pod sheet i will also put the links to udely and real talk in the pod sheet we always put the pod sheets in our newsletter um which you can sign up to on our website um and we'll put the links in the show notes or just go to amazing if.com and you'll find everything on the podcast page so i have a question i have four questions um i also wanted to because i think the answers to the questions are interesting and insightful but the reality is I think that the interviewers are looking for a specific set of skills you know like in in the question they are looking for some things so because everyone's answers be slightly different so they're not judging you on oh you've used it on that project or that project it's what I think it's what sort of skills are you demonstrating in your responses so for each question I've got what is it that they're likely to be looking for.

12:12So we can assess your answers in the context of that. Have you got an AI running to judge me? No, I've just got my brain. Your brain. Great. I'll take that for today. That's sufficient for now. These are real questions, so I haven't tried to make them harder. They're just real questions. Here you go. How do you use AI in your work today? So I use AI in two ways. One is very much about experimenting, sort of low pressure, playing, trying things out, failing quite frequently. So to give you an example, I recently tried to build a profiler around adaptability that would assess your adaptability on lots of different dimensions and ideally give you some actions.

12:56And I used three or four different tools, Claude, which is usually my favorite. I used the Microsoft one, Microsoft Forms, because that got recommended. and you know I just couldn't quite make it work so I think part of my time is definitely I'm just going to experiment I'm going to try it out I'm not too worried about the outcome and then and I think the second one is increasing more for me now just as part of my day where you know you've added AI into what you already do so if I think about how I prepare for a podcast now versus how I prepared for a podcast a year ago I use Claude really as a thought partner but I also try to mix up when Claude becomes part of my process because I'm very mindful of critical thinking and I don't want to lose my critical thinking skills I think that's one of the things that makes me good at what I do so sometimes I will use Claude to critique me sometimes I might use Claude for first thoughts but I do I usually my filter is I want it to sort of start with me like what do I think?

13:58And then maybe if I get stuck or if I'm looking for references or I'm trying to discover something that I'd not discovered before, I do find it sparks my curiosity. So that's more of an example of how I'm adding it in. A really practical, boring one is I sometimes find things hard to find in the company that we work in. I wouldn't say our shared drive or our organizational systems are really sophisticated. So sometimes I'm like, well, where is that document or who was that person and really good prompting in co-pilot, which I've worked quite hard on my prompting skills, definitely like makes that faster.

14:34You know, rather than a sort of manual, oh, can anyone help me or me looking for ages? I can go into co-pilot and say, I'm looking for this document. Nine times out of 10, it finds it super fast. So one probably is more about experimenting and the other is more about efficiency and effectiveness. Nice. I mean, there's general interview stuff there. I like the little endings and that was what I had in my head that was exactly like the efficiency and effectiveness is exactly what I had in my head that one wasn't quite as bad I think that one was okay that's what they might be looking for in a moment my Helen reflections were if I was interviewing you what I would hear uh was um a wide range of uh tools so that that I would be like okay she's not just she's not just kind of skilled in one domain yeah um I would hear quite a wider range of use cases so and and and I'd also hear useful cases as in she has used different tools in different contexts and actually that is quite useful for me because who doesn't have issues with shared drive and finding stuff but you know actually if you can because some of your use cases might be quite specific to a project you worked on but if you've got like a universal use case that could benefit other people I think that's quite a good way of thinking about it um so what they're looking for practical experience okay tick uh productivity you did the you said efficiency and effectiveness yeah i think that so how could it improve you uh judgment you mentioned critical thinking like when do i use it when not we might come on to that soon again um and then what they're looking for how you're combining ai with your own expertise so you said it was a thought partner yeah okay i think you'd get four ticks thanks thanks four ticks for that one are you are you ready for your next one okay that's built my confidence Okay, great, great.

16:17Interviewing with me should always feel like a positive experience. Okay, next question. How do you know when AI is wrong and how do you increase your confidence in it being right? So I think the risk of AI hallucinating, like making up its own answers, is something that I have noticed and I think learned a lot more about in the last six months. So I think when I first started using AI, probably like lots of us, I was just using chat GPT and it's a bit like the world west you're just like oh wow like look at what it can do and you you know almost maybe instinctively go oh well it must be right like it's giving me answers and then you start to realize that's not what it's doing so there are a few things I think have helped me one I think being very specific in the prompts that you give it um so when I'm doing work I if I'm asking it for recommendations or research I will always say um you know peered reviewed research sometimes credible research to make sure it's like acts as a filter so I think my prompts act as a filter and then I always remember a really good bit of career advice that someone called James Watley gave me uh where he talks about um always go the extra click so you know it'd be really easy let's say I was researching for a podcast to be like those two articles look great not even gonna they've summarized it already in the AI I don't need to click on it I always do the extra click because I want to be useful and I want to be trusted and I think to do that you have to still you have to still do your due diligence I actually saw something recently in the FT they did a poll um is AI making your learning better or is it making like your learning like lazier um so I actually said I voted for better but I was massively in the minority so 30 % was people saying better because I think it is making my learning better I think it's I'm discovering new things and I'm curious and I feel like it's yeah I'm finding kind of new ways to learn but 70 % of people are like oh no it's making people lazy and I wonder whether that's also sometimes the we're not questioning it enough I think you can't see it as truth you can see it as a prompt or a spark or something to kind of dive into more but they're the kind of two things for me um so my reflections on that question were it it was quite good because you talked about six months ago so that showed a a depth of like time experience like this isn't something I've just used today so if I was interviewing you I'd be like oh actually she's been using this for a while her experience of it has evolved you are using some AI language so prompting um hallucinations are things that someone who is using ai would would kind of know some of those words um i was trying to think what else i liked in your when oh i your curiosity because you brought in an article that you had read i it makes me think oh this is not just about you know she's kind of aware of some of the other implications of ai and she's kind of reading around it not just using it like a robot at work so do you know what happened to me then though I forgot the question you know like you know I always think how can that ever happen yeah it happened to me then so I knew roughly as in I knew what I was trying to say but three quarters of the way through that I was like I can't remember the exact question that she asked yeah which is why I always think in an interview I mean different people obviously do this in different ways and I have seen this like I think it's okay to like have a notebook you know maybe into just write down even like a couple of keywords would you like a notebook well not right now I wouldn't actually I wouldn't mind a post it to be fair right now but I was just thinking oh I can't I can't quite remember you know like the exact phrase you use whereas for the first one I think I really found my flow for that one I didn't feel like I ended as confidently yeah um and because I think I ended the first one really well yeah still I was still like oh okay like maybe more like a six or a seven out of 10 but i just towards the end my brain was a bit panicky i was like i can't remember what much we're talking about well i mean i'll do some builds in a second but i think to give you your credit you are being interviewed in a fake interview situation on a podcast that people are listening and watching like so it's it's so to give you a bit of credit for i was trying to do it really like seriously yeah um my kind of like maybe even better ifs on that one if someone has asked that question how do you know when ai is wrong and how do you increase your confidence in it being right that's right that was the question um there is some kind of interesting research that has come out about like a positivity bias so it will tell you that you're right you know so the yeah and i know that actually because it's always really nice to me yeah and so actually maybe say act as a um act as a critical you know rather than kind of like yes that's a great idea sarah you should definitely do that which has a positivity bias the other thing that I think you you can do to test whether it's wrong is you can take the output from one tool like put it into another and you can put it into another and say critique this and it can sometimes reduce it can kind of you get them to test each other yes it's just um I didn't think what you said was wrong I just think there's no that would have been a good build build those in um two more questions we're good oh actually just on that one what they tend to be looking for with that one uh critical thinking yeah uh back to the judgment that comes up quite a lot accountability like what can you do okay yeah you're owning it yeah you're owning it um and how you fact check and verify ai outputs okay so it's just does your answer tick tick those boxes um okay where does ai add value in your work and where are its limits so i think in the work that we do around learning the our focus has always been on how can we help people with their self-awareness and then use that self-awareness to prompt action and this is why I do think AI helps people with learning because I think now AI is part of that process not separate to that process but part of that process so where people get stuck with maybe some self-awareness on actually I don't think I've got any strengths or they you know they're struggling to kind of see their strengths actually AI could you could get AI to do 10 questions to give you some quick clues as to what your strengths might be so you could get a quick start on your strengths or maybe you do have a sense of what your values might be but you don't know how to turn those values into valuable actions as part of the work that you do and so when we did the skill sprint last year so we had about 10 ,000 people do a skill sprint with us and that was all about adding AI into your learning and your career development and I think that's where almost I can be most useful because I'm not an expert in AI I think I'm just a user just like everybody else is um and the thing that I think that I'm most interested in is those core principles of what we're trying to support people with which is like useful and practical career development I think AI has a really helpful role to play about to play in that particularly around you know we're always interested in like democratizing development and I know not everybody has the technology but there is some level of AI that most people can access and it's free and it's there when you need it and it's there in the moment and we can't all talk to our managers we can't all have mentors but we can ask AI to act as a manager or act as a mentor and so I do tend to take quite a positive view I think of what AI can do as part of the a part of being useful um but with that kind of caveat of i still think you have to be kind of thoughtful and intentional and that's one of the things i think we saw in the skill sprint is people started to ask us some really thought-provoking questions like well which of these ai tools has the least environmental impact and i think you know at that time i was thinking i don't think i'd ask myself that question um how do these companies run where are they storing their data what's the privacy you know these kind of questions that are now kind of coming up so I think for us it's not about seeing AI as something separate it's really just about for the learning that we design for the learning that we deliver and just generally being useful for people in their squiggly careers how can AI make that easier smarter and also when what not to do and I think from us trying things out and sharing things and being quite open in our approach like having conversations like this I just hope we're all sort of like learning together and I think that takes away some of the some of the fear I think there's always quite a lot of fear around technology more fear on technology there are some other things um but it's often not as scary once you get started or when you learn with with other people so that's I'm a big fan of adding it in rather than seeing it as something separate um so my reflections my reflections on that one are that i think the strongest thing that you did there was you shared a perspective on ai and actually it doesn't really matter what your perspective is right it just matters i think that you have so your perspective was i'm actually quite positive about it your perspective could have been um i'm actually quite concerned that people use ai without considering the environmental impacts of it like everyone's allowed a perspective but I think having a perspective is strong I also liked how you didn't start with AI so the question was where does AI add value and what are it where are its limits what you started with is the purpose of the job that you do and I think unless your job is AI I think you should start with well the purpose of the job that I do is two and you know you talked about learning someone else talked about I don't know selling marketing customer service whatever it is um and then you know how ai helps me to do that better is so i think start with your job don't always start with ai have a clear perspective yeah i think one of the things you possibly could have done more there is talked a bit more about limits i think for example one of the limits in our context is that what ai can't do is it can't create connection between people like we what we want to do one of the things really important is that we bring communities together where they can share stories and learn from each other and the value in that is increased accountability um when they're trying to take action framing you know what can't it do in your context what can't it do or what can't it do yet so it could record a version of this podcast i'm sure but you know you like but it wouldn't have us it doesn't have our brains it doesn't have us going wrong it doesn't have me answering some of these questions slightly better than others it would just do the perfect version and so that's quite a good question the other thing I saw today which you know about having a point of view and a perspective uh Claudia Harris look at Claudia on LinkedIn um who runs Makers company called Makers she has just posted something brilliant maybe a future episode but worth reading now where she has shared four perspectives on what AI could look like in the future and she's used sort of examples of like okay it could be a bit like the internet um it's just become part of all of our lives jobs have changed but there's sort of and but there's still jobs but it's not actually it's not massively rewired yeah the kind of everything um you could say it's really changed the world but you know like the end is quite a pot that's quite a positive one and then another one is like electricity so there's she's done these four um i just read today and i was like oh a immediate safe you know when you read something and I was like you could just read her post and then she's diving into each of those over a few days and you could take any one of those perspectives even if you just talked about that right as in who are you following on LinkedIn yeah who you're finding interesting who's got an interesting perspective and be like oh I really appreciate Claudia's like I follow Claudia because I think she has a really interesting perspective on AI she knows the world better than I do but also she's very she offers lots of different views and she's almost a bit like well here are some things for you to go away and think about rather than being like this is the answer so I appreciate that who are you following or what's a book you've read or a podcast you listen to be prepared yes because there'll be a lot of questions around how are you doing it like what tools are you using but actually that's an addition learning from yeah gosh my brain got so distracted when you were talking about those different scenarios because I was like is one scenario WALL-E you know in one of the film have you seen that film yeah you know when they're like are they all in a spaceship and they've like outsourced so much of their life that they're like little dumplings on little cars that are automatically driving around there is I mean not that she's not gone with that but there is some of them are more optimistic than others I think it's fair to say but also brilliantly talking about borrowed brilliance on borrowed brilliance in when she's then diving into those scenarios she's then linking to the people or person who've done the work on that so then you could listen to them or you could read their work so you know you could be if you if you were like well i this is the one that i find attractive or appealing or i believe in uh she's then gone and then here's how you learn more about it yeah very useful um are you ready for your i'm ready for my final question okay your last question how do you think ai will change this role so you're gonna have to imagine what job you're going for okay um how how do you think ai will change this role this team or the way that we work so let's take each of those into turn and i might start with the last one i think ai will change how we work because we do have lots of manual repeatable processes that are part of us designing and delivering big learning programs around the world so that'll be things like gathering information data that we need metrics that we use and actually I was talking to Anne Law the brilliant author of Tiny Experiments and she was saying like try and spot those like repeatable predictable tasks and I've heard that from kind of a few different people and so I think we have those in our company and most of those have not yet been automated automated or made better by AI if actually any of them not kind of fully I think we're kind of at the start of that process so in terms of how we work as a company I think that's our first opportunity because then I'm really excited about then what that would then free people up to be doing because most of that time you're not using people's like the best part of people's brain it's good attention to detail but there's probably more interesting exciting things that people could be doing and that could make their jobs better then when I think about um us working as a team I actually think one of the risks of kind of technology and AI generally in teams is that people could become more isolated so almost like rather than talking to a person you talk to Claude which does actually happen like I do that um I'm not sure I talked to a person in the first place but that's probably because I'm more introverted um but you know our team are the way that our team so not just our ways of working but our team are all remote um but I also know that one of the consistent values or kind of features that's really important to all of them is connection and so I'm one of the risks I think sometimes of like AI is you're sort of relying on that which can take for maybe doing jobs maybe in place of conversations that you might have had before and it actually reduces connection so it's just a risk that I have in my mind particularly for our team um and rather than seeing it as like an either or or we either embrace AI or we sort of or we or we don't I just wonder if there's opportunities to like bring those things together so as a team we've been doing AI learning in some of our team meetings how would you use granola how could you use Canva AI and different people in our team have been doing those kind of live learning and then we've all been having a go and I'm like oh that's sort of the best of our team everybody's connected we're learning from each other and kind of learning together feels very like safe for everybody it doesn't matter that people are at different levels potentially of like learning um but you're also sort of spending time together and so I feel being really intentional as a team about like how we all get better and learn and grow in the context of AI and just looking out for that risk of like loneliness because we know that's also a big trend that we've seen in other companies and I think that will be particularly harmful for our team and then for me one of the things that I've started to think a bit about is how AI might change some of the content that we're creating around career development so we did an experiment recently which I sort of nudged along a bit because I was really interested to see and this I say as somebody who loves branding and tone of voice and that to be consistent is what would we do or what would it look like if our pod sheet so the summary of our podcasts was created by Claude versus created by us because that's a something that we care about we put a lot of effort into every week and you know almost rather than thinking about that or even like experimenting behind the scenes we actually put that out on LinkedIn and almost got people to just like guess which one is AI but more sort of like what what are your reactions to each of those and I found that really interesting because people really liked the design from Everyone knew the Claude one was the Claude one.

33:43I think you can sort of spot an AI design, I think, from a mile off. But people liked the simplicity. They liked the white space. And you're like, okay, well, there's got to be something we can kind of learn from that. People did miss the Sarah and Helen tone, as I think they were describing it, which I felt quite proud of. But equally, there were some things about how the data and the information was laid out that people appreciated. There was probably less copy. It was simpler. The AI version, probably a bit easier to read. and so that was just like one small example but I think continuing to challenge ourselves on kind of being like we create a lot of content where can we be most useful where can we be uniquely useful maybe that's the Sarah and Helen tone and the practicality of what we do and actually where can AI help us in ways where it's not going to have a really big impact on like the quality of what we're doing maybe it's design maybe it's in pulling things together maybe it's in reading the transcripts from the top 20 most popular podcasts in the last year and pulling out insights from that and I feel like there's a lot more that we could do in that which would make us even more useful one other example is we know I always like AI to solve problems a problem we know people have is finding our stuff like how do i find an episode on this or how do i find which book is better you coach you or learn like a lobster for this challenge and i just wonder whether there's some work we could do with ai on helping people to like solve that problem so i think the thing i really want to do more individually with like the job that i do the job that i want to do um is to connect the dots between the problems we want to solve and like how ai could be part of solving that problem uh nice nice conclusion i think i ended that one a bit better um so i what are my reflections on that my first reflection is so just a reminder the question how do you think ai will change this role this team or the way that we work um my first reflection were there was a nice balance between when you said that the way we work kind of excitement about the efficiency so people can use their time on other things with a sort of there could be a risk around the team i think it's quite you need to be balanced about this because there are pros and there are cons and actually to sort of be i think present a balanced response to that in an interview is is useful um my it's interesting when you said how i will change this role my one little watch out there was it ended up being a little bit tactical yeah it was about a pod sheet and actually what you could do a zoom out a little bit more you know if you're being asked that question you're going from the work day to day yeah the team who does it the future and so that's probably more in the and actually you know the whole context for career development could change and and quite excited about you know there's maybe like a more zoomed out so for people preparing it might be worth them thinking about almost like time horizons so yeah how does it change it today what how could it change the work my team does in the next six months in the next one to five years where could this go and just say no one's got a crystal ball but they're you know this this i'm a lawyer and maybe you know there's a future where lawyers are doing a very different role because ai is doing a lot of that for them or yeah i think if i was answering i was happy with there's like basically three parts to that question i was actually happy with parts one and parts two and funny enough it was like the my role bit where I was like I think I what I if I was answering that again I would start off with the purpose of my role is or within my role well within this role because you're imagining you're in a role within this role I'm imagining that a key priority would be you know a key priority a key problem to solve or purpose I think priority problems and purpose and then you could go and then this is how I can imagine AI changing like one of those whereas I think I was a bit like what do I do or like yeah or because of the role that we did I was like I was struggling a bit with like imagine imagining that but I think that was a much better way to then talk about AI in a role as a marketing manager as someone who's an accountant you know you could then start to imagine I hit some accountants all the time now about how you know how ai is like it is actually genuinely transforming how people use spreadsheets i think you could you could bring it to life then in a more interesting way using those like three p's as a filter i would just say i think people are probably looking for two things right they're looking for the skills the skills in this one are curiosity and strategic thinking can they hear those skills demonstrated and then they're probably just look they're kind of interested in how you're actually doing so i almost think you don't want to fall in love with the way you're doing it today because they just they just want to hear that it's real but you're doing it a real way i actually think just being aware of like in that kind of future one they're looking for that curiosity that strategic thinking about it rather than i'm using a tactical day today um so i have one last one question for you which is less of a one that you need to really think about answering but i thought was a good one that came from sarah reese in our community before i do that very last one what are your reflections on your answering of those questions um it wasn't quite as bad as it wasn't quite as bad as i'd anticipated um which is probably a good pause moment to reflect on you know like I have worked quite hard to think about AI in in my job and in my role and I'm I am I've also tried to be a bit more curious about it like I have just read um we are not machines which is Sarah O 'Connor's new book I think I've got just more into it like in the last six months or so I I think I was always a bit like when AI felt very productivity based that's never super appealing to me because it's that's not a world I want to spend loads of time in like if when it first started became a bit more mass it was very like efficiency I was like meh oh you know I'm not that good at that I'm not that interested or that good in that world and then I think it sort of moved on into something kind of bigger more ominous in some ways but like more interesting for me um and also you maybe have more examples than you appreciate right I was like oh I feel like my point of comparison is you and I feel like you are a real early adopter.

39:56Like I've just got on the granola bandwagon and I feel like you've probably got shares in it. You haven't, but you know what I mean? Like you will have been, you usually, you use stuff so fast and so quickly that I think I always feel quite far behind. And then the other person who I really sort of trust and go to like one of my critical friends, he's also like that. And so I'm always like, oh God, I'm not doing enough. I would think I beat myself up about it quite a lot. Whereas actually having gone through it, I'm like, oh no, I've got some good examples and I am trying and I have got more of a point of view than I used to have.

40:28And I feel like I've been working really actively on that, which made answering those questions much better with still some work to do. You know, we talked about language in there and there was some like really good, like you talked about prompting, you talked about hallucinations. One bit of AI language that we didn't mention, it's just, I think it's just a heads up for people just might want to think, if you've not got a story on it, I think it's fine. but just be aware of it is agentic AI which might sound like agents or just the word agentic AI and just I think you if you are going for a role where AI is likely to be part of it I think just having a perspective on what role could agents play or I've prototyped an agent could just be a little just a little bit of extra expertise to add in I don't think that is for everybody and it didn't I don't think it diminished anything that you had said but it's just when we're thinking about emerging AI expertise and language I think this idea of agents and agentic AI is becoming a bit more of the conversation just like early part of the conversation and if you're new to agents um Isabel Buick has a really good video on it on I don't know what it's it's under the FT what's her working it is that yes if it's still branded that but we'll put it in the because that's how I learned that's how I learned about it I watched her video because I was like well that's a good introduction to Agenda KI.

41:50The best use of Agenda KI I've seen is the one that you've created to help us with things like thumbnails. And when we're then figuring out, we record the podcast and then have to work out what to call it. I created myself a great little agent when I was in Vietnam. Did you? Yeah, because I couldn't work out the pricing. My head just would not do the numbers, the exchange rate. And so I created myself a little agent where I just took a photo and then it automatically it whether it was a menu or whatever it just automatically then generated like all the prices like in English for me and then another thing that I couldn't work out was time zones because I think I was trying to do something in the UK something in the US and it had like I had this basically like a Vietnam agent that that translated I have a question for you yeah um so I will ask the stupid question because maybe some of our listeners are thinking the same every time I've looked at agents I can't ever work out how they're different to just using Claude or using GPT so as someone who's actually done them properly why would I use an agent over just asking Claude those questions yeah um so agents can work without you prompting it to do it so in that scenario I was I was telling it to do something so that I'd actually use that agents can like run in the background yes yeah yeah whereas at the moment the interface you're probably using is very prompt dependent it is yeah whereas like an agent will just kind of I think I need to see one.

43:10You know, I need to see one running in the background. I tell you what's a good video. Oh my gosh, this pod sheet is going to have so many good links in. People are probably like, you started off to do with interviews. It's a little bit scary, but I think it is also entertaining. Hannah Fry has done a really good video. I think she creates an agent called Cassandra. Right. Who sets up a business, orders things. It basically just goes. It just runs. It just runs. But I mean. Is it scary? Well, yeah, I mean, Cassandra basically just goes off and runs a business and spends money. Whose money is she spending?

43:44Well, you have to put your card in. So yeah, Hannah's made to put a card in and then it just spends money. And then it also spends money because of the amount of energy it's using to do. So an agent will just go and go and go. That costs money for all of the things that it's doing. That makes sense because that's why I keep seeing things about, oh will managers have to manage agents as well as humans? Yeah. And the fact that agents never switch off and they don't have breaks. So we could have agents that would help us with our research or our PhD for example that are just constantly finding the latest research.

44:19We probably should. My last one for you. Did I get the job? Did I get the job? You're one of many candidates. I've got a case study for you. Depends on the many candidates. You've got three more rounds to go. My last one, I thought this was a really good point. When I asked people what questions have been asked, Sarah Reese responded and said, don't forget you should also be paired with an AI question that you should ask the interviewer. And I'll let you know the ones that came up. But I was wondering if you were in an interview and you were going to ask the interviewer a question about AI, what would be a question that you might ask?

44:56I would ask what AI has been most useful in your role so far. Lovely. Lovely. Also, I just did a squiggly shortcut on questions to ask in interviews. Ah, okay. There you go. That'll be in the mix. Some other ideas on that one. How does your organisation use AI today? How do you help people develop their AI skills? What guidance do you have on using AI responsibly? How do you see AI changing this role over the next few years? So just perhaps be prepared with an AI question that you could ask the interviewer as well. Do you know what I also thought about one minute before we started this? obviously what I should have done was asked AI what questions you were going to ask me but I didn't think to do that I've not quite got to the well you did it pretty well and also it's good to test yourself right but as in I think some people would do that right they'd be like well what will what are the most common questions about AI that come up in interviews and we've got them these are surfers from our lovely squiggly career community and so I think if you prep for these actually there'll be there could be variations on them so we'll put it in the pod sheet as we said before I think because this pod sheet is going to be full of so many things we've got so many things for you to experiment with the questions itself some things that you might want to watch Cassandra going rogue we will also put the pod sheet as a download on our LinkedIn page so if you go to Squiggly Careers on LinkedIn you'll be able to see this and you'll be able to download it there but that's enough interviewing of me for one day we'll back with you again next week for some more borrowed brilliance that won't involve me getting interviewed We hope you found it useful.

46:30I'm back with you again soon. Bye for now. Bye, everyone.