Interview anxiety may jeopardize an individual's chances of getting hired even if they are a suitable candidate for the job. According to researchers, the stress and anxiety associated with job interviews can affect a candidate’s cognition/memory, body language, facial expression, voice tone/volume and eye contact during competitive interviewing process. Interview anxiety is not a good predictor of later job performance, which means that companies can also pass on qualified candidates. Therefore, interview anxiety is a problem for both the candidates and the organizations.
"State anxiety is negatively related to interview performance"
- Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science (2018)
User Research Methods: A total of 8 user interviews and 8 observational studies were conducted.
Competitive Analysis: Current software applications we identified as competitors in this space either focused solely on reducing general anxiety or interview prep with the help of mock interviews. These competitors include VirtualSpeech, MockMate and Calm.
Identifying User needs and Features: Detailed personas, and customer journey map were created to better understand and visualize how our product will fulfill the needs of the target user.
Create, Ideate and Usability Testing: Prototypes were developed based on the findings from our research study.
We recruited eight adults for the observational study and eight different adults for the interview study via CDM/COMM Participant Pool for Research at DePaul University. For both the observation and interview phases, we observed participants through Zoom meetings where they gave their verbal consent to allow audio and video recording. In our observational study we asked participants to demonstrate how they would find resources to help a friend who is anxious about an upcoming interview. For our interviews, we asked participants a variety of warm up questions, deep focus questions and retrospective questions.Those questions covered their experiences with job interview anxiety, how they prepared for interviews, anxiety management and general challenges associated with interviewing.
Current software applications we identified as competitors in this space either focused solely on reducing general anxiety or interview prep with the help of mock interviews. Those apps include VirtualSpeech, MockMate and Calm.
Virtual Speech is an online and VR based training system that allows users to practice public speaking and general communication skills in a group settings, conference environments or one-on-one meetings. The software uses chat GPT and existing information online about various companies to help users practice common interview questions. The software does not directly address interview anxiety.
MockMate is a job interview AI simulator that allows users to practice typical behavioral questions that are asked in interviews. The application then uses an AI algorithm to provide feedback with a rubric related to the job description, answer structure and attitude of the candidate’s responses. The application is fairly new and also does not directly address interview anxiety.
Calm is a mobile app used to manage stress and anxiety in general. It provides users with guided timed meditation, mood check-ins and sounds to promote more relaxed sleep. However, the app does not correlate these techniques to address anxiety associated with interviewing and communicating
For our observation we utilized the contextual inquiry framework to sort our findings and identified how participants competed the task. Additionally, we coded interviews using Atlast.ti and prepared an affinity diagram in Figma. This helped us identify the common patterns participants used to manage anxiety and research information for interviews.
We organized our findings from the observation and interviews into four categories that describe how participants would take boost confidence during the interviewing process and reduce anxiety associated with interviewing: (1) The Right State of Mind; (2) Support Systems; (3) Multiple Sources and Practice; (4) AI and other Tools.
Participants had mentioned various strategies they used or would recommend to a friend to mentally prepare prior interview to get into a calm state. One participant in the observations recommended listening to music to help with interview anxiety. Another participant in the interviews stated "a 10-minute meditation exercise or taking a walk helps me clear my head and grounds me in some way".
50%(4/8) interview participants mentioned researching other helps them alleviate anxiety. Three of those participants mentioned utilizing Youtube to research about the experiences of others, while one participant mentioned recently using TikTok.
75%(6/8) observation participants were willing to help their friends practice answering interview questions as well to better support them and alleviate their anxiety, this demonstrated the strength of community support.
During the observation majority(6/8) of participants demonstrated referencing multiples sources to search information about a position or company. These sources included LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora and Glassdoor. A participant from the interviews mentioned "Reddit and Quora provide insights into current interview trends".
50%(4/8) of the interview participants mentioned routinely practicing for interviews to help soothe anxiety leading up to interviews. Two of these participants highlighted the importance of getting feedback from practice interviews.
Across both the interviews and the observations we found that our participants are using ChatGPT and other AI tools to seek advice about answering specific questions or streamlining their google searches for the relevant information they need to answer some of the example questions they come across.
The screens below are part of the mid-fi prototype that I developed. The first Three screens after the Sign Up page are the onboarding pages. This is get to know more about the user and tailor feedback from interviews and mindfulness practice recommendations to the user's personality and anxiety levels.
The next three screens are interactions that occur on the search page of the app. Based on our findings , users want to centralize information and knowledge about the position or field that they are interviewing for
The next three screens are interactions that occur on the search page of the app. Based on our findings , users want to centralize information and knowledge about the position or field that they are interviewing for
The last three screens depict the Mock Interview page, Mindfulness page and the User Profile page. The mock interview page is where users can view summarized feedback on past interviews. The mindfulness page is where users can find different techniques that can help them ease their anxious feelings before their practice interviews and real interviews. On the profile page users, can change their settings, quickly access bookmarks and schedule/view their mock interview calendar.
Our interviews and observations had some limitations that included small sample size from DePaul University. All our research participants where students at DePaul University between the ages of 23 and 33 years old. Our observations and interviews were conducted remotely (through video-call), which limited what we could observe. Also our observations used a scenario-based protocol in which participants searched for resources and tools to help a friend alleviate interview anxiety. There may be differences in how participants searched for someone else, versus how they would search for themselves.
Future endeavors we plan to conduct further research such as A/B testing, Surveys and Eye tracking testing with a prototype of a wearable device that can measure eye contact with practice interviews and possible for heart rates. We also plan to recruit a more diverse set of participants, and measure how interview anxiety fluctuates with more mindful practices.
