Allana Akhtar/Business Insider
- Job interviews can be tricky, as hiring managers often use questions designed to catch you off guard.
- To help job seekers prepare for interviews, LinkedIn just launched a new tool that provides advice on answering questions via step-by-step videos.
- I used the tool and found that while awkward at first, practicing my interview answers made me more confident.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Job interviews can sometimes seem more like a game of wits than a test of your abilities.
Things like what you wear, what time you arrive, and how much you smile often make a big difference to the hiring manager, who can even use interview questions to try to trick you.
To help prepare for the uncertainty of job interviews, LinkedIn just released a tool that allows users to practice for the big meeting in real time. After the user applies to a job, LinkedIn shares advice on answering common questions, such as "Why should we hire you?" and "What is your greatest strength?"
Read more: The 30 hottest companies of the year, according to LinkedIn
Using the tool, you can watch videos of career experts who give you a step-by-step guide on how to answer interview questions. Then, you put their advice to the test by making your own videos.
LinkedIn gave Business Insider exclusive access to a mock demo of the tool before it launched (I was registered as "Jane Doe"). I found that even though making videos of myself answering questions felt uncomfortable and silly at first, I felt more comfortable practicing responses out loud over time.
"We are always looking for ways to help our members throughout their career journey, and that is especially true for their job search," Deepti Patibandla, product lead at LinkedIn, told Business Insider in a statement.
Here's what happened when I tried LinkedIn's new interview prep tool: