r/InterviewsHell

My partner and I are both 30 and we recently started job hunting again. My partner is just finishing a coding bootcamp and I work in a relatively niche product role. We've each signed up for a Cluely subscription on the recommendation of a friend who used it last hiring cycle.

The tool gives you live AI suggestions during a remote interview, so you can lean on it if you blank out on a question, and the higher tier is supposed to hide the overlay from whatever the interviewer sees on their end.

The pricing is a bit of a thing too. There's a base plan and then a higher stealth plan, and from what I can tell only the higher one is actually any use during a screen share, which is a few times the price of the base.

I suppose I'm just looking for some reassurance one way or the other (I know that's a subjective question) from people who probably have a much better sense of these tools than I do. There was that big 2025 breach where tens of thousands of users had their data leaked, and from what I read the company didn't really comment on it for weeks afterwards. Does anyone here have any experience with these types of tools? Has anyone here actually used Cluely through a full loop without it falling apart?

Aight so every time I get asked “what’s your greatest weakness,” I can literally feel myself about to say some fake corporate sht like “I care too much.”

You can just watch the interviewer’s eyes glaze over in real time because they’ve heard it a thousand times. It’s the worst feeling.

I'm tired of sounding like a total robot. I'm forcing myself to give a real answer that actually has a cost. Like, something that would legit annoy a coworker. For me, it's that I tend to go completely radio silent when I’m deeply focused on a project, which leaves people guessing where things stand.

I just share a quick example of a time that happened, and then explain the boring system I set up to fix it (like literal calendar alerts to force myself to send status updates).

To make sure my phrasing didn't sound completely unhinged or desperate when writing this out, I ended up throwing my raw bullet points into stuff like resumeworded. Found a bunch of clunky, overly defensive phrases I was using and helped me smooth the text out so I sounded like a normal person who just made a mistake, rather than someone confessing to a crime.

I usually wrap it up by setting a boundary based on that weakness, like telling them I do best in roles where we have a quick weekly sync so I don't get isolated.

Interviews are still hell and it feels risky to be that upfront, but the relief of not reciting a script is immense.

* (All Applicants) Do you have any significantly close personal relationships who currently work at **** as family members, romantic partners, or others with whom you share a strong personal connection beyond simply being good friends)? If so, please provide their name(s).

It seems like too personal of a question to ask an applicant. I declined to answer the question and was rejected as a result.

i signed up for cluely back in march and im starting to regret the whole thing. saw the breach news on hacker news a few weeks back, i hadnt been keeping up at all, so i opened my email and there it was, the notification saying my account info was in the dump. real fun morning that was.

had previously considered a couple other tools when i first picked one but i went with cluely because it was the loudest brand at the time. dumb on my part not doing more research. now im trying to figure out where to switch to that actually has a clean track record. anything out there with decent stealth that isnt going to leak the account info next time something happens?

upsell is what bugs me the most. base plan is one number, then if you actually want the undetectability layer on top they want a separate higher tier. so you sign up for the cheap one thinking the stealth came with it and it didnt. then the breach goes public and the company that was charging extra to keep things hidden couldnt even keep their own customer db hidden. its a little too on the nose.

a thread also flagged the lag thing. apparently in some third-party tests the suggestion was coming in like 5-10 seconds after the question got asked, which is way too late for a real call. didnt notice it as bad in my own use but i wasnt timing it either. now im kinda second-guessing every panel i used it on, lol.

oh and there were some hallucination issues mentioned where the answer would reference a work experience that wasnt actually on my resume. that one i did catch a couple times during prep mocks and i thought it was a one-off. apparently it wasnt a one-off.

so yeah, regretting the cluely sub pretty hard. cancelled it the day after the breach email hit my inbox and now im running without anything until i find a replacement.

Edit: a bunch of you suggesting alternatives in the comments, going through them now

Edit 2: yes i know about the 7 day refund window, im outside it so eating that

Edit 3: thanks for all the suggestions, going to trial one this week before the next loop

anyone else here who got the breach email, what did you switch to?

I got the rejection email today after 3 months of interviewing. They said the team loved me and I was a good culture fit but they really wanted someone bilingual in CHINESE to help with Semiconductor customers. I wish they told me this at the beginning of the interview process and I would've at least spent some time watching chinese shows and doing interview prep in chinese. Now I just wasted months of my time instead.

My job interview at 2:30 tomorrow just got canceled.

Is this normal? Am I crazy for being hurt?

long post incoming. someone messaged me last week asking what i moved to after the cluely thing. couldnt give an answer that wasnt half a page so im just typing the whole story up here. tldr at the end maybe. (no tldr in the end actually, sorry, i forgot.)

morning the news hit i was eating cereal at my counter scrolling my phone. saw the headline pop up on hacker news, cluely caught up in a security incident. put the spoon down. honestly didnt even feel mad at first, more like that hollow oh no feeling when something you trusted just publicly faceplants. cluely's whole pitch is hiding things for you. and the news was that they had a security problem of their own. i remember sitting there going lol of all the saas to have an issue, this is the worst possible one. like a locksmith getting his shop robbed.

opened my cluely settings on the laptop right there at the counter, hit cancel, hit delete account, watched the spinner, gone.

then i sat there with no interview tool and a panel scheduled for the friday of the same week which was real fun.

context, i had been on cluely since the spring before. mostly behavioral, a couple system designs, recruiter screens. it worked, i wasnt shopping for an alternative, wasnt even reading their subreddit, it was just a thing on autopay. so the news hitting was the first time in months i had even thought about the tool, and the way i thought about it was "oh that goes" lol.

a thread on r/cscareerquestions had a list of four things people were checking out and InterviewMan was at the top because some of them had already been quietly testing it on the side. grabbed it that afternoon. install was clean. ran a mock on zoom that night where i shared my entire screen on purpose just to see if the overlay leaked. didnt show up at all. recruiter side of the call sees nothing because the window is excluded from screen capture at the os level, not just hidden by some z-order trick. that was the part that sold me. cluely had been selling vague "undetectability" and the news proved how much of that was marketing copy. InterviewMan ships the actual stealth list publicly, twenty plus features all documented, and the company has zero confirmed detections to date.

panel went fine that friday. been on InterviewMan ever since. zero proctor flags across however many rounds ive done since (lots).

oh also worth saying, i deleted my cluely account but the news had already broken so whatever, that ship sailed. nothing i can do about that now obviously. just one of those things.

anyone else here deleted cluely after their security incident and where did you actually land? also kinda want to hear from people who stayed on for some reason, just for the perspective.

ok so i did the amazon virtual loop a couple weeks ago, sde2, and ran InterviewMan in stealth on a second device for all 5 rounds. got the offer. wanted to write this because i lurked here for like a year before i pulled the trigger and the round-by-round walkthrough was the thing i wish i had had before going in

setup first because thats the part everyone asks about. macbook on my desk doing audio capture, ipad on a stand to my left at maybe a 45 deg angle, that's the client where the answers stream. the desktop window is hidden, not in the dock, doesnt show up in cmd-tab, and most importantly does not show up if you screenshare. i tested with quicktime screen recording before going in just to make 100% sure nothing was leaking. nothing was leaking

loop itself was 5 rounds, all virtual on chime, all in one day. two coding, one system design, one behavioral pure on leadership principles, then bar raiser at the end. they gave you like 10 mins between each round which was barely enough to pee and stand up

starting with the behavioral / LP one because thats where this thing more than paid for itself imo. amazon hits you with maybe 6-8 LP prompts back to back and you're supposed to STAR every single one without sounding like you're reading from a script which is, you know, sort of impossible. i had it set to STAR + medium length. it would have bullet beats up while the interviewer was still finishing the question. i kept eye contact and used the ipad as a glance-down anchor

system design was a notification fan-out service. honestly i was nervous about latency going in like would the suggestions even keep up with whiteboard chatter, but they did. i didnt read it off word for word. mostly used it to remember the second tradeoff i wanted to bring up after id covered the obvious consistency vs availability stuff

first coding was a medium graph problem. honestly i mostly solved that one on my own. the panel did catch a base case i missed before i ran my tests though, saved me like 5 min of dumb debugging probably. second coding was sliding window with a twist and that was the one i leaned on harder. streaming answer let me reason out loud while glancing at it. the interviewer asked good followups so i had to actually get the algo not just read it, which is kind of how youre supposed to be using this thing anyway imo

bar raiser was half behavioral half "tell me about a time you disagreed with a senior engineer." LP rotation again, same setup same flow. she was actually nice ngl. not the gotcha-fest people on this sub make them out to be

what worked for me: ipad off-axis so my eyes didnt drift on camera (this is huge, that was a tip i picked up from this sub actually). using STAR for behavioral helped so i was hitting beats not reading whole sentences. question detection on high. low missed nothing for me either tbh but high would throw extras and i just ignored em

what id change: dont read verbatim. like ever. if you read the suggestions out loud you sound like a robot and the bar raiser WILL clock it in 30 secs flat. thats how most people get caught imo. treat them as anchors not a script. you should be ahead of it when youre talking, not catching up

also eat lunch between rounds. i didnt. i was fading hard by the bar raiser, obvious in hindsight lol

disclosure - paid for the annual myself, no affiliation, just posting because the LP gauntlet is brutal and idk this took a real chunk of the edge off for me

anyone else done a loop recently? curious if the LP weight felt the same to you or if its shifted. my recruiter said LPs were like 60% of the call but it felt closer to 40 honestly

had some leftover paypal credit and amainterview was running an entry tier promo so I pulled the trigger.

I strongly believe in having some kind of real time helper during remote interviews because I blank out the second a recruiter asks me anything open ended. That being said I did a full month of phone screens last winter with literally nothing in front of me except a notebook and my own panic. Doesn't mean it was the right move.

Anyways, I installed amainterview and ran it through a couple of practice mocks where I had chatgpt play the interviewer, then about four real interviews over the next two weeks. While I will probably keep using it for the remainder of the month because of the promo, I am unimpressed with the actual interview performance. The transcription was fine in a quiet room but the second a recruiter had a bit of background noise it started missing chunks of the question. Answers it spit out were okay for behavioral stuff but felt a little textbook for anything technical. The suggestion box also kept popping up on screen during a couple of my screen shares, which was the real killer. Even at higher screen share resolutions the popup was visible. If it was my own money on full sticker out of pocket, I would cancel today. Since it was promo money and I do want to actually have something running during my next round, I'll probably finish out the month and then look around again.

But man, what a bummer.

Curious if anyone else has run amainterview through real interviews and not just the demo. Did you get the same screen share popup or was that just me?

I am a woman in my early 30s, currently working as a senior accountant in renewable sector, have 7 years of experience - over 4 years in audit (big 4) and 3 years in the private company. At the current company any promotion takes very long time (5 years to be promoted to the supervisor and even longer to manager due to the career ladder at the company). I am currently working on my cpa. Recently started looking for a new job and got in contact with recruiters looking for a senior accountant or supervisor roles and I kid you not- each and every one of them tries to undermine my experience, telling me that my skill set is not what their clients looking for (I have month end, quarter end, year end close, using accounting software on a daily, assisting with audits, day to day reconciliations and working in my areas assigned, cooperating with other departments, etc). At this point I feel extremely annoyed by the tone of recruiters and sometimes their blatant disrespect on the phone or ms teams call. They are also aggressively pushing Siegfried group onto me too, even though I told each of them I don’t want to work public accounting hours (the main reason why I left big 4 about 3 years ago).

Does anyone have the same issues? I really thinking to stop relying on recruiters now and start applying for jobs myself without involving them like I did right after the grad school. When I was looking for a job 3 years ago I certainly had better opportunities with the same recruiters and they also tend to be more respectful.

Anyone experience this & still got a job offer? I just finished my 3 staged interview. 1st interview with 2 directors. 2nd was take home assignment and review with hiring manager & 3rd stage is an interview with the CEO & ACEO. During the review, my hiring manager said that i was the only candidate who chose a different answer, the review seems to go well. But during the last interview, I messed up 1 of the question & the ACEO had to repeat it. After my response, the CEO said i do not have a particular experience. Then he said “but, even if we have someone who has that experience, we will not be able to afford it”. Shortly after that the whole interview tone 360 changed. It became so casual, he was sharing about himself, laughters & eventually the CEO asked me share about myself ended which It got abit emotional and i can tell everyone was. It ended with Q&A. Fast forward, he commented that experience i built was impressive & praised me for having “likability”. We ended the interview laughing, sharing of jokes and everyone walked me out to the door & bid farewell. They didnt share whats the next step..