r/hiringhelp

We posted a job with a salary range of $70,000-75,000. We got a good candidate with great references.

We offered her $78,000 (plus extras, including an in-house health benefit plan of $2400 a year and room for financial growth, plus bonuses).

She turned the job down based on the compensation. Keep in mind, she knew the salary range going in, and applied and interviewed (ie apparently wasted our time) anyway.

Not really sure if she expected us to call her bluff or what but we moved on. A few weeks later, she asked if the job was still available as she had changed her mind.

Even if we hadn't filled it, we were no longer interested. She could have been everything we were looking for and more, and still we would not be interested at that point.

JOB ROLE
- Customer Success Executive
- Sales Executive

EVERYONE CAN APPLY (WOMEN/GIRLS PREFFERED)
AGE- 18 TO 35

SALARY & BENEFITS
Salary upto 20,000/- Per Month
Attractive incentives & Bonuses

JOB LOCATIONS
- KHOKHARA
- ASHRAM ROAD
- SONI NI CHALI
- NARODA
- INCOME TAX

FOR MORE INFORMATIONS-

Email: hr@akashcorporation.in
Mobile: +91 9157562233
Or DM.

For context, I got laid off in February and I do not want to spend a ton on some interview AI subscription. I just need something that helps me not freeze on live calls.

I just found out that pretty much every AI interview tool being pushed right now is priced like enterprise software. Stumbled on three of them while shopping around and almost spit out my coffee.

It doesn't even look like there are affordable tools for sale through the usual blog lists that aren't almost as expensive as a used car payment. Is there a way to get a real interview assistant that works on live Zoom calls for under lunch money a month?

I have applied to around 150 jobs and the only one that called me in for an interview was a strip club (part time waitress position). The interview was 5 days ago and didn’t go how I planned. ( they said they were looking for full time, I kept ending each answer with “and yeah” , I forgot to add more days that I am available, the interviewer said that if they could find someone else working part time it could work?) towards the end of the interview I was told they would contact me on Wednesday and it’s Wednesday night.

Is that the end for me?

P.S I also got rejected from McDonalds and Taco Bell.
Also the interview was 10 minutes.

I did it. I caved. I started using AI on my interviews and now I'm sitting here typing this with an offer I genuinely don't think I would have gotten otherwise.

Been job hunting since around January. Got most of my prep done, mock interviews with friends, leetcode grinding, the whole thing. I decided to do this round the "honest" way. Figured I would stay sharp on my feet and prove I could do it cold. Never could have imagined how lopsided it would feel. In the beginning I scoffed at the idea of AI helpers, said I would never use a crutch like that. After a couple months I figured maybe I'd try a free trial just to see, but I wouldn't actually rely on it for the call, and never on a real final round. Besides, my prep had been solid for years and I had passed loops before. I applied and applied and got nowhere.

A couple months ago I finally gave in and started reading every relevant thread on this sub to figure out what people were actually using. Read that nearly half of candidates in 2026 are running some kind of real time AI assistant during calls, didn't really believe it but figured I should at least know what I was up against. I downloaded a couple, tried them in mocks, must have done 30 practice rounds. Then 3 weeks ago a thread popped up from someone who had taken a panel at a place I had been rejected from twice and walked out with an offer. They had been using one the whole time.

Last week I used one for the first time on a real call. Maybe I could have passed without it, maybe that's a kind thing I tell myself. I'm relieved and I feel weird about it. I should have been stronger and held out. I should have been more diligent in raw prep. I should have tried more rounds cold. But the bar for what hiring teams expect now has just moved. And going into a system design round where the interviewer is clearly piping questions through their own model makes you nauseated when you realize you are the only one in the room without help. And I usually keep my tools for years so I can spread the cost out right.....?

Just want to feel good about the offer but I'm a little guilty about it. Like, I gave up the principle thing for a paycheck. Or like I let the noise win. Whatever, I dunno, pretending it isn't going on isn't gonna get anybody hired right now. If you aren't using ai for interviews 2026 you are putting yourself at a disadvantage and that is where we are at. Sorry for the rant, curious if anyone else has done the same flip on this.

ok this is gonna be a long one sorry, tl;dr at the bottom.

ive been laid off about a month, savings are getting kinda tight, and folks in this sub keep telling me to "just pay for one of the live interview ai things" and stop being weird about money. i kept refusing on principle. so i set aside 2 weeks and went hunting to see if a genuinely free ai interview assistant that actually works is a real thing that exists or if its just marketing. heres where i landed.

biggest single realization, before any of the rest. interview ai is two completely separate problems and people lump em together. one is prep, all the work BEFORE the call. drilling behavioral questions, system design rehearsal, mock answers in front of the bathroom mirror. the other is live, the actual interview, where you need an answer in real time and the interviewer can not catch you. the free interview ai that works for one absolutely does not work for the other. i had to learn that one by getting caught.

ok prep first. for prep, free is fully viable and im a convert. i ended up with 3 things i actually use. first is the giant general chatbot that everyone is on, free tier on the web, paste a job description in, ask for the 15 most likely behavioral questions for that role, then i pace around my apartment answering em out loud while my cat watches me look insane. second was a different free open notebook style tool, similar vibe, plug in the company and the role, ask it to walk me thru 3 design questions theyve asked in past loops. and the third was a free ai voice tool that lets you talk to it like a real person, sounds dumb but its the closest thing to a fake interviewer ive found. all 3 are zero dollars and all 3 are good. for prep, a free ai interview assistant absolutely does work and you do not need anything fancier.

now live. tried using any of those same tools on a real Zoom and the wheels came off. propping the chatbot on my phone next to my laptop got me caught the second i looked down too long. interviewer literally said "you ok" and i nearly threw up. tabbing to a browser tool on my own laptop shows up immediately on the screen share, you can see the tab change. one of the dedicated interview ai things gives you a 5 min free session which is not enough time to even get past the intros. another capped me at 15 min and died right when the system design portion started, which was, lets just say, character building. for the live part, free as a working option basically does not exist outside one specific edge case.

the edge case is the free tier on a real purpose built interview ai (not a general chatbot, an actual dedicated tool). they exist but the limits are real. the one i landed on gives a small bucket of minutes per month free, which is enough to dry run a full mock or use it on a quick 20 min recruiter screen but not enough to carry a full 60 min loop. for that you have to upgrade. its the only free interview ai that works on the live side at all in my testing.

so the math i ended up with. for prep, free is fully fine, dont pay anyone. for live, the free tier on the right dedicated tool gets you partway, and if youre interviewing more than the occasional short call you eventually have to pay. the sub was right and i was being weird about it. the cheap end of the dedicated tool market is roughly a weeks worth of coffee if you commit annual, and there is one option specifically where the entry price is so low that the principle of "i refuse to pay" stops being economically rational. ill drop the exact name and pricing in the comments cuz i dont want the body to read like an ad.

before i name names, asking the sub. is there a free ai interview assistant that 1, gives genuinely unlimited live minutes (not just a small monthly bucket), and 2, hides itself from screen share without you alt-tabbing? cuz i went deep and the answer i got was no. id rather pay zero than anything if i missed something obvious. and if your conclusion ended up the same as mine (free for prep, pay for live), what is the cheapest dedicated tool you have actually used and not regretted? a couple of folks who got laid off the same week as me are asking what to grab and i want to forward a clean answer. thanks

tl;dr: free is fine for prep (i use 3 free things). free does not really work for live calls (5 min trials, 15 min caps, screen share detection). free tier on a real dedicated tool is the only thing that gets you anywhere on live, and even then the bucket is small. paid is cheap if you go annual. naming names in the comments.

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As a software engineer, I'm honestly scared of where all this is heading. People are being replaced by AI tools, tens of thousands are being laid off every month, and the number of available jobs feels much smaller than the number of people looking.

People like Sam Altman keep talking about population decline and the future of humanity, but how is that future supposed to work if ordinary people can't find jobs? I feel like society is heading into a major problem and everyone is pretending this is just progress.

Does anyone else feel this way?