How to Use AI to Create Interview Questions (4 Steps + Prompts)

The candidate is booked for Thursday at two. You have their CV open, a job description you wrote last month, and a blank page where your interview questions should be. So you reach for the same five you always ask: tell me about yourself, your biggest weakness, where you see yourself in five years.

Here’s the short answer. To use AI to create interview questions, don’t ask ChatGPT or Claude for “good interview questions for a project manager”. Paste in the job description, name the three to five skills that really decide success in the role, and ask for one behavioral question and one situational question per skill, each with follow-up probes and a short note on what a strong answer sounds like. Then ask for a simple 1 to 5 scoring guide and a check for anything you shouldn’t ask. That takes about ten minutes. You end up with a question set you can use for every candidate, so you compare people on the same things instead of on gut feeling.

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Why the usual interview questions tell you so little

Most interviews are a friendly chat. You follow whatever sounds interesting, you like some people more than others, and afterwards you go with the feeling. It feels thorough. It isn’t.

Iris Bohnet, a behavioral economist at Harvard Kennedy School, put it bluntly in Harvard Business Review: unstructured interviews get the highest ratings from hiring managers for how useful they feel, yet dozens of studies found them among the worst predictors of how someone will actually do the job (HBR, How to Take the Bias Out of Interviews).

The fix is not more clever questions. It’s structure. The US Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s HR agency, sums up the research: interviews that ask every applicant the same predefined questions and follow-ups, and score answers against set benchmarks, show higher validity, better agreement between interviewers and less adverse impact than loose conversations. Questions built on the specific skills the job needs do best (OPM, Structured Interviews).

That is exactly the boring, careful work AI is good at. It won’t decide who to hire. It will do the drafting that most of us skip because it takes an hour.

Step 1: Start from the job, not from a list of “top 50 questions”

Generic question lists are where most AI interview question generators start, and that’s why their output feels generic. Your input decides the quality.

Before you open ChatGPT, write down three things. It takes five minutes:

• The job description. If you don’t have a good one yet, our guide on how to use AI to write a job description gets you there first.
• Three to five must-have skills. Not twelve. The few things that, if missing, mean this hire fails. For a customer support team lead that might be calming angry customers, coaching a struggling agent, and prioritising a queue on a bad day.
• What good looks like in month three. One or two sentences per skill. “Handles escalations without passing them up” is useful. “Great communicator” is not.

That last point is the one people skip, and it’s the one that makes the AI’s scoring guide sharp later.

Step 2: The prompt that writes your interview questions

There are two proven question types, and OPM describes both. Behavioral questions ask what someone did in a real past situation (“Tell me about a time you…”). Situational questions ask what they would do in a realistic scenario from the job. Both work; behavioral ones hold up especially well for complex professional and managerial roles (OPM). Ask the AI for one of each per skill.

Copy this into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and fill in the brackets:

The “Missing info” line matters more than it looks. Without it, the AI fills gaps with invented details about your team, and you end up asking a candidate about a tool you don’t even use.

Step 3: Ask for a scoring guide before you meet anyone

Questions alone are half the structure. The other half is deciding, in advance, what a 1, a 3 and a 5 sound like. Otherwise the candidate who was charming at the start gets a 5 on everything.

If several people interview, OPM’s description of how structured panels work is a good model: each interviewer scores on their own first, then the panel talks through the big differences. Doing it in that order stops the most senior voice in the room from setting everyone’s score.

Step 4: Check the questions for bias and anything you shouldn’t ask

AI drafts can slip in questions that sound harmless and aren’t. “Where did you grow up?” or “Do you have kids?” have no place in an interview. In the US, the EEOC says pre-employment questions should stick to what’s needed to judge if someone is qualified, and that questions which reveal protected characteristics, such as age, religion, disability or family status, should generally be avoided (EEOC, Prohibited Employment Policies/Practices). Most other countries have similar rules, so check your own.

Run one more pass:

Treat this as a second pair of eyes, not legal advice. If you’re unsure about a rule where you hire, ask your HR person or an employment lawyer.

A before and after example

Say you’re hiring that customer support team lead. Here’s a question most of us would write on the spot:

Before: “How do you handle difficult customers?”

Every candidate answers that one the same way: “I stay calm, I listen, I find a solution.” You learn nothing.

Here’s the kind of question set the prompt above gives you for the skill “calming angry customers”, after one quick round of edits:

After (behavioral): “Tell me about the last time a customer was angry with you or your team. What had gone wrong, what did you say first, and how did it end?”

Probes: “What would you do differently now?” and “What did you tell your team afterwards?”

After (situational): “It’s Friday at 4pm. A customer emails the CEO directly, saying their order is three weeks late and they’re cancelling. The agent who owns the ticket is out sick. Walk me through your next hour.”

Strong answer signs: names a concrete first action, owns the problem without blaming the agent, mentions following up after the fix. Weak answer sign: stays general and never says what they’d actually write or say.

Same ten minutes of your time. A completely different conversation.

How to generate interview questions from a job description

Many people search for an AI interview questions generator based on a job description. You don’t need a special tool for this. The prompt in Step 2 already does it: the job description is the main input, and the “use details from the description” rule makes the situational questions specific to your role.

Two tips make it work better:

• Cut the fluff out of the description first. Company history and benefits don’t help the AI write questions. Paste the responsibilities and requirements only.
• Tell it which requirements matter most. A job description lists ten things. If you don’t rank them, the AI gives every line equal weight and your interview becomes a checklist.

Free versions of ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini all handle this well. If you’re new to these tools, our ChatGPT tutorial for beginners covers the basics in a few minutes, and how to use Claude for work shows the same idea in Claude.

Tailoring questions to one candidate’s CV (carefully)

A fair interview asks everyone the same core questions. You can still add two or three follow-ups about a specific CV, as long as the core set stays the same for all candidates. Ask the AI something like: “Here are my core questions and this candidate’s work history. Suggest three follow-up questions about gaps or claims I should explore. Don’t change the core questions.”

Before you paste a CV anywhere, remove the name, contact details, photo and date of birth. You only need the work history. Also check your settings. In ChatGPT’s personal plans, the “Improve the model for everyone” setting is on by default, which means your chats can be used for training unless you turn it off under Settings, Data controls. Temporary chats aren’t used for training, and business workspaces aren’t used for training by default (OpenAI Help, Data controls in ChatGPT). If your company has rules about candidate data, they win.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Asking for “the best interview questions”. You get the same list as everyone else. Always paste your role and your must-haves.
• Too many questions. In a 45 minute interview, eight to ten questions with probes is plenty. A candidate rushing through twenty gives you twenty shallow answers.
• Skipping the scoring guide. Without it, you’re back to gut feeling with nicer questions.
• Letting AI change the set between candidates. Generate once, edit once, then freeze it for this hiring round.
• Using the output without reading it. Read every question out loud once. If it sounds odd when you say it, rewrite it.
• Letting AI judge the answers. Your notes and your scores decide. AI helps you prepare, not decide who gets the job.

Questions people ask about this

Can I use ChatGPT to create interview questions for free?

Yes. The free versions of ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini can all write a full question set and scoring guide with the prompts above. Paid plans mostly help with longer documents and higher limits.

How many interview questions should I prepare?

Plan two questions per must-have skill, so six to ten for three to five skills, plus probes. For a 45 minute slot that leaves room for introductions and the candidate’s own questions.

Should I use behavioral or situational questions?

Both. Behavioral questions show what someone has actually done. Situational ones help with candidates who haven’t faced that exact situation yet, like a first-time team lead. If you want candidates to give fuller answers, many career services teach the STAR method (situation, task, action, result), and MIT’s career office has a clear guide on it (MIT CAPD, The STAR method). Your probes can gently steer someone through those four parts.

Can AI write the answers I should expect?

It can describe the signs of a strong answer, which is what the scoring guide needs. Don’t use it to write a “perfect answer” you compare word for word. Good candidates answer in their own words, from their own experience.

What about performance reviews and internal promotions?

The same structure works for internal interviews. For the review side of things, see how to use AI to write a performance review.

After the hire, a short new-starter survey tells you whether your interview process worked. Here is how to use AI to create a survey people actually finish.

Once you’ve made the hire, the same approach helps with their first months. See how to use AI for employee onboarding for a 30-60-90 day plan, a first-week checklist and a welcome email.

Your next interview, ten minutes from now

Pick the next role you’re hiring for. Write down the three skills that matter most and what good looks like in month three. Paste them into the Step 2 prompt, then run the scoring and bias checks. You’ll walk into Thursday’s interview with questions that actually tell candidates apart, and a sheet that helps you defend your choice afterwards.

The AI writes the drafts. You decide what the job really needs, and who fits it.

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