The Mercor AI interview, and how to practice for it

What Mercor's help page says

• Length. About 20 minutes for most interviews; some are shorter or longer.
• Questions. Role-specific. Some are technical and need deep discussion of your prior experience; others test language or reasoning skills.
• Pace. Mercor says to answer clearly and succinctly, and warns that long silences may lead the AI to cut in. If it cuts in while you are still thinking, you can tell it you were not finished.
• Retakes. Up to three across all applications that use the same interview. A retake resets your progress, and hiring managers can see your retake count.
• One interview, many applications. Each unique interview only needs to be done once; the result carries over to other applications that need it.
• Practice interviews. Mercor offers free practice interviews that it says are not shared with companies.
• Setup. A working camera and microphone, your full face visible, a quiet room. Chrome is recommended; Edge and Safari are supported; Firefox and mobile browsers are not. Some interviews need full-screen sharing.

What you may use, and what you may not

Mercor's page points to its LLM usage policy: checking your grammar and wording is fine, but do not use large language models to write your responses. Pen and paper, and a calculator where it fits, are allowed. It also asks candidates not to share interview questions or screenshots online.

That is why we do not, and will not, publish "the real Mercor interview questions". Nobody legitimate has them. What follows are practice prompts we wrote for the kinds of question Mercor describes.

Practice prompts for the kinds of question Mercor describes

Ours, not Mercor's. Say each answer out loud in about a minute.

• Walk me through one project on your resume. What did you do yourself?
• Pick the hardest technical decision in that project. What were the options, and why did you choose the one you did?
• Tell me about a problem you solved at work. What was the result?
• How do you use AI tools in your work? How do you check what they give you?
• Why are you interested in this role?

The question to prepare: "How do you use AI in your work?"

This question now comes up in screens and in final rounds, and a vague answer is easy to give. "I use it for everything" sounds careless. "I don't really use it" sounds out of date. A strong answer is short and concrete:

• One task. A real one, like drafting a first pass of a weekly report.
• What the tool did and what you did. It drafted; you chose the numbers and rewrote the summary.
• How you check it. You compare every figure against the source before it goes out.
• What it saved. Two hours a week, or one fewer round of edits.

The practice round asks this question every time, then asks how you check the output.