This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend FRIEND is in placement season and told me one thing scares them most: SPECIFIC FEAR, e.g. "I freeze when they ask about my own project." Paid mock interview tools cost money and want a full resume uploaded to someone else's server.
So I built Mock Interview Partner: upload a resume, pick a role, and it interviews you. It asks questions about your actual projects, pushes back on vague answers with follow-ups, scores each answer strictly from 1 to 5, and writes a report with weaknesses and a practice plan. It runs completely on a laptop.
(Optional: a 30 to 60 second screen recording.) A free, private mock interviewer for placement season. Upload a resume, choose a target role, and get tailored questions, follow-ups, strict per-answer feedback and a final report. It runs entirely on your own laptop with an open-weight model, so nothing is sent to a server.
Built for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend.
A resume contains a phone number, address, grades and email, and a mock interview records someone's honest mistakes. Neither belongs on a server you don't control. Running a local open-weight model means nothing leaves the laptop, and no internet is needed once the model is downloaded.
Open source also gives you:
llama3.2:3b through Ollama, fully on a 6 GB RTX 4050
The flow is: resume text → structured profile → question plan → answer → score and feedback → optional follow-up → final report.
Everything behavioural lives in plain text: the prompts, three interviewer personas and a rubric.yaml with score anchors.
What went wrong: WRITE ONE REAL FAILURE. Ideas: the model gave 4 or 5 out of 5 to weak answers until I added explicit score anchors and told it to grade like a strict interviewer. Or the 7B model split between GPU and CPU on 6 GB of VRAM and was painfully slow, so I moved to the 3B model (X seconds per answer instead of Y).
I ran a mock interview with FRIEND_NAME, who is preparing for placements, and asked for honest feedback afterwards.
Their first reaction was a simple "wow."
What they found most useful was the improved sample answers and the review after each question. When I asked what the tool showed them that they hadn't noticed, they said: "I missed too many things, and this app pointed them out. I improved my answer."
I also asked whether any scoring felt unfair, since a strict grader is only useful if it's fair. They said no, the feedback looked fair to them.
Their verdict on using it again before placements: "Yes, it will help me a lot."
That last answer is what I built it for: a free place to practise as many times as they need, without a resume or answers going to anyone else's server.