What is an alternative to ChatGPT for interview preparation?

Feature comparison

As of 4 September 2026. "not stated" means it could not be read on their own site — not "does not exist". Our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow, not from marketing copy.

Pricing side by side

As of 4 September 2026. "not stated" means it could not be read on their own site — not "does not exist". Our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow, not from marketing copy.

What voice mode genuinely does better

Start with the concession, because it is not close: ChatGPT talks back. Interviews rarely go wrong because a candidate did not know the answer — they go wrong because the answer comes out differently in the room than it did in your head. The only cure is saying it out loud, and a tool that replies, pushes back and lets you interrupt beats any written document at that. Ours cannot do it.

This matters more in Switzerland than almost anywhere, because interviews here are routinely held in a language that is not the candidate's first. An expat in Zurich may be interviewed in English by a panel that switches to German for the small talk. A candidate in Lausanne may find the technical half of the meeting runs in English while the HR half runs in French. Rehearsing that shift out loud is exactly what voice mode is for, and the free tier covers a few runs.

Two things stand on OpenAI's own pages, read on 24 August 2026. First the recommendation: preparing for an interview is listed there beside practising a language. Second the limit: the free tier lists "Limited voice chats", and voice with video — the closest thing to a video interview — is marked No for Free, with the feature page naming Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu on mobile. If you want the camera version, you pay for it.

Why paper wins inside the room

A chat ends when you close the tab. The interview starts there. You cannot scroll a thread while someone is looking at you, and the question that throws you almost never arrives in the order you rehearsed. So the real alternative to ChatGPT here is not a different chatbot — it is a different format.

Bringing notes to a Swiss interview is normal rather than odd. The official arbeit.swiss guidance states that a separate sheet listing your referees "can also be handed over at the job interview" — paper is part of the choreography here. Notes that look like notes read as preparation; a script read aloud does not.

So the cheatsheet is built to be scanned, not read: 24 boxes sorted into four to six groups, a literal line from the advert on one side, your answer on the other, a tick box in front. Afterwards you can see which of the 24 actually came up. Around them sit three strengths, each tied to a phrase quoted from the advert; a self-introduction timed at roughly 110 seconds, because two minutes is where listeners start to drift; and a 45-minute plan that tells you when the money question usually lands.

The last block is the one people underestimate: a short list of the advert's own vocabulary. Using the employer's words instead of your own removes a translation step for the person opposite, who hears their own posting come back at them. It is not a trick — it is the shortest route between what they asked for and what you have done.

What the official Swiss checklist asks of you

Before picking a tool it is worth knowing what actually has to be prepared. arbeit.swiss sets out four blocks for the interview: yourself (qualities, experience, knowledge, values), your goals and salary expectations, the employer (sector, products and services, market position, objectives, structure, headcount), and the employer's typical questions — career to date, abilities, motivation for applying, suitability for the role. A fifth block covers presentation: clean and appropriate clothing, eye contact, an open posture, attentive listening, not interrupting.

A language model handles two of those well — phrasing and sharpening. Two it cannot do without you. Your salary expectation is a number you must fix beforehand; arbeit.swiss points to the national wage calculator and advises basing the figure on your own performance and qualifications. And the facts about the employer are not reliably inside any model: they are in the advert and on the company's own site.

The checklist is free, official and published in English as well as the three national languages. What it gives you is the list of questions, not your answers. The difference between tools is how much of that work they take off you — and how much of it still exists after you close the window.

The Swiss things an international tool does not know

A model trained largely on American hiring prepares you for American hiring. Four things fall through the gap. The first is money: in Switzerland the salary expectation is stated as an annual gross figure, normally including the 13th month salary, and tied to a Pensum — the workload expressed as a percentage. Naming a monthly figure, or a number that ignores whether the role is 80% or 100%, misses the question being asked.

The second is the Arbeitszeugnis. Swiss employers issue a written, evaluative reference at the end of each job, your dossier contains them, and the interviewer has read them. Expect questions about a gap between two of them or about a specific formulation. This has no equivalent in a US resume process, and no international interview coach prepares you for it — which is why our wizard lets you attach up to three documents and uses their text.

The third is the permit. If you are not Swiss you will be asked which permit you hold or need — B, C, or G for cross-border commuters — and often about your commute, which is a real topic for a G permit. The answer is short, but it should not be improvised. The fourth is language: the language the advert is written in usually decides the language of the interview, with the extra Swiss-German wrinkle that the conversation around the meeting may run in dialect while the meeting itself runs in standard German. You prepare for that by listening, not by memorising.

The common thread: a tool that does not know Switzerland will still answer confidently, and the answer will quietly be American. That, rather than which model writes better prose, is why local sources are worth the twenty minutes.

The other alternatives, named honestly

A person is still the best option if you can get one. A former colleague from the same industry asks the follow-up no model asks, because they know where this profession gets probed. It costs a favour and an hour. If you have nobody, the cantonal career guidance service is the local institution for this; what it charges depends on where you live, from free in some cantons to a three-figure hourly rate in others.

If you are registered with the RAV, the preparation belongs in your counselling appointment. arbeit.swiss describes labour market measures as a complement to the personal counselling, with the individual case assessed together with your placement counsellor. Asking costs nothing and the answer is more concrete than any general advice online.

And there is the option that is not a tool at all: print the advert, go down the requirements one at a time, and write a line from your own history beside each. That is precisely what our cheatsheet automates, and it works by hand. One interview a year does not need an account. Three interviews in one week is where the difference shows up.

Which tool, when

Use ChatGPT if your problem is delivery: you run long, you lose your thread, the meeting is in a language you do not use daily. Use it, too, when you cannot yet phrase an answer and need something that asks back. The free tier covers that with limited voice chats; the camera version starts at Plus, on mobile.

Use us if your problem is content: you know how you sound, but in the room you cannot produce the one piece of experience that matches the one line in the advert. The cheatsheet connects the posting to your history line by line, comes out in your interface language, and sits on the table beside you when it counts.

And if you have the time, use both — that is the honest answer. Build the cheatsheet first so the substance is settled, then rehearse out loud the three or four answers where the wording still fights you. Together that is one evening, and it is the same evening most people spend reading lists of interview questions without answering a single one.

Features: SwissJobs.app and ChatGPT voice mode

As of 16 September 2026. ChatGPT per OpenAI's "ChatGPT Voice" help page and its Swiss pricing page, both read that day. "Not stated" means not readable on the vendor's pages, not "does not exist".

Prices side by side

As of 16 September 2026. ChatGPT prices from the rendered pricing page at chatgpt.com/de-CH/pricing, voice allowances from the "ChatGPT Voice" help page. Our allowances from the product constants that day.

What ChatGPT voice mode does well

Its strength first, because it is real. OpenAI describes a Live option that listens and speaks at the same time, so you can interrupt, cut in and start over much as you would with a person. It works in the browser, on iOS and on Android, and the conversation stays in the chat as text, so you can read back what you actually said.

The second strength is volume. Someone facing an interview in French who has barely spoken it since school does not need eight questions, they need hours. Three hours a day on Go for CHF 7 is a fair price for that, and no scored practice tool comes close. If you are relocating and your interview in Zurich will be in English but the small talk around it will not, or you are a native English speaker preparing for a role that asks for B2 German, this is the obvious place to put in the hours.

The third is freedom. You decide who sits across from you, how hard they push and when to stop. An instruction such as "You are the HR lead at a Zurich insurer with 300 staff. Ask me questions about this advert one at a time and wait for each answer" works well, as long as you paste the advert and your CV into the chat first.

Where voice mode leaves you on your own

That freedom has a cost: everything that makes a rehearsal realistic is something you have to ask for and then enforce. A language model is polite. It lets you talk until you finish, praises a four-minute answer and will happily answer its own question at the end. If you set no time limit, you practise without one, and in a real interview an answer running past three minutes has usually lost the room.

Feedback is the other gap. You can ask ChatGPT for an assessment afterwards, but each time the format changes, the criteria change and there is no number that tells you whether the second attempt beat the first. Practice means same question, one change, new result. Without a fixed yardstick you are left with a feeling.

Then there are the limits OpenAI states itself. The free allowance is limited and unquantified. According to the help page, Live does not support video, and the pricing page marks voice with video as unavailable on Free. Rehearsing a camera interview needs a paid plan and the older voice option in the mobile app.

What our practice interview does differently

You set up three things first: the job with its advert, your CV, and the panel. For the panel you type who will be in the room, up to five roles, such as HR, your future manager and a specialist from a neighbouring team. You also pick the company size from four bands and the language: German, French, Italian or English.

From that come eight questions that name your past roles and the advert's requirements, spread across the panel. The voice asks, you answer freely, and a three-minute countdown runs. If the answer was vague the voice may ask one short follow-up, no more. Then the next question arrives, without small talk.

Each answer gets a score from 0 to 10, broken into substance, structure and fit for the role, with two or three sentences of reasoning and a note on what a strong answer would have added. A closing report gives a percentage. That figure is a language model's reading of your answers against a rubric, not a forecast of what the employer will decide, and our page on what an interview score measures sets out what it cannot see.

The Swiss detail ChatGPT will not pick up unprompted

Salary is the clearest example. In a Swiss first interview you are often asked for your expectation, and it is expected as an annual gross figure, usually including a 13th month, and tied to a workload percentage. Someone arriving from the UK or the US who answers with a monthly or hourly figure, or who does not scale it to an 80% role, answers a different question. Our panel asks it because it belongs in a Swiss interview.

The same goes for notice periods, Arbeitszeugnisse (the written references Swiss employers read closely) and, for anyone without a Swiss passport, the permit question. ChatGPT will ask about all of these too, but only if you remember to tell it to. Left to its defaults, a general model prepares you for an American-style interview, with a question about your greatest weakness and none about your workload percentage.

For German-speaking roles there is one more: form of address. Small firms often switch to the informal du; large ones keep the formal Sie. Our panel follows the company size you give it, so the shift does not catch you out on the day.

What it costs, worked out honestly

A full round with us is eight questions at up to three minutes each, so up to 24 minutes of speaking. The monthly plan covers five such rounds a month and the yearly plan ten. If you want a round every evening for three weeks before a big interview, the monthly plan will run out. We say so because comparisons usually leave it out.

With ChatGPT the arithmetic runs the other way: plenty of speaking time, but no structure and no scoring. Three hours per 24 hours on Go or Plus works out at more than seven of those rounds a day. What you pay instead is your own effort: writing the instructions, pasting the advert, watching the clock and judging each answer yourself.

Our free path is one scored answer without an account and five more on the day you sign up, six answers in all, just short of a full round. ChatGPT's free path is an allowance with no stated size that OpenAI says may change. Either is enough to try it out. Neither is enough for a week of training.

When to use which, and when to use neither

Use ChatGPT voice mode when the language itself is the problem, when you need many hours, or when you already know what to work on and simply want someone to talk to. Use our practice interview when you have a particular advert in front of you and want to find out which of your answers hold up, measured the same way on your second attempt.

A sensible order for many people: one round with us to find the two or three weak answers, then repeat exactly those out loud with ChatGPT until they come easily, then a second round with us to see whether the score has moved.

Use neither if it is people who make you nervous, or if presence and body language carry real weight, as in a senior management interview. Both tools hear only your voice, or the transcript of it. A person is still better there: a former colleague, a coach or, if you are registered with the RAV, your job-centre adviser, who can tell you whether a course is available.