Is interview coaching worth it, and what should it cost?

Diagnose before you buy

Almost all wasted money in this category comes from buying the wrong stage. Coaching is expensive per hour and precisely targeted; buying it to solve a CV problem is like hiring a driving instructor because your car will not start.

What each option is actually good for

• Free practice with a friend. Good for fluency and for getting used to speaking under mild pressure. Bad for accuracy — a friend will not tell you your answer was rambling, and usually cannot tell you why it was.
• AI interview simulators. Good for volume and for structure: they are patient, available at midnight, and consistent about flagging a missing result or a two-minute preamble. Bad at cultural nuance, at reading the room, and at telling you the thing you did not think to ask about. Typically free to about £20.
• CV writing services. Worth it if your CV genuinely does not parse or your bullets are duty-shaped. Not worth it at the premium end — a £400 CV is rarely four times better than an £80 one, and the writer's knowledge of your actual work is the binding constraint either way.
• Human interview coaching. The only option that catches what you cannot hear in your own answers, and the only one that can tell you how something lands with a person who has actually hired. Worth it at the specific stages in the table above.
• Employer-provided outplacement. If you were made redundant, check what your employer already paid for. It is frequently unused and it is already bought.

What to look for in a coach

1. Hiring experience in your target market — someone who has sat on the employer's side of the table and made the decision, not only someone trained in coaching technique.
2. Familiarity with your specific situation. Coaching a non-native speaker through cultural translation is a different skill from coaching a native speaker through nerves, and not every good coach does both.
3. A mock interview in the session, not just conversation about interviews. Practice with feedback beats advice.
4. Something in writing afterwards. Insight you cannot remember on Thursday was not worth paying for on Monday.
5. Clear pricing per session with no package requirement to start. One session should be enough to tell whether it is working.

Red flags

• Guaranteed job offers. Nobody can guarantee this, and the guarantee always has conditions that make it unclaimable.
• Large packages sold before a first session — ten sessions upfront, non-refundable.
• Claims of insider access to a hidden job market, or of getting your CV 'straight to hiring managers' at named companies.
• Charging for referrals, or any fee tied to an employer's process. That is not how legitimate recruitment works in the UK or EU.
• No named coach on the website. You are buying a specific person's judgement; if you cannot find out who they are before paying, that is the answer.

Where HappyHire fits — and where it doesn't

In the interest of being useful rather than only promotional: our free CV scanner and £6 optimiser are for the first row of the table, the £15 simulator is for the second, and 1-on-1 coaching at £60 an hour is for the third and fourth. Ash, who runs the coaching, is a recruiter who has hired for companies including Nintendo and Tencent as well as startups, and has worked with clients from more than twenty countries.

What we are not the right choice for: highly technical interview preparation in a specialist field — a machine learning system design round is better served by a specialist in that field than by a generalist recruiter. Academic job markets, which run on entirely different conventions. And anyone who is not getting interviews at all, who should fix the CV first and can do most of that free.

All paid services carry a 30-day guarantee: if it did not help, email hello@wearehappyhire.com and we will make it right.

Frequently asked questions