Before the interview
1. Load the context the night before
Open Cloak Pro Workspace, upload your resume, and paste the job description. The persona that runs during the call now knows your background and what the company is hiring for. The difference between "good generic answer" and "answer that namechecks your last 3 jobs and the JD's must-haves" is entirely this step.
2. Pick the persona, don't accept the default
Cloak ships seven personas. Use the one that matches the round:
- Technical screen → NeetCode / Coding persona (narration + code + complexity).
- System design → Architecture persona (constraints, capacity, tradeoffs).
- Behavioral → STAR Behavioral persona (situation, task, action, result).
- Sales / partnership call → Sales persona.
3. Pre-flight
Five minutes before the call: hotkeys responsive (Cmd+Shift+M / A / S), provider responding, overlay invisible in your Zoom self-preview. Take a screenshot of your own screen with the OS tool — if Cloak shows up, something is misconfigured.
During the interview
Use the overlay as a sanity layer, not a script
The mistake people make in their first Cloak interview is staring at the overlay and reading. Eye-contact drift is obvious on video. The good pattern:
- Hear the question. Start talking.
- While you're restating the question and clarifying scope, the answer streams in.
- Glance once. Confirm or adjust your direction.
- Keep talking. The answer is now a reference, not a teleprompter.
Talk first, every time
Restate. Clarify. Ask one good question. This buys you 12–20 seconds and is also the single most senior-coded behavior in technical interviews. By the time you stop clarifying, the model has finished generating.
Use the answer structure, not the words
AI answers have a recognizable rhythm — three crisp bullets, a tradeoff, a closing. If you repeat that rhythm verbatim three times in one round, interviewers notice. Take the structure, re-narrate in your own cadence. Pause where the AI doesn't. Add a personal example the AI can't have.
When you don't know — say it
The worst Cloak failure mode is bluffing through a topic you don't actually understand because the overlay sounded confident. Senior interviewers run a follow-up the moment they smell it. "I haven't worked directly with X, but here's the closest model I have…" is a better answer than a fluent hallucination.
Round-specific notes
Coding rounds
Take a screenshot at the start of the round so Cloak sees the question. Re-screenshot when the interviewer changes constraints. The "narration" block tells you what to say next; the code block is your reference implementation. Type something close to it, not it.
System design
System design is the round where Cloak helps the most because the answer space is huge and structure is everything. Use the persona to surface capacity estimates and one tradeoff per component. Talk through them on your own; the overlay is just keeping the outline in front of you.
Behavioral
The trap: AI-written behavioral answers sound like LinkedIn posts. Use Cloak to remember which story to pull, not what to say. STAR structure → real specifics from your own resume → real quote you actually said in the situation.
After the round
Open Settings → History. Cloak keeps the full transcript and your prompts locally. Review what you actually said versus what the overlay surfaced. The gap is your prep list for the next round.
The one rule
Use Cloak in interviews where AI assistance is allowed or unspecified. If a company explicitly bans it, don't use it. Long careers are built on credibility; a single round isn't worth burning it. See our Terms for the formal version.
Try it
Download Cloak from the home page. Free tier with BYOK is enough to run your full prep cycle.