Review on Adaptive Interview Prep with Generative AI and Analytic

Abstract

Technical interview preparation remains a deeply fragmented challenge for engineering students and working professionals. Existing tools are either statically structured, heavily dependent on external AI APIs, or offer no personalised performance insight beyond a binary pass-fail outcome. This paper presents Crack-it, a full-stack web platform that fuses two fundamentally distinct assessment methodologies under one roof: a Generative AI pipeline for resume-driven conversational interviews and a Zero-API, deterministic local evaluation engine for domain-based screening. The platform analyses 350-plus curated industry-standard questions across seven technical domains and evaluates user responses through a weighted scoring model that combines technical keyword density at 70% and semantic Dice coefficient similarity at 30%, supplemented by real-time behavioural signals captured via an in-browser computer vision pipeline. An isolated server-side code execution sandbox enforces strict resource limits and pattern-based security guards for multi-language coding challenges. Firebase Firestore maintains a persistent, evolving user profile across sessions, and a multi-tier AI fallback architecture ensures service continuity for resume interviews even under API quota constraints. Evaluated across functional correctness, structural match, and communication quality, the platform demonstrates that rigorous interview preparation does not require a paid AI subscription for every interaction.

Introduction

The document presents Crack-it, an AI-powered technical interview preparation platform designed to overcome limitations in existing tools that focus only on coding practice, theory, or peer interviews without unified, personalized, or multi-modal evaluation.

The core problem identified is that current platforms lack holistic interview simulation, personalized feedback, and consistent evaluation across verbal, coding, and behavioral skills. Crack-it addresses this by combining three assessment modes:

• Resume-based AI interviews using Google Gemini for personalized, context-aware questioning and evaluation.
• Domain-based interviews using a deterministic, local scoring engine with no API calls for fast, low-cost, and reproducible evaluation.
• Coding interviews executed in a secure sandbox environment with structural and logic-based assessment beyond simple output matching.

The system evaluates candidates across multiple dimensions including technical accuracy, semantic understanding, communication clarity, and behavioral signals (e.g., filler words, pauses). It also adapts difficulty dynamically based on performance.

Technically, Crack-it is built as a full-stack microservices platform:

• React frontend with coding editor and interactive UI
• Node.js backend handling orchestration and APIs
• Secure sandbox for isolated code execution
• Hybrid AI layer combining OpenAI/Gemini models with fallback logic
• Firebase for authentication and data storage

A key innovation is the hybrid evaluation strategy: deterministic scoring for domain questions and LLM-based personalization for resume-driven interviews, reducing cost and latency while maintaining intelligence.

Results show high accuracy (up to 99% parity with manual grading for structured coding problems), low latency (sub-second to ~2.5s depending on task), and strong security against code injection attacks.

Conclusion

Crack-it demonstrates that a comprehensive, multi-modal technical interview preparation platform can be built and operated without requiring an AI API call for every interaction. The deterministic local evaluation engine — combining a weighted keyword density analysis, Dice coefficient semantic similarity, synonym expansion, and behavioural signal integration — produces consistent, low-latency answer scoring for 350-plus domain questions across seven technical fields. This design choice makes the platform economically viable at scale while maintaining a quality of feedback that approaches what a language model would provide for straightforward knowledge-based questions. The selective deployment of generative AI for resume-driven interviews and skill gap analysis captures the domains where LLM contextual understanding genuinely adds value — personalised question generation grounded in a candidate\'s specific experience — while avoiding the cost and latency overhead of applying the same approach uniformly. The multi-tier fallback architecture for AI-dependent features ensures that service interruptions in one model do not degrade the user experience, a critical requirement for a platform where session continuity directly affects the quality of practice. The secure sandboxed execution environment, combined with the structural evaluation engine\'s anti-cheat heuristic, addresses a gap that exists in most automated online judges: the ability to detect solutions that pass test cases through hardcoded returns rather than genuine algorithmic logic. By combining functional test verification with structural match analysis, the coding module provides a more complete and honest assessment of a candidate\'s problem-solving ability. Taken together, the platform\'s design reflects a broader principle: that the best educational technology is not the one that uses the most sophisticated tools, but the one that deploys each tool precisely where it adds the most value for the user. Crack-it_AI applies this principle to make meaningful, multi-dimensional interview preparation accessible to any candidate with a browser.

References

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Copyright

Copyright © 2026 Muskan Lodhi, Sharvari Kamble, Rahul Yadav, Pratik Tikare, Supriya Pawar. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.