Feature 02 · Follow-ups
An AI interviewer that asks the second question
Mentari is an AI mock interview with follow-up questions: instead of reading out a list, the interviewer listens to each answer and responds to it. Say you improved something and it asks by how much. Offer a solution before clarifying the constraint and it notices. It interrupts when you drift, gives a single hint when you are genuinely stuck, and does not keep drilling a candidate who is struggling — the judgement a good human interviewer uses.
Why the follow-up is the interview
Anyone can prepare an answer to "tell me about a project". The follow-up — why that approach, what breaks at ten times the load, what you personally did, how you measured the result — cannot be memorised, because it depends on what you just said. It is where interviewers find out whether the first answer was real.
Practice that never pushes back trains the wrong skill: delivering a prepared answer to a listener who accepts it.
What you say, and what comes next
| If your answer… | A question list does this | Mentari does this |
|---|---|---|
| Claims a result with no number | Next question | Asks how much, from what baseline, measured how |
| Says "we" throughout | Next question | Asks what you personally did |
| Jumps to a solution | Next question | Asks what you assumed about the constraints |
| Drifts off the question | Waits | Interrupts and brings you back |
| Stalls completely | Waits | Offers one hint, then moves on if it does not help |
| Is clear and specific | Next question | Raises the difficulty |
How Mentari decides when to push
The round is planned in advance as a set of topics with a time budget. Within each topic the interviewer probes until it has the evidence it was looking for — a quantified result, the reasoning behind a choice, your individual contribution — or until the topic has had its share of the clock, and then it moves on.
If you say you have not worked on something, it switches to a different thread rather than scoring you on a topic you never claimed. If you go quiet, it nudges. If you are stuck, it offers one hint and sees what you do with it.
Voice and text
By voice it is a two-way conversation: it talks back and can interrupt. By text it is a chat with an interviewer who follows up on what you write. Both use the same plan and produce the same scorecard.
The other two things that make it different
Last updated · Written by the Mentari team