InterviewUp Wants to Make Interviews Less Painful

InterviewUp is following in Yahoo Answers’ very successful footsteps on Monday by officially launching a site where users can share questions and answers with one another.

While Yahoo Answers appeals to people who are itching to ask all types of questions – and others who inexplicably have the time and desire to answer those questions – InterviewUp focuses on the niche of people interested in sharing job interview questions and answers. The site is meant to appeal to both interviewers and interviewees: interviewers benefit from the availability of questions that they might want to use in their own interviews, and interviewees get to check out the questions that might be asked of them and what answers they might want to respond with.

The site is fairly straightforward; you don’t even have to sign up for an account to begin posting questions and answers. Questions can be tagged, voted on, and printed out. You can also set things up so you are notified when certain questions are answered.

Clutter and authority problems are two of the biggest reasons I am personally disinclined to use this sort of site. If I have an important question to ask, I don’t want to throw it up on a site aside questions like “What to eat before wearing a bikini?” or “What’s your Theory?” (both taken from the front page of Yahoo Answers today). InterviewUp doesn’t appear to have that bad of a problem with clutter (yet), probably because there is a defined topic for the site and it’s been in private beta.

However, it has (and will continue to have) the same authority problems that plague other Q&A sites. Without knowing more about who answers my questions, I’m not going to desire strangers’ feedback enough to use the site instead of looking stuff up on my own with Google or Wikipedia. Because of this, InterviewUp’s greatest value will probably come from its repository of questions, not so much from its answers. Now if InterviewUp were to develop a good user profiling system and somehow attract experts to the site, then we’d have a different a story.