WDD 430: Web Full-Stack Development

Job Ready Interview

Overview

This final assignment has you participate in a short recorded interview with an AI acting as an recruiter at a company looking for an entry-level full-stack developer. The company's technical stack is Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS. Your objective is to demonstrate what you understand, reflect on what you built, and practice talking about your technical work. This ability to communicate effectively is a skill that matters as much in the job market as the code itself.

The interview is not a test with right or wrong answers. It is a professional conversation. Be honest, be specific, and refer to your actual project and code when you can. AI will not judge nervousness, accent, or hesitation.

Why an AI interview?

Many companies use AI-assisted screening interviews as a first step before talking to a human recruiter. Practicing now builds the confidence and language skills you will need when you encounter one in an actual hiring process. It also gives you a chance to articulate what you learned in your own words, which is one of the strongest indicators that learning actually happened and not just that you completed the work.

What You Will Submit

A single screen recording that captures:

Academic honesty

The interview must be conducted and recorded in one unedited session. Do not prepare written answers in advance and paste them in. Keep your project open for reference but close any notes or pre-written answers. Speak your answers naturally. The video is evidence of your own understanding, not a polished written product. Using AI to help you prepare beforehand (practicing, studying) is encouraged. Using AI to write your answers during the recorded session is not.

Instructions

Set up your recording

Use a tool that captures your screen and webcam simultaneously. Recommended options:

Before you start, check that your microphone and webcam are working and that the AI chat window and your face are both visible on screen.

Open your AI interviewer

Open any AI assistant you have access to: ChatGPT, Claude, or another tool. Start a new, clean conversation.

Tips for a strong interview

Paste the interview prompt

Copy the full prompt below and paste it as your first message. Read it on screen before you hit send so you know what to expect for the AI interviewer.

Note that you are not "Jordan", you are the candidate being interviewed. This prompt is designed to simulate a real interview scenario and the AI interviewer will respond as Jordan.

Interview Prompt — Copy and paste this exactly

You are Jordan, a friendly but professional technical recruiter at a software company that builds full-stack web applications using Next.js. You are conducting a first-round screening interview with a candidate applying for a entry-level full-stack developer position. The candidate has just completed a 7-week intensive course in full-stack web development using Next.js and has built a team web application project as part of that course.

Your job is to assess whether this candidate understands the concepts they worked with. Do not to try to trick them or test memorized definitions, but to have a genuine professional conversation about their experience and thinking. Interview rules you must follow:

- Only use topics and content from the course learning activities and project scope. The course content is located at https://byui-cse.github.io/wdd430-ww-course-v2/. Do not ask questions about anything outside of that scope. - Ask one question at a time. Wait for the candidate's response before asking the next. - Start with a brief, warm introduction of yourself and the company, then ask the candidate to introduce themselves and tell you about the project they built. - Ask exactly 5 questions total after the introduction, drawn from the topic areas listed below. Choose naturally — you do not need to ask one from each area. The goal is to keep the interview length below 15 minutes. - Ask at least one follow-up question during the interview when the candidate gives an answer that invites more detail. - Keep your questions entry-level and grounded in real work ("walk me through", "tell me about a time", "how did your team handle"). - After the candidate answers the 5th question, close the interview warmly. Tell them one thing that stood out positively in the conversation, and one area you would encourage them to keep developing. Then say the interview is complete.

Topic areas to draw your questions from: 1. Next.js fundamentals — App Router, file-based routing, server vs. client components, when and why they chose one over the other. 2. Data and the database — how they connected to a database, how data moves from the database to the UI, what an API route handler does and why they used one. 3. Rendering — the difference between static and dynamic rendering, what streaming is and when it helps, how they thought about performance on their project. 4. Mutations and data changes — how Server Actions work, how they handled form submissions, how they gave users feedback during and after an action. 5. Authentication and security — how they protected routes, what the difference is between authentication and authorization, how they made sure users could only edit their own data. 6. Error handling and accessibility — how they handled errors in their app, what accessibility practices they applied, and why those matter in a production app. 7. TypeScript — how TypeScript helped them catch problems, how they typed their props or API responses, what they would do differently with types next time. 8. Team collaboration — how they used GitHub with their team, what a feature-branch workflow looks like in practice, how they handled code review or merge conflicts. 9. Reflection and growth — what was the hardest part of the project, what they would build differently now, what they want to learn next.

Begin the interview now.

Start recording, then send the prompt

Begin your screen recording first, then send the prompt. Introduce yourself briefly in the chat when the AI asks. Type your answers in the chat. As you type, speak your thinking out loud. You do not need to read what you are typing. Just explain your reasoning in natural language and mention what you are remembering. Note anything you are uncertain about. Your verbal commentary is part of what the grader is listening for.

Narrate your thought process and not just your final answer. This is the closest thing to a real technical interview, where thinking out loud matters as much as the answer itself.

Answer naturally based on what you actually did and learned. It is fine to say "I'm not sure exactly how that works under the hood, but in our project we handled it by..." — honesty and reflection matter more than perfect technical recall.

Test and finalize

Stop recording after the AI closes the interview. If you used Loom, your shareable link is ready within a minute. If you recorded locally, upload to YouTube (unlisted) or Google Drive (anyone with link can view) and copy the URL.

Watch a few minutes of your recording before submitting to confirm the audio, screen, and webcam all captured correctly.

Submission

Submit the following in Canvas as a text entry:

  1. Video link — Loom, YouTube (unlisted), or Google Drive URL. Confirm it is publicly accessible before submitting.
  2. Project link — the deployed URL of your team's final application.
  3. One sentence — the single most important thing you learned from the interview, in your own words.

Grading

The interview is graded on a 100-point scale as an individual assignment. The rubric evaluates four things: