Blog

Interview prep that goes deeper than a cheat sheet.

Real frameworks for the questions interviewers actually ask — system design, behavioral, the moments that decide whether you move forward. Plus the occasional product note from the team.

FeaturedProduct · 4 min read

Why Cruto doesn't use live AI copilots (and never will)

Live copilots feed answers through a real-time overlay during a real interview. The candidate gets caught, the credential gets hollow, the trust gets broken. We don't ship that segment.

May 13, 2026

Interview prep · 9 min

How to think about behavioral interview questions

STAR is the scaffolding, not the answer. Most candidates skip the part that actually moves the interviewer — and pad the part that doesn't.

April 26, 2026

Engineering · 11 min

System design interviews: a 30-minute primer

Most system-design prep teaches archetypes. Most candidates fail because they don't know what order to do things in once the question lands. Here's the 30-minute walkthrough.

April 26, 2026

Interview prep · 9 min

How to prepare for a system-design interview without losing your weekend

System-design prep is the part of interview prep with the worst signal-to-noise ratio. Here's the framework we use — and why generic mock sessions miss the point.

April 25, 2026

Interview prep · 7 min

How to read a job post (and stop applying to roles you'll bounce from)

Most job descriptions look identical. Three signals tell you whether the role is real, the bar is high, and the stack is what they say it is.

April 12, 2026

Interview prep · 6 min

The psychology of a mock interview that actually changes your performance

Pramp matches you with strangers. Friends-of-friends are too polite. The mock interviews that move the needle have three things in common.

March 30, 2026

Engineering · 8 min

Why we built our own interview scorer instead of using OpenAI's

Off-the-shelf LLM scorers grade the surface of an answer. Interview scoring has to grade the trade-offs underneath. Notes on the rubric we built.

March 15, 2026

Product · 5 min

How we priced Cruto: the 90 minutes / month math behind the free tier

Most 'free tiers' are 7-day trials in disguise. Here's how we sized Cruto's free tier to be a real free tier without making the unit economics impossible.

March 1, 2026

Engineering · 6 min

We don't touch your audio. Here's how the architecture works.

Most AI voice products proxy audio through their own servers. We don't. The candidate's audio streams directly to Gemini. Here's how — and why.

February 18, 2026

Product · 4 min

Why Cruto doesn't auto-apply (and never will)

Lots of users ask us to auto-submit applications. We won't. Auto-applying isn't a feature; it's a way to make the candidate look like a spammer.

February 4, 2026

Interview prep · 5 min

Interview readiness is a trailing metric. Stop optimising for it.

Mock interviews are the test, not the training. The training is the skills underneath. Here's how to tell which axes you're actually weak on.

January 22, 2026

Engineering · 7 min

Boring Postgres, everywhere: how Cruto's backend stays small

We pick the boring tool first. That tool is usually Postgres. Notes on what we'd reach for instead — and the small list of times we did.

January 8, 2026