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Why We Built SkillLynk

Every interview is a conversation. Almost no interview prep actually practices one. We built SkillLynk because that gap is the whole problem, and closing it took more than another question bank.

The prep you can get is the wrong shape

Open any interview-prep tool today and you get one of two things. The first is a huge bank of questions you solve alone, silently, at your own pace — great for pattern recognition, useless for the actual skill being tested in a real interview: thinking out loud, handling a follow-up you didn't expect, recovering when your first approach is wrong and the interviewer is still watching. A real interview is a back-and-forth. Solo practice, by construction, never is.

The second option is a real mock interview with another person — a mentor, a senior engineer, a friend who's been through it. This is the format that actually trains the skill. It's also the one that's hardest to get consistently: someone else's calendar, someone else's willingness to do this for free repeatedly, or a real cost per session if you go through a paid mock-interview service. For most people prepping seriously, that's a bottleneck, not a resource.

What we set out to fix

Close the gap between "practice that's available" and "practice that's actually the right format," without pricing anyone out of the second one. Concretely, that meant building three things that had to work together, not as separate features bolted on:

• Real back-and-forth, on demand. Peer mock interviews — matched to another candidate practicing the same kind of role — and AI voice interviews, a live spoken conversation with an AI interviewer that asks follow-ups and adapts, for the moments you want to practice alone but still want the real conversational format, not a quiz.
• A daily habit, not a one-time cram. Interview skill decays if you only touch it once a month before a real interview. Free, capped daily practice drills and a shared Daily Coding Challenge exist so showing up regularly is the default, not an ask.
• Proof that travels with you. A Skill Passport that reports what you've actually done — topics you've demonstrated real mastery in, interviews you've completed, problems you've actually solved — shareable with a company that never personally ran a session with you. Not a vanity score to chase; a record of real activity.

Why free, and why that's not just a growth tactic

The bottleneck we're fixing is access, so the fix can't reintroduce a cost wall at the first step. Peer interviews are free. Daily practice drills are free and capped, not paid. Every new account starts with a real credit balance for the AI-voice format specifically, so the first several sessions of the highest-value practice format cost nothing while you decide if this is actually useful to you. That's a product decision, not a promotional one — the whole premise breaks if "real practice" only exists on the other side of a paywall.

Where the other side comes in

The two-sided part of this — companies running structured Hiring Drives (quiz, coding, and live AI-voice rounds) and discovering candidates through Skill Passport instead of a blind resume pile — is still early and building. We didn't want to wait for that half to be fully proven before shipping the half that helps a candidate practice better today. That ordering was deliberate: fix the practice gap first, for real, then build the hiring side on top of activity that's actually happening.

What "done" looks like to us

Not a bigger question bank. A candidate who's had a real, spoken, adaptive conversation about the kind of problem they'll actually face, enough times that walking into the real thing doesn't feel like the first time they've done it out loud. That's the bar we're building against — everything else is in service of that one shift.