Toby

Toby is an AI mock interviewer built to help people prepare for real job interviews. You paste a job description, and Toby builds the questions a real panel would ask — from the warm-up to the curveball — then interviews you on a Google Meet, Microsoft Teams or Zoom-style video call. Toby Higgins, the AI hiring manager, asks the questions, listens, and tells you exactly what to fix. It is aimed at candidates who have an interview coming up, whether that is a recruiter screen, a hiring manager conversation, a case round or a values interview, and its purpose is to let you practise the hard questions before they count so that the real interview feels familiar. Interview preparation usually means reading a generic list of questions, rehearsing alone, or memorising answers that collapse under pressure. Toby's stated approach is different: it is not a generic list of questions. Toby researches the company, maps every round and plays the interviewer, then shows you exactly what to fix. The product frames itself as "the interview before the interview." The idea is that useful practice should resemble the interview you have actually got, happen on the kind of call you will actually take, and produce feedback that tells you precisely what to change rather than vague encouragement. The site explicitly contrasts this with generic question lists, positioning company-specific research and round-by-round mapping as the core of the preparation. The first thing Toby does is build your prep brief so that you know the company cold. Tell it the role and it produces a picture of what the company does, how it makes money, what has happened lately and how the team works. The brief presents stage, size, HQ and business model at a glance. The worked example on the site is a Senior Product Manager, Payments role at Fernleaf: spend management for UK and EU small businesses, covering company cards, bill pay and expenses in one account, at Series B with £45m raised, roughly 200 staff, headquartered in London. The brief also lists recent news and culture signals, dated — for example, a new CFO hired in August 2026 from a listed payments company, and a June 2026 launch of bill pay in Ireland and the Netherlands. Finally, it suggests talking points worth raising in the room: asking how SEPA failure rates compare with Faster Payments, noting that interchange is most of their revenue so authorisation rate is a revenue metric, and referencing their memo culture by offering a short written plan for your first 90 days. The point of this section is that you arrive already knowing the business model, the recent context and the signals that show you have done the work. Toby then maps the interview process so you can see every round coming. It sets out each round, how long it runs and what it tests, and then lists the questions most likely to come up in each one. In the example this is a 30-minute recruiter screen, a 45-minute hiring manager interview, a 60-minute product case and a 45-minute values round, with six questions listed per round. Each question is tagged by competency and difficulty and marked when real candidates have reported it. So "What made you apply to Fernleaf, and why this payments role in particular?" is tagged customer focus, motivation, easy and reported, while "This role leads a squad of six engineers without line management. How have you led teams in that set-up?" is tagged cross-functional leadership, leadership, medium and reported. There is also a browsable library of company interview guides linked from the site. This gives you a structured view of what each stage is assessing rather than one undifferentiated bank of questions. The practice itself is designed to feel like the day. You pick the round — recruiter screen, hiring manager, case or values — and how long you have got: 10, 20 or 30 minutes, whatever you've got. You then choose a mode. Real mode runs it straight through, uninterrupted, like the day itself, with the full debrief at the end. Coach mode gives you a note or two after each answer and a chance to try again; coach notes only appear once you have finished talking, so you are not interrupted mid-answer. The call runs in a Google Meet, Teams or Zoom-style format so the real thing feels familiar, and you can have your camera on or off. Toby will wait while you think, and as the site puts it, he is very patient. Overall, Toby works as a three-step loop: tell Toby the role, take the call, get the debrief. Everything is anchored to the job description you pasted, which is what makes the questions and the feedback specific to the role rather than generic. Toby Higgins plays the interviewer throughout, and the model is built around reproducing the conditions of the real interview — the round type, the length, the video-call format — and then converting that performance into structured notes. The outcome is a debrief that tells you exactly what to fix. Toby gives you a score against the role's rubric — the example shows 60 out of 100 with the verdict "Solid examples, light on measurable impact" — and then breaks down every answer: what worked, what to fix, and a stronger version built only from what you said. Each competency is scored 1–5 with the quote behind it, for instance customer focus at 3/5 because the answer was a real example but had no numbers to size the impact. It also measures delivery: talk time at 35%, pace at 136 wpm against an ideal of 130–160, and one filler word, "actually", used once. Because the stronger version is built only from what you said, you are not handed a generic script — you get your own answer rebuilt, with brackets to fill in with your real details, such as adding the result as a number: from what, to what, over what time. The full transcript, question by question, is included as well. The overall promise is simple: walk in having done it already. In practical terms, the use cases follow the rounds Toby maps. A candidate with a recruiter screen coming up can run a short 10-minute coach-mode session to warm up on motivation and background questions. Someone facing a hiring manager round can run a longer session in Real mode to get the uninterrupted feel of the day, then read the debrief. A candidate with a 60-minute product case or a values round can pick that specific round and rehearse against the questions most likely to come up in it. Before applying or interviewing, you can use the prep brief to learn the company's business model, recent news and talking points. And after a bad answer, you can review the transcript and the stronger version, fill in the brackets with your real numbers, and try again. Toby is aimed at job candidates preparing for interviews, from those practising a recruiter screen through to people preparing for case and values rounds at specific companies. It runs on the web. On price, Toby is free to start: your first 5 minutes on a call are free, which is enough to warm up and see how the feedback works, and you save a card to see your debrief — it isn't charged. The free tier includes a full prep brief for your role, likely questions for every round, Real or Coach mode, and a debrief on what you answered. After that it is £0.50 a minute; you buy minutes in packs from £5, they are only used on a call, and they last 6 months. There is no subscription. As an illustration, a 10-minute mock interview is £10.00, and both modes, prep briefs and debriefs are included, and you can stop whenever you like. Toby's core value proposition is that it turns interview preparation into a realistic rehearsal against the specific role and company you are targeting, then converts that rehearsal into concrete, measurable fixes — pacing, filler words, talk time, structure and stronger versions of your own answers. Rather than hoping the real interview goes well, you walk in having already done it.