AI interviews: how they work

An employer sends you a link. You open it, answer a handful of spoken questions on camera, and that is the whole thing — about fifteen minutes, whenever suits you. There is nothing to book, no account to create, and no software to install.

It replaces a first-round phone screen, not a real interview with a person. The point of it, from the employer’s side, is that everyone who applies gets one instead of only the few whose CVs happened to catch someone’s eye.

1. The employer writes or reviews the question set for the role before anyone is invited. Questions are drawn from that set at random, so two candidates for the same job rarely get an identical interview.
2. You open the link and are shown what will be recorded and why, before anything is switched on. You choose whether to continue.
3. An interviewer asks a question out loud. You answer out loud. It may ask a follow-up based on what you actually said, so the conversation is not a fixed script.
4. The interview is time-bounded. If time runs short it asks fewer questions rather than cutting you off mid-answer, and anything it never got to is simply not part of what the employer reads.
5. Afterwards your answers are transcribed and written up. The employer is emailed a link to the write-up and reads it when they choose.

• Your voice, for each answer you give.
• Still images from your camera while you answer. Not video. Single frames, taken at intervals.
• A written transcript of your answers, and notes on each one.
• The name or reference the employer used to invite you.

Nothing is taken from your device beyond that. There is no keystroke logging, no screen capture, no check on which other windows are open, and no attempt to detect whether you are reading from notes.

Each answer is compared against a reference answer the employer can see and edit — what a strong response to that question would contain. Two things are assessed: whether the answer addressed the question that was asked, and whether it was clear and structured enough to follow.

What the rating is not. It has not been validated against how anyone performs in a job, and we do not claim it predicts that. It has nothing to do with your CV, which the interviewer does not read. It is a measure of how a handful of answers went on one day, and it should be treated as exactly that much.

Nothing is decided automatically. No candidate is rejected by this system. A person at the company reads the write-up and makes the decision, and the product is deliberately built not to produce a shortlist for them.

The transcript of what you said, notes on each answer, a short summary of the points that stood out with your own words underneath them, and the rating described above.

They are not shown any judgement about your appearance, surroundings or demeanour. The system does generate notes of that kind for candidates practising on their own account, where it is coaching someone asked for about themselves. Those are withheld from employers deliberately: how well-lit your room is and whether you own a collared shirt are not qualifications, and an employer who saw them would be marking you on the wrong thing.

You do not have to do this. An interview you were asked to record by a company you want a job from is not a free choice in any ordinary sense, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest, so: close the page and tell the employer you would rather not. That is a reasonable thing to ask and it is not a withdrawal of your application.

The same goes for needing longer, needing it in another format, or needing an adjustment for any reason at all. Reply to the email the link arrived in — it reaches the employer directly, not us. You do not have to explain why, and we would encourage you not to share health or disability information you have not been asked for.

This is for people aged 18 or over. If you are under 18, close the page and speak to the employer.

Audio recordings and camera stills are deleted 45 days after the interview. The transcript and the written notes are kept for as long as the employer is considering applications for that role.

It is not used to train any model, it is not sold, and it is never shared with another employer.

The employer decides to screen you, decides what the questions are, and decides what happens next. Under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act they are the Data Fiduciary for your interview, and we are the Data Processor acting on their instructions. We run the software; they make the decisions.

In practice that means questions about why you were asked to interview, what the role is, or how your application is going go to the employer. Questions about the recording itself — deletion, a copy, something that looks wrong — can come to either of us, and we will act on them and tell the employer.

Your speech is transcribed by an automatic speech-recognition model, and the conversation and the written notes are produced by a large language model from Anthropic. Both run as services we send the data to for processing; neither provider is permitted to use your interview to train their models.

Automatic transcription makes mistakes, particularly with names, technical terms and accents it has heard less of. If the transcript of your interview has got something wrong, that is worth telling us about — it is the kind of error that is invisible to everyone except the person who said the words.

You can withdraw your consent after the fact, ask for a copy of your interview, or ask for it to be deleted. Email gandotravaibhav486@gmail.com and we will act on it and tell the employer. You do not need to give a reason.

If you are not satisfied with how your data has been handled, you may complain to the Data Protection Board of India.