Proctored video interviews

What is a proctored video interview?

A proctored video interview is a structured interview a candidate completes in their browser, recorded and monitored for session-integrity signals, without a live interviewer present. Every candidate for a role answers the same questions under the same conditions, and the recording plus transcript becomes the evidence the hiring team reviews later.

The problem it solves is specific: first-round screening is the stage where scheduling costs the most and consistency is worst. Twenty candidates times a thirty-minute call is a week of recruiter time, spread across whatever questions each interviewer thought to ask that day. By the time the panel compares notes, the earliest conversations have blurred.

Recording the round changes what the panel is comparing. Instead of four sets of interviewer notes, they have four candidates answering the same question, reviewable side by side, at whatever point in the process the decision actually gets made.

What does "proctored" actually check?

OpusHire runs session-integrity checks during the interview and surfaces what it observed for human review. The output is a set of flagged moments a reviewer can jump to in the recording — not a verdict, and not a score that gates the candidate. A reviewer decides what, if anything, a flag means.

This is deliberately framed as review support. Integrity signals are noisy by nature: a candidate looking away may be reading a second monitor or may be in a room with a window. Presenting a flag as proof would be wrong, and presenting it as a score that filters candidates automatically would be worse.

What the platform gives a reviewer is the timestamped moment and the recording to check it against, so an anomaly is something a person resolves in ten seconds rather than a number they have to trust.

How are the interviews structured and scored?

Questions are configured per requisition so every candidate for a role gets the same set. Answers are transcribed, and reviewers score them against a scorecard rather than writing free-form impressions. The scorecard produces the comparable output; any AI-drafted summary is labelled as AI-assisted and sits alongside the transcript rather than replacing it.

Structured interviewing is the part of the hiring literature that is least controversial and least practised, mostly because keeping it consistent is administratively annoying. Making the structure the default — same questions, same scorecard, transcript attached — is most of the benefit.

• Same questions per role. Configured on the requisition, asked of every candidate.
• Full transcript. Searchable, attached to the candidate record, reviewable without scrubbing video.
• Scorecards. Reviewers rate against defined criteria, so two interviewers' outputs are comparable.
• Shareable review links. A completed interview can be shared with a reviewer who has no platform account, through a time-limited read-only link.

When should you use an asynchronous interview instead of a live one?

Asynchronous interviews suit the first round, where the goal is to cover many candidates consistently and the conversation is mostly one-directional. They suit later rounds badly: once you are selling the role and probing judgement, the candidate needs to be able to ask questions, and a recording cannot do that.

Used at the wrong stage, recorded interviews cost you candidates. Senior applicants asked to record answers into a browser for a final round will reasonably conclude the employer is not investing in them, and some will withdraw.

The honest framing is that this replaces the phone screen, not the interview. It removes the scheduling bottleneck from the stage where scheduling costs the most and consistency matters most, so that live interviewer time is spent on the shortlist rather than on filtering.

What does the candidate experience look like?

Candidates complete the interview in a browser at a time they choose, after a device and connection pre-flight check that catches camera and microphone problems before the interview starts rather than halfway through. They are told the session is recorded and what is being checked, and they consent before anything is captured.

Consent is not buried in the terms of service. An interview is a recording of a person, and the platform treats the candidate's agreement to it as a distinct, informed step.

The pre-flight check exists because the most common failure in asynchronous interviewing is not misconduct, it is a candidate discovering their microphone was muted for the first two answers. Catching that up front removes the retake request that otherwise lands in a recruiter's inbox.

Frequently asked questions