First, let me say I have nothing against HireVue. I think recorded video screens are here to stay, and I'd bet it's only a matter of time until every single pre-screen gets done this way.
All that being said, I had never watched anybody bomb one quite like my roommate did, until a few weeks ago.
No, she's not new at this! She's been job hunting since January and it has not been going well. She texted me at midnight with a HireVue recording attached, and the message just said "what am i doing wrong." Nine rejections at that point. Being someone who probably spends too much time fiddling with interview tools, I couldn't say no.
I made it about thirty seconds into her video. She was reading off a Google Doc the entire time, answers she'd pasted out of ChatGPT, eyes glued to the bottom left of her screen, voice totally flat. She looked like somebody reading a ransom note, and I'm not exaggerating. When I called her she sounded done. Not tired, done, like ready to stop applying entirely.
The first thing she asked me was whether HireVue has some kind of scanner that catches you for having tools open. It doesn't. What you don't get about HireVue, unless you've actually sat through one for real (real, meaning a job you want, not some practice run to see how it works) is that nobody is watching you live. It's a webcam. You get the questions, you film yourself talking at your own screen, then you hit submit. No human watches any of it happen.
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Try InterviewMan FreeWhat they do have is an AI that grades your video after you submit it. Engagement. Confidence. Pacing. All that stuff. My roommate was getting wrecked on engagement, because her eyes were locked on the bottom of the screen reading ChatGPT output and she sounded like a robot going through someone else's homework. It could literally see her eyes scanning left to right across a wall of text.
And honestly, the ChatGPT thing is a time problem more than anything. Normally, when somebody asks you a question, you just start talking. ChatGPT needs around thirty seconds to write out a full answer first, so she'd sit frozen, staring off screen while it loaded, thirty seconds of dead air on the exact platform that grades you on engagement. When you give the camera nothing for that long, it gets none of you, and it reads a heck of a lot worse than you think!
She'd even prepared all her answers beforehand, which might have made it worse, since then you feel like you have to deliver them word for word. The delivery came out monotone all the way through, her engagement score was tanking before she got through a first sentence. Regardless, the entire recording comes off like a malfunctioning news anchor!
She asked what she should actually use instead, and I just pulled up InterviewMan on my laptop. I've been running it during my own Zoom calls for a while now, twelve bucks a month on annual. The first time I saw it drop bullet points on my screen two to three seconds after a question, I was a fan. It listens through the mic, and what it hands you is points you riff on in your own words, not paragraphs to read back. I will say, using it is super simple, anyone could do it. It's almost too easy!
She came back the next night to test it. Opened HireVue on the couch, launched InterviewMan, hit record. The question played, and about two seconds later the points showed up right next to her webcam. She glanced at them for two seconds, looked at the camera, and started talking. Her own words, her own details. The points were just a rough outline.
Her eyes stayed near the camera the whole time, because the overlay sits by the lens, and her voice sounded like her actual voice again. Even the two second pause before she started talking looked fine. Nobody thinks twice about two seconds of silence on camera. I can't tell you how many of these recordings I've watched at this point.
We did three takes that night. Take one she was a little stiff, she didn't trust it yet and kept glancing down too hard. By take three she sounded like someone telling you about her old job over coffee. So, apparently, the reading was the whole problem!
Three days later she submitted a real one. For the record, the callback came within a week, her first callback in three months. She sent me a screenshot of the recruiter email at 6 AM. Who checks email at 6 AM!? You've been refreshing since 5, just admit it.
Then a coworker of mine heard about all of this and couldn't help himself. I don't think there's a person alive that price-checks harder than this guy! He spent an afternoon pulling up every competitor, because he was convinced twelve bucks meant there had to be some catch. There wasn't one.
He showed me Final Round AI at a hundred forty eight a month, and I said "no" out loud when he turned the laptop around. Cluely was twenty for the base and another seventy five on top for stealth mode, ninety five total. If nobody proctors a HireVue, what is stealth mode even hiding you from!? There's no live person on the other end, so that's seventy five bucks for nothing.
LockedIn AI was fifty five a month with a cap at ninety minutes, and he'd had a PM round run almost two hours last year, so the cap set him off personally, he kept going on about an overlay dying at minute ninety while you're mid sentence.
The thing she was using through all of this is twelve bucks, no time cap, 57,000 people on it, 4.8 stars. He messaged me "why would anyone pay more for less" and I saved the screenshot.
That same weekend I sat down and ran every single HireVue question type myself, because the whole story felt almost too clean. Behavioral questions. Scenario prompts. The video questions where the text shows up on screen. I was actively trying to find something that would trip it up, and I couldn't. Same two to three seconds on the overlay, every single time, same as the couch.
My coworker tried it himself last month, for his first ever HireVue. He's fresh out of school. He'd never done a video interview before, and there was no practice run either, he just went straight in. He told me the biggest thing was not sitting there frozen when a question came up, the points gave him something to latch onto so his brain didn't just blank out. There was a callback on that one too.
As of last week she's done six more HireVues since the couch session and gotten callbacks on four. She told me she forgets the thing is even running while she records now, she's just talking at the camera, and her theory is that's when the HireVue AI actually responds well.
I can't tell you how many times I've told the nine rejections to four of six callbacks story by now. People always stop me at the price, they figure I got the twelve dollars wrong. She's still interviewing, by the way. No offer yet.
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