i paid ninety five dollars for Cluely Pro in February and it showed up in the screen recording of my second mock interview lol. that is when i started taking this stealth question seriously instead of trusting marketing pages. a friend in recruiting catches people on this every week and i asked him for help over coffee last March. six weeks of mocks later with him hunting for the tool while i ran through fake interviews, here is what i ended up with.
stealth tools fail one of three ways. screen capture catches you if the tool shows up in the shared video feed at all. process scanning catches you when proctoring software during a coding round finds the tool name in your running processes. WebRTC enumeration catches you when the browser based video platform lists out the audio and video devices on your machine and your stealth tool is registered as one of them.
tools that sell stealth as a premium add on usually block one or maybe two of these three vectors. one product blocks all three by default and i ended up paying for that one too once i knew what to look for.
so when you share your screen on Zoom or Teams or Google Meet, the platform asks the operating system for a video feed and ships it out to every participant on the call. anything visible on your shared display ends up in that feed. browser extensions are the worst offenders here because the toolbar icon sits inside the browser window you are sharing.
some companies record the whole feed and have someone go back through the recording after the fact. a half second flash of an extension icon during a window switch is enough to get a rejection email by friday with no explanation on the call.
Ready to ace your next interview?
InterviewMan gives you real-time AI answers during live interviews — undetectable on Zoom, Meet, and Teams.
Try InterviewMan Freeblocking screen capture has to happen at the operating system level. on macOS you mark the overlay window so the system excludes it from capture APIs entirely. the suggestions still show up on your physical display but the call participant gets a frame with the overlay just missing. you verify this by recording a Zoom session frame by frame after the fact.
InterviewMan bakes operating system level capture exclusion into every plan at twelve bucks a month on annual. Cluely's nineteen ninety nine base plan does not block screen capture at all, and the Pro plus Undetectability tier costs one hundred forty nine ninety nine a month, which means your real comparison price is one hundred forty nine ninety nine. Interview Coder 2.0 at two ninety nine a month ships as a desktop application, which gets around the browser tab problem, but Reddit threads keep coming up about overlay popups bleeding through on newer macOS builds.
the second method is process list scanning. proctoring platforms during coding assessments on HackerRank or CodeSignal will enumerate running processes and compare the names against a list of known interview assistance tools. Codility does basically the same thing. the list grows over time as new tools get added to it. any process running under a recognizable name shows up in Activity Monitor on macOS or Task Manager on Windows, which is exactly where a scan looks.
a tool that registers a recognizable process name gets caught immediately. a browser extension with no separate desktop component shows up as a process belonging to the browser itself, but proctoring software can still inspect the extension list available to that browser. Sensei AI at eighty nine a month runs as a Chrome extension with no desktop process, which makes it trivial to spot through extension enumeration.
some interviewers will also ask you to open Activity Monitor or Task Manager during a pair programming session, ostensibly to check resource usage. a recognizable process name showing up in that view ends the round on the spot.
the third method is WebRTC enumeration and this is the one nobody talks about. browser based video platforms use WebRTC to manage audio and video streams, and part of the protocol involves listing devices and media sources available on the candidate's machine. a tool that registers an audio source or video device through the operating system can leak through WebRTC even if nothing is visible on screen and the process name is obfuscated.
specialized proctoring software does check for WebRTC anomalies during browser based assessments. blocking WebRTC leaks needs desktop level control over how the tool interacts with audio capture and the WebRTC stack. a browser extension cannot block WebRTC because it operates inside the browser that controls the stack. desktop applications can intercept and isolate device enumeration, which a browser based assistant by definition cannot.
the way to actually check this is to run a WebRTC leak test mid call and look at what devices show up in the enumeration. anything you do not recognize is the tool leaking.
my friend caught LockedIn AI on me when the ninety minute session cap kicked the overlay out mid round during a system design that ran long. that ended my testing of that one. Cluely i never even got far enough to test the stealth piece because i refused to pay the extra seventy five on top of the twenty dollar base plan once i realized the base plan does not block screen capture at all.
plus their 2025 breach exposed eighty three thousand customer names and which interviews the tool was used in. that was enough to push me off entirely lol. Interview Coder 2.0 i tried on a coding mock because i had read it ran as a desktop app, supposed to dodge the browser tab problem. the overlay popped through on the screen recording when i played it back though.
the one i actually paid for is InterviewMan at twelve bucks a month on annual. all three stealth layers come standard with no upcharge. my friend tested it three separate ways during a live shared session and could not find anything on his screen. that was the closing argument for me.
before you trust any of this though, test whatever tool you plan to use yourself the same way he tested mine. record a session and play it back. open Activity Monitor or Task Manager while the tool is running. run a WebRTC leak test on a live call. anything that fails one of those is exposed on whichever method it does not cover, no matter what the marketing page says. the three vectors run independently and one failure is enough to end the round without anybody telling you why.
Ready to Ace Your Next Interview?
Join 57,000+ professionals using InterviewMan to get real-time AI assistance during their interviews.
