Most people preparing for an AI-screened interview worry about the wrong thing. They worry about tricking the algorithm, smiling more, sounding upbeat, and staring dead into the camera lens like they’ve been told to, when HireVue itself says its AI-scored assessments work from the transcript of what you actually said against job-related competencies, not your face, your posture, or your tone of voice. Anyone offering interview coaching to UK candidates can genuinely use this stage to spend more time on what candidates say than how they perform for the camera, because that’s what the score is actually built from.
By 2026 this isn’t a fringe thing anymore. Recorded video interviews are now part of the recruitment process for some UK employers and graduate programmes. Vodafone, for example, uses recorded video interviews for certain roles, and Goldman Sachs has publicly referenced HireVue video interviews as part of its recruitment process. You record answers to a fixed set of questions, usually within a day or two window, and the content is scored against the competencies the employer has defined for the role before a person decides whether to move you forward. Some employers are experimenting with live AI-guided follow-ups too, where the system asks a second question based on your first answer, though this is still far less common than the standard fixed-question format.
What’s actually being scored
For transcript-based assessments, the content and structure of your answer matter more than trying to look perfect on camera. The system transcribes your answer and analyses that transcript against the competencies the employer built the question around, which means rambling, circling back, or restarting a sentence halfway through shows up as a weaker answer regardless of how warm or confident you sounded saying it. STAR- or SOAR-structured answers, situation, task, action, result, still work here, arguably better than they do in a live interview, because there’s no interviewer to rescue you with a follow-up prompt when you go off track.
Timing matters more than people expect too. Some assessments give candidates a fixed amount of time to answer each question, so practising with a timer is useful. That sounds like plenty until you’re mid-sentence and the recording cuts off. Practising against an actual timer, not just rehearsing the content, is the bit candidates skip and shouldn’t.
Your setup still matters, just not for the reason you’d think
Your setup still matters, even though the AI isn’t judging your appearance. Poor audio can make your answers harder to transcribe accurately, and a garbled transcript is a real risk if the scoring runs off the text of what you said. A distracting background or unreliable connection may not affect the score directly, but it can make you more nervous and disrupt your answer. Test your microphone, camera and connection before the assessment rather than discovering a problem once the timer’s already running.
Where human review still comes in
For most employers, the AI stage is a filter rather than the final decision, and a human still reviews your recording once you clear the initial score. At that point they’re generally looking for the same things a live interviewer always looked for: whether you can actually hold a conversation and whether your examples genuinely match the role you’re applying for. We’ve had clients spend all their preparation time on the AI stage and then freeze slightly in the human interview that follows because they’d assumed the hard part was already over.
Where coaching actually helps
We fold this into our regular interview and career confidence coaching now, because the underlying skill, structuring an answer under time pressure without a live prompt to lean on, is the same skill whether there’s a person or a screen on the other end. For graduates going through their first application cycle, where recorded and technology-assisted screening is becoming more common, our graduate career counselling and coaching work spends real time on exactly this, since most students have never had to answer a question with a countdown timer running.
We’ve also written more broadly about how AI is changing career counselling in the UK, which covers some of the fairness and bias questions employers are still working through on their end. It’s worth a read if you’re curious how this looks from the hiring side rather than the candidate side.
Practising for it
Record yourself answering a real question with a ninety-second timer running, on the same device and in the same room you’d actually use, then watch it back once without sound and then listen to it without looking at the screen. The first helps you notice distracting movements and long pauses; the second makes it easier to spot rambling, repetition and unclear answers. Watching with the sound off catches the fidgeting and dead air a human reviewer would notice later. Listening with your eyes closed catches the rambling and circling-back that the transcript-based scoring would actually mark down. Do that three or four times before the real thing, and most of the panic tends to sort itself out.
If you’ve got an AI screening coming up and want someone to sit through a few practice rounds with you, get in touch and we’ll book you in before the window closes.
