An interview starts once. The ten minutes of setup beforehand decide whether the first two minutes are spent on your work or on "can you hear me?".
The stakes are asymmetric in an unhelpful way. Nobody is hired for excellent audio. People do get remembered for a call that started with four minutes of fumbling, because it is the first thing that happened and the thing the interviewer had to be patient about.
The day before
Confirm the platform and install it. Teams, Zoom, Meet, Webex and the various one-way recording tools all behave differently, and several will want to install or update something on first launch. Doing that at the scheduled time costs five minutes you do not have. Open the invite link the day before and let it do whatever it wants.
Check the meeting app's permissions. On Windows 11 each application needs camera and microphone permission separately, under Settings → Privacy & security. A browser-based call needs the browser to have permission and the site to have it inside the browser.
Do one real test call. Not a preview: a call, with someone, on the same platform. Preview windows tell you the camera turns on. They do not tell you that your microphone is picking up the neighbour's building work, or that you are backlit into a silhouette.
Choose where you will sit at the time of day the interview is. Light changes. A spot that works at 10am is a different spot at 4pm, and a window behind you that was overcast on Tuesday is direct sun on Thursday.
Thirty minutes before
- Restart the computer. Not superstition: it clears applications holding the camera, resets audio device selection, and gets any pending update prompt out of the way instead of having it appear mid-call.
- Close everything that uses the camera or microphone. Other meeting apps, the Windows Camera app, OBS or any virtual camera tool, and browser tabs from an earlier call. These are the most common reason a camera "does not work": it works, it is just already in use.
- Plug in. Power, and a wired network connection if you have one. Laptops on battery throttle and can change power behaviour mid-call; Wi-Fi is fine until someone else in the building starts a download.
- Turn on Do Not Disturb. This matters most if you will share your screen. A notification banner carrying a message from another company is a specific and avoidable way to have a bad day.
- Put your notes on the same screen as the camera, close to the lens, not on a monitor to the side. Reading from a side monitor is very visible.
The last sixty seconds
This is the check that actually catches things, because it is the only one that happens after the last thing changed.
- Camera: you can see yourself, in the right camera, with your eyes about a third of the way down the frame rather than your forehead at the top.
- Microphone: the level meter moves when you speak, and it is the device you are wearing.
- Speakers: you can hear something. A device being available is not the same as being audible.
- Light: the brightest thing in the frame is your face, not the window behind you.
- Background: look at what is actually in the shot rather than what you remember being there.
- Connection: stable, not merely fast. Good throughput with bad jitter breaks live video while a speed test looks excellent.
CallReady exists for this minute. One click from the system tray runs the whole set — camera and framing, microphone signal, speaker availability, face-focused lighting, unexpected device changes, and network latency, jitter and throughput — and returns one verdict: READY, NEEDS ATTENTION, or NOT READY. It takes about ten seconds, and where it can act it offers to: Screen Light turns your display into a light source if your face is too dark. It checks the Windows setup; the meeting app still has its own device picker, so confirm that too.
What interviewers notice, in order
Worth knowing, because it tells you where to spend effort.
- 1. Audio. Bad audio is exhausting to listen to and makes you harder to understand. By a distance the most damaging problem, and the cheapest to fix: a basic wired headset beats an expensive laptop.
- 2. Light on your face. Being a dark shape is worse than an untidy room.
- 3. Eye line and framing. Camera at eye level, eyes roughly a third down the frame. A laptop on a desk points up your nose; a couple of books under it fixes that permanently.
- 4. Background. It needs to be unremarkable, not impressive. Virtual backgrounds cost processing power and produce edge artefacts around your head when you move; a plain wall is better.
- 5. Stability. Freezing mid-sentence reads as a bad connection, which is forgivable, but it costs you the sentence.
One-way recorded interviews are a different problem
Automated video interviews — record an answer to a question, limited retakes, no human present — remove the thing that saves you in a live call. There is nobody to say "you're breaking up".
- Test on the platform's practice question if there is one, and watch the recording back with sound. That is your only chance to hear what they will hear.
- Check the retake policy before the first question, not after.
- Use a wired connection. An upload that stalls partway through a recorded answer can lose the answer.
- Run nothing else. These tools encode video locally while recording, and a busy machine drops frames.
- Look at the lens, not at your own image. There is no conversation to make it natural, so it has to be deliberate.
Have a plan B, and say it out loud
Decide in advance, so you are not deciding while flustered.
- Your phone as a hotspot, already paired and tested, so switching networks takes seconds.
- The dial-in number from the invite, saved in your phone, for when video fails entirely.
- A one-line script: "My connection just dropped — I'll rejoin in thirty seconds, or dial in if that fails." Said calmly this is a non-event. Said while panicking it becomes the memorable part of the call.
If something does break, name it once, fix it, and move on. Interviewers deal with this constantly and are unbothered by a problem that is handled. What they notice is the three minutes of narrating it.