What is a HireVue interview?

The format, step by step

HireVue's own candidate walkthrough describes the sequence as: connect your camera and microphone; a system check; practice questions; then the interview itself. Of the practice stage it says you can repeat it as often as you like before starting, and of the interview it says this:

Two things about that page are worth knowing before you rely on it. It is dated 7 October 2014, and it still instructs readers to download Adobe Flash Player, which no browser has supported since the end of 2020. It is a long-standing default described on a page nobody has revisited, not a current rule. The timing page works through what HireVue's current documents say instead, and they say something noticeably different.

How many questions, and how long in total

Two HireVue documents give slightly different numbers, and the honest thing is to show you both rather than average them.

The ranges overlap. Plan for five or six questions and roughly half an hour, and block out the full 45 minutes so a slow upload does not turn into a crisis.

The games

Some roles bolt on short game-based assessments. HireVue describes these as measuring general mental abilities such as numerical reasoning, or personality areas such as conscientiousness. They are a separate thing from the video questions and they are scored separately. We do not simulate them, and any site that claims to have the real ones is guessing.

Three things a HireVue interview is not

• It is not a conversation. Nothing on the other end responds, probes or reacts. Practicing with a friend who nods is practicing a different skill.
• It is not live. HireVue also sells a live video product, and a few employers use one. If your invitation names a time slot and a person, that is the live product and this page is about the other one.
• It is not the final decision. HireVue's own FAQ describes the interview as a first step, with the top group moving on to person-to-person interviews before hiring decisions are made by people.

What happens to the recording

The company you are interviewing with decides how long it is kept. HireVue's FAQ states that it stores candidate data for the retention period chosen by the company you are interviewing with, and puts it plainly:

That single sentence explains most of the confusion people have about HireVue privacy. The screen-recording page works through the rest of it, including what is and is not captured while you record, and what you can ask for afterwards.

Start with your question

Most people arrive here with one specific worry rather than a general curiosity. Pick it.

Then do a practice interview

Reading about a timer does not prepare you for a timer. The failure modes on a one-way screen are almost never about knowing the answer: they are running out mid-sentence, leaving twenty seconds of silence at the end, or spending the whole preparation window panicking instead of choosing an example.

The simulator runs the same shape as the real thing: question on screen, preparation countdown, one take, hard stop. Your video never leaves your device. The audio of each answer is sent once to be turned into text and is then dropped. The text is what gets graded, by AI, which is labeled as AI everywhere it appears.

That is the recorded interview, and it drills the format. When you want to be pushed rather than timed, the talking interviewer is the same product in its other mode, and it is set harder than a real interview on purpose. It does not take the first version of an answer. It asks for the number or the moment behind a claim, and it presses again when an answer was already good, which a real panel will not bother to do. You train above the bar so the real room is the easy version.

Employer question sets

Eight employers, each built from the competencies that employer publishes about itself. To be exact about what that means: nobody outside these firms has their real screening questions, us included. What these pages carry is the process facts each employer states in its own words, and practice prompts derived from its own published competency framework, each one labeled as derived rather than quoted.

Three claims we will not make

Three claims you will see confidently stated elsewhere, which we will not make:

• "These are the real HireVue questions." They are not. No legitimate source publishes any employer's current one-way video questions. Anything presenting a list as the real script is either guessing or breaching somebody's terms of use.
• "Practicing guarantees you the job." Nothing can promise that. What practice changes is how your answer comes out under a timer, and that part is yours to control.
• "You get 30 seconds to prepare and 3 minutes to answer." Usually, but those are settings your employer chooses. The timing page shows where the numbers come from and what HireVue itself recommends instead.

One more, which matters more than the others: this is preparation software. It is for use before your assessment, never during it. McKinsey & Company and Deloitte each publish a policy that permits AI for preparation and prohibits it during the assessment. We agree with them.