How to practice for an AI video interview

Record yourself answering real questions out loud from memory, watch the footage back for the places you break, and drill the follow-up until it stops rattling you. Use AI to build the skill before the interview, never to feed you answers during it, because the live copilot is exactly what employers are moving to ban and the skill is what holds up when the follow-up lands. An AI video interview changes the camera and sometimes the first reviewer, not what earns the offer, so you train for it the way you train for a person, with reps on the substance until your answers hold under pressure.

By UnchartedCareer

Last updated: July 2026

What is an AI video interview, and who watches it?#

It is a recorded interview where you answer set questions on camera and your responses are reviewed later, sometimes by a human, sometimes by an algorithm, sometimes both. Researchers call this an asynchronous video interview, and automated scoring is only one mode of review, not the universal one (International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 2025). Recruiting is the HR function with the highest AI adoption, at 27 percent of US organizations in an SHRM survey fielded December 2025 (SHRM, 2026), so the format is common enough to train for deliberately. The practical catch is that you usually will not know on the day whether a person or a model watches first, which is why you prepare to satisfy both.

Where is the line between practicing with AI and cheating?#

Run every use through one test. Can you defend the answer without the tool in the room? If yes, the AI built a skill that is now yours. If no, the AI is standing in for your judgment, and that is the use that gets caught. Practicing with AI before the interview is fair game, running mock questions, drafting an answer you then rehearse from memory, researching the company, getting feedback on a recording of yourself. A live copilot feeding you answers to read during the interview is the use employers are writing out of bounds. Anthropic, the company that builds Claude, tells candidates plainly that live interviews carry no AI assistance unless it says otherwise, and that take-home work should be done without its model unless a task allows it (Anthropic, 2025). The company that sells the model does not want the model in the room, because it wants to see you solve the problem in real time.

The reason the line holds is mechanical, not moral. A copilot wins the question you already saw coming and collapses on the follow-up, because reading words off a screen is not the same as defending them, and defending them is the whole reason the interview exists.

What should you prepare before you hit record?#

Do the homework the AI can help with, before the camera is on. Read the job posting and translate it into plain requirements, then pick three or four real stories from your own experience that show those requirements in action. Use an AI model to pressure-test them, ask it to play a skeptical interviewer and pose the follow-up you would dread, then rehearse your answer from memory until you can deliver it without the draft in front of you. That is practice AI doing its legitimate job, building recall and fluency that walk into the room with you, with nothing to detect because you are simply better prepared. In a Gartner survey from late 2024, 39 percent of job seekers said they already used AI somewhere in the application process (Gartner, 2024), so the tooling is normal. The line is that it prepares you, it does not sit in for you.

How do you practice, step by step?#

Start with a camera and one hard question. Open your laptop camera, and with no notes, answer something like "tell me about a time you owned something that broke and what you did." Say it out loud, all the way through, the way you would to a stranger who can hire you.

Then watch it back and look for the three tells that survive into any recorded interview: where you reached for filler, where your pace ran away from you, and the moment your eyes left the lens. Each one is a place a reviewer, human or model, loses confidence in you.

Redo the same question until those tells fade. Then swap in a harder one and add a follow-up you did not plan for, the "why did you do it that way" that real interviewers ask. Answer in structured specifics, the situation you faced and what you actually did about it, in your own words from memory, and hold that framing when the follow-up lands. The goal is not a memorized script. A script wins the first question and dies on the second.

Do this in short daily reps, not one long session the night before. Confidence is the trainable part, and it trains through repetition, the boring way.

How do you come across well on camera?#

Treat the camera as the interviewer and answer like someone who knows the work. The basics that read as competence to a person give a model clean signal too: specific answers, steady pace, eyes on the lens, and a clear situation-and-action structure you can defend. The research literature is honest that the format is still unsettled, with a 2025 editorial in the International Journal of Selection and Assessment flagging fairness and automated-scoring efficacy as open questions rather than settled science (International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 2025). So aim to be defensibly good on camera, because that holds up whether a human reviewer or an algorithm watches first.

What should you never do in an AI video interview?#

Never hand the room to a stand-in, human or software. A live copilot collapses on the follow-up, and the downside is one-sided and brutal, a pulled offer and a burned door at a company you might want later. This is not hypothetical. In a Gartner survey from mid-2025, 6 percent of candidates admitted to interview fraud, posing as someone else or having someone pose as them (Gartner, 2025). Detection is not flawless and not every interview is monitored, but the trade is terrible, risking a real offer to dodge a drill you could have just done. Build the skill before the room instead. It is the only edge that travels into a room you cannot fully predict.

Your move#

You can run this whole drill by hand tonight, and you should at least once, because recording yourself teaches you exactly where your answers thin out. The ceiling is real though. A recording shows you the tells, but it cannot ask the question you did not see coming, and the unseen follow-up is where most answers fall apart. When you want that follow-up on demand, scored and repeatable, AI interview practice is built to throw it at you, after you run the manual drill yourself.