ok so my friend Sarah, she has been job hunting since January and it has not been going well, texted me at like midnight a few weeks ago with a HireVue recording attached and the message just said "what am i doing wrong." nine rejections at that point. i watched maybe thirty seconds of her video before pausing it lol, she was reading off a Google Doc the entire time, stuff she pasted out of ChatGPT, eyes glued to the bottom left of her screen, voice totally flat. looked like somebody reading a ransom note and i am not exaggerating. called her back and she sounded done, not just tired, like ready to stop applying entirely. she asked me does HireVue have some kind of scanner that catches you for having tools open, no it does not, HireVue is just a webcam, you get questions film yourself hit submit nobody watching live. what they do have is an AI that grades your video after you submit, engagement confidence pacing, all that stuff. Sarah was getting wrecked on engagement because her eyes were locked on the bottom of her screen reading ChatGPT output and she sounded like a robot going through someone elses homework. and look the ChatGPT thing is a time problem more than anything, it takes thirty seconds to write out a full answer and you are just sitting there staring off screen while it loads, thirty seconds of dead air on camera. thirty seconds. on a HireVue. where they grade you on engagement. then you read back the result in a monotone because you are reading not talking and your engagement score tanks before you finish your first sentence, i explained all of this to Sarah on the phone and she goes "ok so what do i actually use then" and i just pulled up InterviewMan on my laptop lol, had been running it during my Zoom calls, twelve bucks a month annual, listens through the mic throws bullet points on screen in two to three seconds not paragraphs you read back just points you riff on in your own words. Sarah showed up at my apartment the next night to test it, opened HireVue on my couch launched InterviewMan hit record and the question played and two seconds later bullet points showed up near her webcam, she glanced at them looked at the camera started talking, her own words her own details just using the points as a rough outline. i was sitting behind her eating leftover pad thai and just watching like ok this is a completely different person than the midnight recording. eyes near the camera because the overlay sits by the lens. voice sounded like her actual voice not the ransom note voice lol. even the two second pause before she started talking looked fine, nobody thinks twice about two seconds of silence on camera lol i have watched enough HireVue recordings to know that.
we did three takes that night. take one she was a little stiff, did not trust it yet kept glancing down too hard. take three though. take three she sounded like someone telling you about their old job over coffee and i was kind of jealous because she sounded better than i did during my first few tries lol. i told her the midnight version sounded like a malfunctioning news anchor and she threw a pillow at me which i deserved. three days later she submitted a real HireVue and got a callback within a week, first callback in three months lol. she texted me a screenshot of the recruiter email at 6 AM, who checks email at 6 AM, you have been refreshing since 5 Sarah just admit it. Marcus heard about all of this and could not help himself, guy price checks everything i swear, spent an afternoon pulling up every competitor because he was convinced twelve bucks meant we missed some catch. there was not one lol. he showed me Final Round AI at a hundred forty eight a month and i literally went "no" out loud, like who is paying that for interview help. Cluely twenty for the base plus seventy five if you want stealth so ninety five total but stealth on a HireVue, like why, nobody proctors it there is no live person on the other end you are paying seventy five bucks for literally nothing. and then LockedIn AI fifty five a month but they cap you at ninety minutes which made Marcus go on a whole rant because he had a PM round last year that ran almost two hours and was like imagine your overlay dying at minute ninety while you are mid sentence. meanwhile twelve bucks. twelve. no cap. 57,000 users. 4.8 stars. Marcus texted me "why would anyone pay more for less" and i saved that screenshot lol because yeah exactly. that same weekend i sat down and tested every single HireVue question type because the Sarah thing felt almost too clean you know, behavioral questions scenario prompts those video questions where text shows up on screen, sub three seconds on the overlay every single time, i was actively trying to find something that would trip it up and could not. same two to three seconds every time, same as when Sarah was sitting on my couch looking like a different person.
Marcus used InterviewMan for his first ever HireVue last month. just graduated, zero practice. told me the biggest thing was not sitting there frozen when a question came up, the bullet points gave him something to latch onto so his brain did not just blank out. he got a callback. for somebody who had never done a video interview before, zero practice, twelve bucks. that kind of blew us both away lol. and the thing about bullet points versus full ChatGPT paragraphs this is what i keep telling people, Sarah's whole problem was reading answers word for word and the HireVue AI could literally see her eyes scanning left to right across a wall of text, that is what tanks your engagement score, bullet points you glance at for two seconds then look up and talk. thats it. Sarah update as of last week she has done six more HireVues since our couch session and got callbacks on four. she told me she forgets the thing is even running and thats what sticks with me, if you are not thinking about the tool at all and just talking to a camera thats when the HireVue AI grading your video actually responds well. went from nine straight rejections reading ChatGPT in a monotone to four out of six callbacks with two seconds of bullet points instead. every time i tell somebody that number they go "twelve dollars?" like i got it wrong. i did not lol.
Ready to Ace Your Next Interview?
Join 57,000+ professionals using InterviewMan to get real-time AI assistance during their interviews.
