Reviewing a video interview

How to watch a candidate's video answers, rate them, and shortlist or discard from one screen.

When a candidate finishes a video interview, you review it on a single screen: the recording in the middle, the transcript on the right, and your rating, the shortlist and discard buttons and your colleagues' ratings on the left. This article covers that screen. For creating the questions and adding the stage to a job, see "Setting up video interviews".

Who can review

System Admin and HR users can review any video interview they can open. Everyone else can submit a rating only if at least one of these is true for the candidate:

They are assigned to interview the candidate.
They are in the interviewer pool of the video interview stage.
They are an interviewer or host on an interview event for the candidate at that stage.

Being a recruiter or hiring manager on the job is not enough on its own to submit a rating. If you are not covered by one of the three points above, you get the message "You are not assigned to interview this candidate" when you select Submit Review. A recruiter or hiring manager on the job can still open the screen and read the team's ratings. Members also need to be the hiring lead or on the job's team to open the candidate at all.

Shortlisting and discarding follow the pipeline move rules, which are covered further down.

Getting to the review screen

Open the job and go to the Pipeline tab, or find the candidate on the Candidates page, and open their profile.
On the Overview tab, scroll to the Video interview panel. It shows the position, when the candidate completed the interview and, if they have had more than one attempt, the attempt number. It also plays the recording and shows the transcript in a smaller form.
Select Review video, which sits below the panel.

The Review video button only appears while the candidate is sitting in the job's video interview stage. Once they have been moved on, you can still watch the recording in the Video interview panel, but the full review screen is no longer offered. If the job has no video interview stage, the review screen shows "No recording available for this interview."

If a candidate has had several attempts, the screen shows the most recent completed one.

Watching the answers

The recording sits in the centre with a standard player (play, pause, volume, full screen). When the candidate answered several questions, a list underneath is headed "Answer 1 of 4" and so on, with one button per answer. Each button is labelled with the question. Select one to switch to that answer. When there is only one recording, there is no list.

What you see depends on the state of the recording:

While the recording is still being prepared, the centre panel says it is being processed. The screen checks again every 15 seconds for up to five minutes. If it is still not ready after that, reload the page later.
If a recording cannot be loaded, you see "Could not load the recording." with a Retry button. Recording links expire quickly, so the screen already refreshes the link once by itself if playback fails part way through. Use Retry if that does not work.
If the interview has no recording at all, the panel says "No recording available for this interview."

Reading the transcript

The Transcript panel on the right shows the written version of the candidate's answers as one block of text you can scroll. It does not follow the video and you cannot click a line to jump to that point. If the transcript has not been produced, the panel reads "Transcript not available."

Rating the interview

Use Your Review on the left.

Select a star rating from 1 to 5. A rating is required.
Add anything you want to record in Comments. This is optional and can be up to 5,000 characters.
Select Submit Review. A "Review submitted" message confirms it.

If you select Submit Review without a star rating, you are told "Please select a rating before submitting."

Your rating is recorded against the video interview stage of the job. It is a single overall score, not a scorecard. The five stars correspond to the recommendation scale used in other interview feedback, from Strong No at one star up to Strong Yes at five.

Changing a rating

You can rate the same candidate again at any time and the new rating replaces your old one. After you submit, the form empties and does not show your earlier rating, so you need to choose the stars again. Comments are replaced too: if you submit the second time without comments, your earlier comments are cleared. If you already submitted a full interview scorecard for this stage, a video rating cannot replace it and you get an error instead.

Team Reviews

Team Reviews lists what your colleagues have submitted for the same stage, newest first. Each entry shows the reviewer's name, the date, their stars and their comments. It does not include your own review. If nobody else has rated yet, it says "No team reviews yet."

The same people who are allowed to rate can read this list. In addition, anyone who is a recruiter or hiring manager on the job can read it, and so can anyone assigned to the candidate or in the interviewer pool of the candidate's current stage.

Shortlisting and discarding

Two buttons sit above your review.

Shortlist moves the candidate to the next stage in the job's pipeline, the one directly after the video interview stage. A box titled "Move to Next Stage" asks you to confirm with Confirm Shortlist. The button is greyed out when the video interview is the last stage, or when you are not allowed to move candidates.
Discard rejects the application. A box titled "Discard Application" asks for a Reason (not qualified, experience mismatch, overqualified, underqualified, location, salary expectations, culture fit, incomplete application or other) and optional Additional notes, then Confirm Discard. Discarding triggers the rejection email, exactly as a rejection from the pipeline does.

Rating and moving are separate actions. Submitting a review does not move the candidate, and shortlisting does not require you to have rated them first.

Who can move candidates: System Admin and HR users, and the recruiter on the job, always can. Hiring managers and interviewers can only when the organisation has turned on Allow hiring managers and interviewers to move candidates (under Settings, Roles & Permissions, in the Pipeline permissions group). If you try to discard without permission, you get "You do not have permission to reject applications for this job".

Finding interviews that are ready for review

A candidate counts as ready for review, for you, when all three are true: they are in a video interview stage, their latest video interview invitation is completed, and you have not yet submitted a rating for them. The flag is personal. A candidate you have already rated is no longer ready for review for you, though they still are for colleagues who have not rated.

On the job's Pipeline tab, tick Ready for review in the filters to show only these candidates. Cards in the video interview stage also carry a badge: Video completed once they have finished, or Awaiting response while the invitation is out.
On the Candidates page, use the Ready for review filter, optionally combined with the job filter.

Inside the review screen, Previous and Next at the top step through the ready-for-review queue for that job, with a position such as "2 of 5". If the candidate you opened is not in the queue, for example because you have already rated them, Next takes you to the first candidate in it.

What blind scoring and confidential shortlisting change

Confidential shortlisting. While a candidate's identity is hidden from you, the left panel shows the candidate as "Candidate" with the application reference in place of their name, and the email and location are removed. Who is hidden from, and how identities are revealed, is described in "Blind scoring and confidential shortlisting". The recording and transcript are shown as they are, so a video shows the candidate on camera. Ratings, shortlisting and discarding work as normal.

Blind scoring. The job's Blind Scoring setting applies to interview scorecards. It does not change this screen: Team Reviews shows reviewer names, stars and comments to everyone who can open it.