The five-minute camera check before a video interview

Interviews are the worst time for a technical problem and the most common time to have one, because it is usually the first call you have made on that platform.

Here is the order to check things in, with the highest-risk items first.

The day before

Install whatever the invitation names. If the interview is on Teams or Zoom and you have never used it, install it and sign in now. First-run permission prompts, account creation and forced updates are exactly what you do not want in the last two minutes.

Test on the same machine and network. Your camera working on your phone tells you nothing about your laptop. If you plan to join from a café or a shared office, test there.

Check the camera at all. Open a camera test and confirm the basics: the camera is found, the picture is bright enough, the frame rate is not crawling. Doing this a day ahead leaves time to fix a driver or buy a lamp.

Five minutes before

1. Close everything that uses a camera

Zoom, Teams, Slack, OBS, any spare browser tab with a green room open. On Windows only one app holds the camera at a time, and a background app is the single most common reason a camera appears broken at the worst moment.

Closing the window is often not enough — quit from the system tray on Windows, or the menu bar on a Mac.

2. Confirm the camera works

Run a quick test in the browser you will actually join from. Permissions are per-browser: allowing a camera in Chrome means nothing in Safari.

You are looking for three things. Does it find the camera. Is the resolution 720p or better. Is the frame rate near 30fps. If the frame rate is low, the room is usually too dark, and the fix is a lamp, not a setting.

3. Fix the light

The camera needs light on your face, not behind you. A window at your back makes you a silhouette that no camera setting recovers.

If it is dark, put a lamp in front of you and bounce it off a wall rather than aiming it at your face. This does more for how you come across than any other thirty seconds you could spend.

4. Fix the framing

Raise the laptop until the camera is at eye level — a stack of books is fine. Sit about an arm’s length away, with your head and the top of your shoulders in frame and a little space above your head.

Glance at what is behind you. Tidy, with a couple of things in it, reads as considered.

5. Check the sound

People forgive a mediocre picture and do not forgive bad audio.

Use wired earbuds if you have them — they sit closer to your mouth, pick up less room noise, and avoid the Bluetooth pairing that fails at the worst time. Say a sentence and play it back if the platform lets you.

Silence your phone, and close anything that makes notification sounds.

6. Have a fallback

Assume something will fail, and decide now what you will do.

• Know the dial-in number if there is one.
• Have the interviewer’s email open in a tab, so you can message them in ten seconds rather than hunting for it.
• Know how to tether to your phone’s hotspot.
• If video dies entirely, offer to continue audio-only rather than spending the interview debugging. Most interviewers will say yes, and handling it calmly reads better than a perfect picture.

Things worth turning off

Virtual backgrounds and blur. They cost CPU and make your video stutter, and edges around hair and glasses flicker. A real, tidy background is better than a processed one.

Beauty filters. Zoom’s “Touch up my appearance” is on for some people without their knowing. It is a matter of taste, but an interview is not the place to discover that it is doing something odd.

Automatic updates, for the next hour. An update prompt mid-call is avoidable.

During the call

Look at the camera lens when you are making a point, not at the faces on screen — that is what reads as eye contact to the person watching. Moving the meeting window to the top of your screen, just below the camera, narrows the gap between the two.

If your connection struggles, turning your own video off for a moment frees up bandwidth and usually stabilises the audio, which is the part that matters.

Run the check

The test below covers the camera half of this list in about three seconds: whether the camera works, what resolution and frame rate it is really delivering, and whether your lighting is good enough — including a specific check for being backlit, which is the mistake hardest to spot in a preview.

Nothing is uploaded or recorded. The video is read inside your own browser tab, and the camera is released when you close it — so remember to close the tab before you join, or it will still be holding the camera when the interview starts.