Preparing for a virtual interview
It is easy to prepare for the interview and ignore the virtual part. Then the call starts, your face is a silhouette against a bright window, the interviewer's first question arrives half-garbled over hotel wifi, and the prepared answers never get their chance. The medium isn't neutral. It's a second interview running underneath the first one, and it's the easier of the two to pass.
The technical bar is genuinely low, which is why missing it reads so badly. Do one real test call (same chair, same time of day, same light) with a friend who'll be honest. Your own preview tile lies to you about both sound and framing. Audio matters more than video: a person will forgive a mediocre picture for forty-five minutes, but strained listening curdles into irritation with whoever caused it. Camera at eye level, roughly; light in front of you, not behind; wired connection if you can get one, and know how to hotspot your phone in under a minute if the wifi dies. That last one isn't paranoia. Twenty seconds of "sorry, rejoining from my phone" reads very differently from three minutes of dead air, and composure under a glitch is itself information for the interviewer.
The subtler differences are conversational. Video latency eats the little sounds people use to take turns talking, so interruptions that would be natural energy in a room become collisions on a call. Let pauses sit a beat longer than feels comfortable; the silence you're tempted to fill is often just the delay. Eye contact means the camera, not the interviewer's face, which is unnatural and worth practicing. A workable compromise is glancing at their expression while you think and at the lens while you land the point. And warmth transmits weaker over video than in person, so turn it up a notch past what feels normal, which is compensation for a lossy channel rather than performance.
Notes are the medium's honest advantage: you can have them, and you should. The discipline is what kind. Prompts, not prose: a handful of trigger words for the stories you want available, the two or three questions you're asking them, a number you'd hate to blank on. Tape them at camera height. A script is a trap. Reading has a cadence everyone recognizes instantly, and the moment a question deviates from what you scripted, the script starts working against you.
Which brings up the uncomfortable modern version: live AI feeding you answers during the call. Interviewers know this exists now, and the tells (the lag before fluent answers, eyes tracking a moving line, diction that doesn't match your small talk) are the reading-cadence problem with higher stakes. But getting caught in the call isn't even the worst outcome. An answer generated for you plants claims you'll be expected to stand behind in the next round, in person, without the teleprompter. Everything I've written here about honest résumés applies double to words said in your own voice. Prepare before the call instead; that's the version of AI help that doesn't detonate later.
On prep, one specific thing we learned building jobhunt's interview-prep feature: who the interviewer is matters as much as what the role is, and it's precisely where made-up preparation hurts most. When you tell Coach your interviewer's name, it researches them, actually fetching what's publicly available, and everything in the dossier it builds about that person has to trace to material it really found. If it can't find them, it preps you for the role instead of inventing a person. We built it that way because an invented dossier is worse than none: walk in "knowing" your interviewer led a team they left two years ago, ask a confident question about it, and you've spent your credibility on a hallucination. The same rule applies if you're prepping by hand, with or without AI. Check that what you "know" about the person traces to something real, because you'll only get to be wrong about them once.
Last: have your own questions ready, written down, specific to the team rather than recyclable anywhere. Virtual interviews can end abruptly; there's no walk to the elevator. The questions you ask at the end may become part of your closing impression. That part has nothing to do with the medium. It is simply easy to skip after spending the rest of your preparation on it.