What Happens When Your Connection Drops Mid-Answer

What Happens to the Answer You Were Giving?

On HireVue, it was most likely submitted.HireVue's help article 'Disconnected During the Interview' tells a candidate who dropped while answering to assume the answer has most likely gone through ¹. On re-entry the interview moves to the next question, and there is no way for the interrupted one to be reset ¹. A drop between questions is gentler. You resume at the next question, with your previous answers saved ¹.

'Most likely' is the vendor's own wording, and the page does not say what a recruiter sees of a truncated answer.

One companion fact belongs beside it. HireVue's explainability statement sets two conditions for an answer to be scored by AI: the candidate has consented to AI scoring, and the system detects enough content ². When either condition is unmet, the answer is not AI-scored and is flagged for human review instead ². The statement names the failures it has in mind: an answer too short, one not given in the allotted time, speech the system cannot understand clearly enough, or a microphone problem ².

The vendor calls this a small proportion of candidates in any cohort and publishes no figure for it ².

Flagged for a person is not the same fact as scored well. It moves the response to a reviewer, and says nothing about what that reviewer concludes.

That is the vendor's account of its own process, and it covers only an answer too thin to score.

Keep Going, Then Send the Recruiter One Message

Answer the questions that are left before you do anything else. HireVue's advice in its disconnection article is to finish the interview, then contact the company you applied to ¹. That company can send a retake if it feels one is needed, and the vendor says it does not have permission to provide another interview itself ¹. Abandoning the rest costs you the questions that still work.

Then write to the recruiter, and keep it short: the question number, roughly when it happened, that the connection dropped mid-answer, and what you want.

A request is easier to answer than a description of a bad evening. Ask for a retake of that question, or for the chance to answer it in writing. Say that you finished the rest, since that tells the recruiter the problem was the line.

Send it the same day, while the details are fresh.

Reloading the link does not bring the question back, and on Willo it does not stop the clock either. Willo's documentation says a candidate invited by email, SMS or an ATS integration cannot reset the timer by restarting the assessment, closing the browser or refreshing the page ³.

Who Can Actually Grant a Retake?

On HireVue, the hiring company, and nobody else in the chain. HireVue's 'Restart Your Interview' article says a submitted response cannot be returned to, whether the interview is still in progress or already complete ⁴. A full retake takes the hiring company's explicit approval, delivered as a new interview link ⁴. The vendor says it is not involved in hiring decisions and cannot authorize one itself ⁴.

Which is why the recovery move is a message rather than a button.

Retries before submission are a different setting, and they belong to the employer too. HireVue's explainability statement lists question retries as a Yes or No configuration, with unlimited as its recommended setting ⁵. How a candidate experiences the assessment is configurable by the company deploying it, the same document says ⁵.

Both are decisions the employer made before you opened the link.

Radancy, which now runs myInterview, tells candidates that a missing retake button means either the company did not enable retakes or the allowance is used up ⁶.

A few platforms publish a route. Karat's Redo Interviews page describes a candidate requesting a second attempt within 24 hours of the original, scheduling it, and answering a new set of questions ⁷. Both recommendations go to the client, which decides whether to advance the candidate ⁷.

That last step is the honest cost of asking: on Karat the client sees both, and none of these pages says how often a company agrees.

It helps to know what the employer is being told about this round. What employers read about the scripted async video round argues that it still separates people on delivery and hardly at all on substance. That is an argument about the format rather than a reading of your application. What actually happens in an AI interview covers the four formats and what each one records.

What Other Platforms Do When You Drop

The rule differs by platform, and the first thing to check is which platform your invitation came from. Alex, the AI interviewer formerly named Apriora, points a candidate who misses a slot for a technical issue back to the same link later on ⁸. Spark Hire's candidate help says a candidate can pause and return through the interview link, between questions, as many times as needed before the deadline ⁹.

Read your own invitation before you assume any of this applies.

Willo runs a third way. Its knowledge base describes the time allocation as guard rails rather than a cut-off: the timer counts up, continues until the answer is submitted, and includes any retakes ³.

A candidate who runs over is not blocked, and the employer reviewing the response sees the total, with a coloured indicator for under or over ³.

A clock that keeps counting is a signal to the reviewer, not a door closing.

What travels to the employer is worth knowing before you write anything. Alex's candidate FAQ says it does not make final hiring decisions and does not automatically reject candidates ⁸. Its recordings, transcripts and notes are shared with the employer's hiring team, where humans make the decisions ⁸.

Alex is describing Alex there, which is not an audit, and nothing in it governs what a hiring team does with the file once it arrives.

Most of this is cheaper to settle before the connection has a chance to drop. How to prepare for a one-way video interview covers the hour before you click, including the retake policy worth reading before you start. Your own instructions screen is the first place to look for your platform's rule, and it takes a minute to read.

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