Find Out What a Digital Interview Invite Is Before You Start

What the Link Itself Tells You

The host in the link usually names the company that built the assessment, and that one word decides how the next hour should go. Hover before clicking and read the name between the double slash and the next single slash. Two invitations can be worded identically and open completely different exercises.

Sapia.ai's candidate explainer describes its chat interview as something you type, on a phone, a tablet or a computer. It says there are 5 to 7 text questions, mainly behavioural, with the instruction to answer each in 50 to 150 words ¹.

Asked whether the candidate is recorded on video or seen by a camera, the page answers no to both, and adds that the interview is not timed ¹.

That is Sapia describing its own product, which is not an audit of it.

Open a HireVue link instead and the evening can look nothing like that. A typical AI-scored assessment there runs 4 to 6 asynchronous video questions plus 2 to 3 games, taking about 15 to 25 minutes in total ². HireVue's 2025 explainability statement offers that as a typical example rather than a measured average, and the same page says how a candidate experiences the assessment is configurable by the company deploying it ².

The two share the word interview and not much else.

The email around the link helps as well. The sender's address, the reply-to line and the title of the page once it loads usually name the same platform, which matters when a corporate mail filter has rewritten the link into something unreadable. If none of that settles it, the four kinds of AI interview and what each one records sorts the formats by what happens on the screen.

What the Vendor's Page Cannot Tell You

It cannot tell you your own settings, because most of them belong to the employer rather than to the platform. What a vendor page gives you is the menu the hiring team chose from, which is worth having and is not the same thing. Read the page for its range, and expect your own numbers on the first screen.

Three platforms publish that in their own documentation. Spark Hire's help article on re-recording says the number of takes is set per question when the employer builds the question set, from a choice of 1 to 5 attempts or unlimited ³. VidCruiter says recruiters set thinking time, recording time, number of attempts and review timers per question ⁴. HireVue lists interview question retries as a yes-or-no switch and recommends unlimited ².

Whether you get a second take is a fact about the employer, not about the platform.

Employers are told to publish some of this themselves. The hiring-side article on naming the assessment stage in the job post argues for three facts near the end of the ad. Those facts are how many stages there are, that one of them is an assignment, and roughly how long that assignment takes. An invite that gives you none of that says less than that guidance asks of the job post alone.

The menu is published, and which item was picked is not.

One line in the VidCruiter documentation is worth reading twice. Where AI-assisted scoring is used, the company says reviewers receive AI-generated scores as a starting point and then apply their own judgment with built-in scorecards ⁴.

VidCruiter is describing how the feature is meant to be used, which is not evidence of how any reviewer weighs a number already sitting on the screen.

Ask the Recruiter Three Things

Three questions close what no vendor page can reach: which platform it is, roughly how long it takes end to end, and who reviews the submission afterwards. Send them as logistics in a reply to the invite. A recruiter answers scheduling questions all day and is likely to read them as scheduling.

• Which platform is this link for, and are the answers typed or recorded?
• Roughly how long does the whole thing take?
• Who reads the submission after I send it?

All three fit in one short message.

The third one is the one to phrase carefully. What to ask an employer about the AI in their hiring process makes the case that asking whether AI screens you sounds adversarial however politely it is put. It reliably gets a vague answer back. Asking who reads the submission gets at the same thing as ordinary process detail, which is what a recruiter is equipped to answer.

Asking fills a common gap rather than making a nuisance of you. In Greenhouse's 2026 candidate AI interview report, whose findings reflect 1,200 US respondents, 70 percent of candidates said they were never clearly told upfront that AI would be evaluating them ⁵. And 21 percent said they found out only once the interview started ⁵. That is self-report collected by a company that sells hiring software, and it measures what candidates noticed rather than what any consent screen contained.

You are asking for the shape of the thing, not for a favour.

An employer can answer the third question before anyone asks. Unilever's UK and Ireland page for the 2026 Future Leaders Programme describes its digital interview as three short questions followed by a business case, recorded whenever and wherever the candidate chooses ⁶. The same page states that the company does not use AI as a screening tool in its recruitment process, so the submission is reviewed by a real person ⁶.

One programme, in one market, and an employer's statement about itself is not an audit.

A non-answer carries information too. A recruiter who cannot say which platform the link opens, or will not say who reads the recording, has told you something about how much of this process the employer is actually holding. That is worth knowing before you spend an evening on it, and it is not a reason to assume the worst.

Read the First Screen Before You Answer

The first screen carries the numbers the vendor page could only bracket. On a Spark Hire one-way interview, every question shows a think time, a number of takes and a response time limit ⁷. Read that screen before you click anything on it, because one of the clicks can start a countdown.

Spark Hire's candidate help describes the sequence. Where think time is limited, clicking to view the question starts a countdown, and recording begins automatically when the countdown ends; where it is unlimited, recording starts when the candidate is ready ⁷. After recording, the video plays back for review, and a candidate who has run out of takes, or was allowed only one, is offered the option to skip the question instead of submitting ⁷.

What skipping costs you, the page does not say.

On at least one platform, the screen before the first question can carry a consent decision. HireVue's statement says candidates are shown an AI consent statement before an AI-scored assessment and can opt in or out of AI evaluation ⁸.

A candidate who opts out completes the same assessment, and recruiters manually review and rate the responses against the same behaviourally anchored scales ⁸. HireVue says the consent statement itself has to tell the candidate that opting out will not exclude them from the hiring process ⁸.

Read that with its limits attached. It is a vendor's account of its own consent flow, and consent screens are themselves configurable by the employer deploying the platform ⁸. So what you are offered may not match the example in the document ⁸. Whether any other platform offers the same choice is a separate question, and this document does not answer it ⁸.

It is a decision worth making before the countdown, not during it.

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