Online interview preparation at executive level is not a production exercise. A virtual executive interview is one stage in a longer process, usually an early one, and what separates it from the same conversation held in a room is not your lighting or your background. It is that the medium degrades the mutual sense of the other person being present, and that you are now being authenticated as well as assessed.
What follows is what the research establishes and what it leaves unresolved, why senior interviewing is moving back toward the room, the 10 things worth doing on screen and the published advice the evidence contradicts, what changes when the panel is a nomination committee, and where recorded interviewing stops. Every figure carries its publisher, its sample and its date.
Last reviewed 8 August 2026.
Why senior interviewing is moving back toward the room
Since 2023, three independent producers have measured the same direction of travel. An American Staffing Association poll of 2,019 US adults, reported by SHRM on 13 March 2023, found 70% prefer in-person job interviews, against 17% favouring video. Gartner, in a press release of 31 July 2025 drawing on candidate surveys with samples between 2,918 and 3,290, found 62% more likely to apply where an organisation requires in-person interviews. Greenhouse, in its AI in Hiring Report of 19 November 2025 surveying 4,136 people across the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany, found 39% of hiring managers conducting more in-person interviews specifically to verify authenticity, which we set out in full in our guide to executive interview questions.
A note on this page’s own record, since it is the same test we apply to everyone else. Earlier versions of this guide described virtual interviewing, on the 2021 evidence then available, as a method organisations, search firms and boards had come to prefer. That framing has been retired for the reasons above.
None of the three segments by seniority, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Directionally they are enough: enthusiasm for remote interviewing has cooled, and the reasons are candidate preference and verification. The honest position for a senior candidate is therefore not that virtual is here to stay and here is how to shine. It is that the virtual round is increasingly the filter rather than the decision, and the medium itself is under suspicion.
How much of an executive process actually runs remotely?
Nobody has said, credibly, since about 2021. The most recent authoritative statements come from the Association of Executive Search and Leadership Consultants. Its Assessments for Executive Selection, November 2021, records that “video interviews, even video panel interviews became the norm in 2020 and have continued through 2021”. A companion AESC article, undated anywhere on the page and placed by internal evidence in 2021 or early 2022, describes firms running “a virtual end-to-end search process” and judges clients “unlikely to want to give up the efficiency and speed of the remote interview process before the late stage of a search”.
Neither gives a proportion, a stage split or a seniority breakdown, and nothing published since 2023 does either. There is no current, credible figure for how much of an executive search or board appointment process is conducted remotely, and any page that gives you one has invented it. What the AESC does give is the limitation the profession names against itself: “on a video you can only learn so much in terms of someone’s executive presence”, which is why firms increase referencing.
Does the medium cost you marks? This is unresolved, and saying so is the point
Two peer-reviewed meta-analyses disagree, and the category publishes confident claims in both directions without acknowledging that either exists. Blacksmith, Willford and Behrend, in Personnel Assessment and Decisions in 2016, across 12 studies and 1,557 participants, found interviewer ratings lower in technology-mediated interviews at d = −.41. Moon, Park and Park, in Current Psychology on 28 January 2026, across 24 studies and 31 samples, found no difference in ratings at ρ = −.01.
The newer paper flags its own contradiction rather than burying it. Its ratings estimate rests on seven studies, and the authors, who describe that set as eight, note that “the variability across the eight studies included in our analysis was large” and is “particularly noteworthy” given how few studies there are. Roughly 60% of that analysis used student participants and two thirds of its studies were AI interviews rather than videoconference calls. Neither meta-analysis studied executives.
So the correct answer to “does video lower my score” is that we do not know, and anybody telling you either way is over-reading a small and contested literature. What is robust across both points somewhere more interesting: the candidate’s view of the employer is consistently worse on video, and worst where the format is asynchronous. That is a finding about the employer’s cost rather than your score, and at your level it is a thing you may reasonably name in the room.
What degrades, where a mechanism has been isolated
Gao, Huang, Yang and Bian, in BMC Psychology on 22 January 2026, ran a randomised experiment across 232 participants and found that video interviews produced lower fairness perceptions and lower interviewer ratings “through lower perceptions by applicants and interviewers of the other party’s social presence“.
The sample is Chinese undergraduates in a simulated interview and we are not presenting it as an executive finding. It names the variable, and one moderator is worth sitting with. Applicants with high expectations for nonverbal communication experienced significantly lower social presence and fairness on video, while those with low expectations showed no meaningful difference. The more a leader relies on reading and working a room, the more the medium costs them, which is what the search profession says about itself.
The 10 ways senior leaders stand out on screen
Three of the 10 have peer-reviewed evidence behind them. The rest are practitioner guidance from a named search firm, attributed and dated. We keep those categories separate, because most pages competing on this subject present folklore in the register of fact.
1. Put the camera in front of you, not beside you
Basch and Melchers, in the Journal of Business and Psychology in 2025, ran two experiments across 448 raters. Vertical eye-contact deviation, the ordinary case where the camera sits above the screen and you appear to be looking slightly down, produced no significant difference in performance ratings, at d = 0.10 to 0.12, and did not affect social presence. Horizontal deviation, where the camera sits off to one side, reduced perceptions of hirability, with decreased social presence as the mediator. Restrictions in eye contact, the authors conclude, are “no immediate driving factors for lower interview performance ratings”, while decreased social presence “can ultimately lead to negative outcomes for interviewees”.
A smaller Japanese study by Shinya and colleagues in Scientific Reports on 31 May 2024, using 38 evaluators, did find downward screen-directed gaze costly, but its authors note the result may depend on the language and culture studied. Where the two agree is the actionable part, and the rule they support is not the rule the category publishes.
Looking at the screen rather than the camera on a normal laptop is not the problem. Having the camera off to one side of you is. That is precisely the executive setup: a laptop open beside a large external monitor, the call on the monitor, the camera on the laptop, and the candidate visibly addressing something to their left for an hour. Move the call to the screen the camera is on, or the camera to the screen the call is on. Odgers’ candidate guidance, by Helen Thomas, its head of candidate experience, dated 25 May 2022, reaches the same place from practice: “camera level is paramount, having it center screen at eye level is key to ensuring engaged conversation”.
2. Stop optimising the room
Scott and Roulin, in Personnel Assessment and Decisions in 2024, tested this with 276 raters recruited on Prolific, all with prior hiring experience, across a home-office background, a bedroom background and background blurring. Their finding, verbatim: “Final interview scores were positively associated with both initial impressions and applicant response quality. Yet, background type (or the use of blurring) was not associated with initial impressions or final interview scores.”
The raters were experienced but not necessarily professional selectors, and the study is not at executive level. Within those limits it is the only direct evidence available, and it says the room is a hygiene factor. A tidy background is courtesy, not a lever. What predicted the score was the quality of the answer.
3. Treat your background as disclosure, not decoration
There is one narrow way a background moves a judgement and it has nothing to do with tidiness. Basch, Roulin, Gläsner, Spengler and Wilhelm, in a paper in press with the International Journal of Selection and Assessment, showed 222 German raters the same actor giving the same scripted answers against three backgrounds: a neutral bookshelf control, the control plus religious material, and the control plus material signalling sexual orientation. Interview performance ratings were not significantly affected by either condition. Perceived competence was, in one, at d = 0.32, and the gap was predicted by the raters’ own attitudes rather than by anything about the candidate.
German sample, inexperienced raters, a single actor, scripted answers, a customer service role, and authors who conclude only that background cues “may not always lead to substantial bias”. What survives is worth carrying: a background is a channel through which you involuntarily disclose things about yourself, and it belongs to the record you deliberately control, like everything in our guide to personal branding for executives.
4. Spend the effort on presence, not production
If what degrades on a screen is the mutual sense of the other party being present, the practical agenda is whatever restores it, and almost none of that is production. Odgers’ 2022 guidance names the mechanics: a view that shows you the whole panel, the interviewer’s tile moved close to your camera where the platform permits, proper listening, slower speech, no distracting movement. Its blunter line is the useful one, which is to command the call rather than submit to it. None of that has been tested as an intervention. It is what a global retained firm tells its candidates, and it points the same way as the camera finding.
5. Ask whether every candidate is being seen in the same medium
This is the most senior question available to you and almost nobody asks it. Blacksmith and colleagues warn explicitly of fairness risk where interview mode is inconsistent across applicants. The Commissioner for Public Appointments, in guidance issued to UK departments on 4 June 2020 and updated on 15 September 2020, put it positively: candidates should understand “that everyone will be treated on the same basis”. That guidance is six years old and does not address the mixed case, which is the case that matters. A shortlist in which two candidates are seen in the room and two on a screen is not a level comparison.
6. Assume you are being authenticated as well as assessed
The reason senior interviewing is drifting back into rooms is not etiquette. It is that the video call has become the place identity fraud happens. Greenhouse’s AI in Hiring Report of 19 November 2025, sampling 4,136 people across four markets, found 36% of job seekers have altered their appearance, voice or background in a video interview and 74% of hiring managers are more concerned about fake credentials and deepfakes. Gartner’s survey of 31 July 2025 found 6% of candidates admitting to interview fraud, and Gartner predicts one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be fake by 2028, which is a forecast rather than a measurement. Neither producer breaks its figures down by seniority.
Two things follow. Small signals that once read as circumstance now read as evasion: a camera off, a partial name on the tile, a connection that fails at the same question twice. And your account of your career is now checked as one trail across CV, public profile and interview, which is the argument our executive CV guide makes at length.
7. Prepare the answer, not the setup
The evidence above says the score follows response quality, and what a strong response is made of at executive complexity is the subject of the pillar: behaviour rather than hypothesis, scale and stakes, the decision and the alternative rejected, the mechanism including the part that failed, a number with a date, and an evaluation. Two minutes is the working length. One screen-specific adjustment: without a room to read, you cannot tell whether an answer has landed, so build the check in. Finish, name what you have not covered, and ask whether they want it.
8. Remove the failure modes the medium adds
Hygiene items, labelled as such rather than dressed up as differentiators. From Odgers, dated 2022: an environment that is genuinely interruption-free, a practice run on the actual platform, enough battery for the duration, and your correct name on the screen. One of ours: decide in advance what you will do when the connection fails. None of this wins you anything, and all of it can lose you something, which deserves a different share of your attention.
9. Prepare for the medium to change late
The profession’s own account, from around 2021, expected remote stages to run until late in a search. The 2023 to 2025 data suggests employers are pulling the in-person stage forward. Prepare on the assumption that the final conversation happens in a room, and treat the virtual rounds as the filter that decides whether the room happens.
10. Name what the screen cannot carry
What does not transmit is the accumulated impression of how you operate: how you handle interruption, what you do with a hostile question, how you are with people who cannot promote you. The profession compensates by increasing referencing. You compensate through the specificity of your evidence. A candidate remembered from a video call is remembered for one exact thing they said, not for how they looked while saying it.
The board or nomination-committee interview, held on a screen
We checked both instruments directly, expecting guidance on remote conduct. There is none, and the absence is the finding.
The Governance Code on Public Appointments, published by the Cabinet Office on 30 October 2025, contains no mention of remote, virtual, video, online, telephone or digital conduct of interviews or assessment panels anywhere. Paragraph 3.3 says only that “a variety of techniques may be used to assess candidates fairly against the published selection criteria for the role”, footnoted with encouragement toward “innovative models of assessment in order to ensure that assessment processes are accessible and inclusive, while remaining appropriately rigorous”. King V, applying to financial years beginning on or after 1 January 2026, refers to virtual meetings once, at Recommended Practice 139, and that practice concerns shareholder meetings. No practice in either code addresses how a governing body or a nomination committee conducts its own meetings or its candidate interviews.
The codes are silent on the medium and unchanged in substance, so the requirements travel intact onto the screen. Due diligence must be conducted in advance of interviews. All potential conflicts of interest and how they might be managed must be discussed with an individual at interview. Qualifications and designations must be independently verified prior to nomination, and existing professional commitments disclosed. What each demands of a candidate is set out in the executive interview questions guide.
The translation is one sentence. A candidate joining a nomination-committee call from a hotel room is in exactly the same regulated event as one sitting in the boardroom, and the committee arrives already holding the due-diligence file. The informality of a screen is the trap. Have your commitments in days per year and your conflicts with a management mechanism attached, and offer them rather than waiting to be asked.
One mechanic matters more on a panel call than a one-to-one: set a view that shows you the whole committee, because you cannot read a group you cannot see. And note, per the Commissioner’s 2020 guidance, that good panels decide beforehand which member asks which question. If you are told who is on the call and in what order, that is information about the shape of the assessment rather than courtesy.
Do recorded and AI-scored interviews reach executives?
No credible evidence places AI-scored or asynchronous recorded interviewing inside C-suite appointment. Our executive interview questions guide establishes that across four independent checks and we will not re-argue it here.
One further check points the same way, from the supply side. HireVue, the market-leading asynchronous video interviewing vendor, names five solutions on its own site: Professional, Campus, Technical, Hourly and Internal Mobility. Executive, C-suite and board hiring appear nowhere, and its dedicated solution pages are high-volume hourly hiring and campus recruiting. That is one organisation describing its own market, retrieved on 8 August 2026, so treat it as a single source. It is also the source best placed to know.
The peer-reviewed literature arrives by omission: it studies asynchronous video interviews as early-stage screening instruments, and the stimuli are entry-level and general roles. We located no study examining them at executive level. The recorded interview is a volume instrument and executive hiring is not a volume problem. If you are asked to record answers to fixed questions for a C-suite appointment, ask the consultant where in the process it sits and who watches it.
What this evidence does not cover
Said once, plainly, because it is what makes the rest of the page credible. None of the experimental work above used executive samples. The camera study used general raters, the background studies raters recruited online and a customer service role, the social presence experiment undergraduates, and both meta-analyses cover general and largely student populations. The base is unusually international, with Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Japan and China represented, which is a real strength. Not one of those samples is a board or an executive committee. We use it because it is the only direct evidence on these questions, and because a finding drawn from raters with hiring experience beats a claim drawn from nothing.
Common questions
Do video interviews lower your interview score?
Genuinely unresolved. Blacksmith, Willford and Behrend (Personnel Assessment and Decisions, 2016) found interviewer ratings lower on video at d = −.41 across 12 studies and 1,557 participants. Moon, Park and Park (Current Psychology, 28 January 2026) found no difference at ρ = −.01, on seven studies with wide variance the authors themselves flag and roughly 60% student samples. Neither studied executives. What is robust across both is more useful: the candidate’s view of the employer is worse on video, and worst where the format is asynchronous.
Does your background affect a video interview outcome?
Not on the available evidence. Scott and Roulin (Personnel Assessment and Decisions, 2024) tested home-office and bedroom backgrounds and background blurring across 276 raters with prior hiring experience, and found background type and blurring were not associated with initial impressions or final interview scores. What was associated with the score was the quality of the response. A tidy background is courtesy rather than advantage.
Should you look at the camera or at the screen?
The distinction that matters is not camera against screen, it is where the camera sits. Basch and Melchers (Journal of Business and Psychology, 2025, 448 raters across two experiments) found vertical deviation, the ordinary laptop with the camera above the screen, immaterial to performance ratings at d = 0.10 to 0.12. Horizontal deviation, with the camera off to one side, reduced perceptions of hirability through reduced social presence. Put the camera in front of you, not beside you, which usually means moving the call onto the screen that carries the camera.
Do governance codes say anything about remote board interviews?
No. The Governance Code on Public Appointments of 30 October 2025 contains no mention of remote, virtual, video, online, telephone or digital conduct of interviews or assessment panels. King V’s only reference to virtual meetings is Recommended Practice 139, on shareholder meetings rather than the governing body or its nomination committee. The codes are silent on the medium and unchanged in substance, so the requirements apply identically on a screen: due diligence before the interview, conflicts discussed at interview, qualifications independently verified before nomination, and existing commitments disclosed.
What proportion of executive interviews are held virtually in 2026?
No credible current figure exists. The most recent authoritative statements come from the AESC and date to around 2021, and neither gives a proportion, a stage split or a seniority breakdown. Since 2023, three independent producers have measured a preference shift back toward in-person interviewing, none segmented by seniority. Any percentage published on this subject should be traced before it is believed.
Where this leaves you
Most of what is published about performing on camera is unevidenced, and two of its most repeated instructions are contradicted by the only direct research that exists. The room is a hygiene factor. The camera’s position is a real variable and almost nobody gets it right. The answer is what is being scored, by people who are simultaneously checking that you are who you say you are.
None of that is fixed by a better ring light. It is fixed by having the evidence of your career assembled, sequenced and testable before the call, which is difficult to do for yourself, because the decisions that distinguish a senior leader are the ones that felt obvious at the time.
Executive Interview Preparation is the engagement that answers this article. It builds the evidence base behind your answers, works the specific room you are walking into, whether that room is on a screen or not, and puts the account of your career under the scrutiny it will meet from a search consultant. It is delivered through the Executive Career Positioning Suite™. Where the destination is a board seat, the Board Pack and the Board & Leadership engagement are scoped by consultation.
Review the executive engagements and what each includes, or write to [email protected] to arrange a confidential consultation. For the questions themselves, and for the board and private equity sets, start with executive interview questions.
About this guide
Published by the Executive Insights desk at Elite Executive Career Solutions, formerly Elite CV. Across nine years of practice the firm has positioned more than 10,000 professionals in 38 countries across five continents. Every executive engagement is human-written, and client identities are never disclosed. Where a source is older than we would like, undated by its own publisher, or drawn from a population other than the one under discussion, the guide says so on the page rather than in a footnote. This page corrects a claim it previously carried, and says so above rather than deleting it quietly.
Sources
- Blacksmith, Willford & Behrend, Technology in the employment interview: a meta-analysis and future research agenda, Personnel Assessment and Decisions 2(1), 2016. Sample: 12 studies, 1,557 participants
- Moon, Park & Park, Technology-mediated interviews: meta-analyses on interview ratings and job applicants’ responses, Current Psychology 45(4), published online 28 January 2026. Sample: 24 studies, 31 samples, n=3,874, approximately 60% student participants; the interview-ratings estimate rests on 7 studies
- Gao, Huang, Yang & Bian, How does the job interview medium affect fairness perceptions and interview ratings?, BMC Psychology 14:232, 22 January 2026. Sample: n=232, Chinese undergraduates, simulated interviews
- Scott & Roulin, Does background type and blurring affect performance ratings in video interviews?, Personnel Assessment and Decisions 10(1), 2024. Sample: 276 raters with prior hiring experience
- Basch, Roulin, Gläsner, Spengler & Wilhelm, Background in AVIs: how different backgrounds in video interviews can bias evaluations of applicants, International Journal of Selection and Assessment, in press. Sample: 222 German raters, single actor, scripted answers, customer service role
- Basch & Melchers, Here’s looking at you: does eye contact in video interviews affect how applicants are perceived and evaluated?, Journal of Business and Psychology 40(3), 2025. Sample: two experiments, 250 and 198 raters
- Shinya, Yamane, Mori & Teaman, Off-camera gaze decreases evaluation scores in a simulated online job interview, Scientific Reports 14:12056, 31 May 2024. Sample: 12 interviewees, 38 evaluators, Japan
- Cabinet Office, Governance Code on Public Appointments, 30 October 2025. Checked directly for any reference to remote, virtual, video, online, telephone or digital conduct: none found
- Institute of Directors in South Africa, Code on Corporate Governance for South Africa 2025 (King V), applying to financial years beginning on or after 1 January 2026. Recommended Practice 139 is its only reference to virtual meetings and concerns shareholder meetings
- Commissioner for Public Appointments, COVID-19 and public appointments, published 4 June 2020, updated 15 September 2020. Emergency guidance, dated on the page
- AESC, Assessments for Executive Selection, November 2021
- AESC, How executive search is adapting to serve post-COVID organizations, undated by the publisher. Internal evidence places it in 2021 or early 2022, and it is used here as the profession’s account of that period rather than as current practice
- American Staffing Association poll reported by SHRM, Majority of job seekers prefer in-person interviews, 13 March 2023. Sample: 2,019 US adults, no seniority breakdown
- Gartner, press release, 31 July 2025. Candidate surveys 4Q24 n=3,290, 1Q25 n=2,918, 2Q25 n=3,000; countries and fieldwork dates not disclosed. The 2028 figure is a Gartner prediction rather than survey data
- Greenhouse, AI in Hiring Report, 19 November 2025. Sample: n=4,136 across the US, UK, Ireland and Germany, no seniority breakdown
- HireVue, solutions page, retrieved 8 August 2026. Named solutions: Professional, Campus, Technical, Hourly, Internal Mobility. Single source, and the organisation describing its own market
- Odgers, Client interview: be the one who stands out, Helen Thomas, 25 May 2022. Practitioner guidance from a retained search firm, not tested as an intervention
Traced and not used. A widely repeated claim about the share of executives using real-time video to interview candidates, carried by a university-branded blog, misquotes a Korn Ferry Futurestep survey with fieldwork in June 2015. The blog conflates two different statistics in that release, the survey is 11 years old, and neither figure is repeated here. It is the most authoritative-looking executive statistic on this subject, and that is why it is worth saying that it does not survive a trace. A widely circulated YouGov figure on UK interview format preference could not be traced to YouGov and is also not used.
Consulted and not retrievable. Dunlop and colleagues’ 2025 editorial in the International Journal of Selection and Assessment on asynchronous video interviews, Tilston and colleagues’ 2024 paper in Human Resource Management on asynchronous video interview reactions by applicant age, and Roulin and colleagues’ 2023 paper in the Journal of Organizational Behavior were all located and none could be retrieved. Their findings are not characterised anywhere in this guide.