Video interviews can feel unnatural and unfriendly. The main problem is the lack of eye contact.
If you’re looking at an image of the interviewer in the middle of their screen, from their point of view you’ll see to be looking away. It’s hard to get into a comfortable rapport with someone who won’t meet your eyes!
The solution is to look at the camera, but of course you still need to see the interviewer’s facial expressions. But there’s a way that you can give the general sense of looking at the interviewer even when you’re looking their face.
Here’s what to do: Resize the teleconference window in which the person’s image appears, making it smaller, then move it up as close to the camera as it will go. Now, when you look at their face you are looking very close to the camera, so it may give the impression that you’re generally looking at the person, or even making eye contact. And as you look back and forth between the camera and the face, your eye won’t have nearly as far to go.
Resizing windows: On a Windows device, you can press Alt+Spacebar to open the window menu and then use the arrow keys. On a Mac, just grab the corner of the window and drag it.
With present technology, this may be the best way to get eye contact in a video interview. If you have other suggestions, let me know! For more tips on video interviews, see my post “How to Ace a Video Interview.”
This article was originally published in 2015 and has been updated.
