What's the best video interviewing software, and are one-way (asynchronous) interviews actually effective?

Video interviewing software sells three distinct products under one label: live interviewing with structured scoring, one-way asynchronous recording, and interview recording with automated notes. The category you pick matters more than the brand you pick inside it.

Live interviewing with structured scoring

A scheduled two-way conversation with an interview guide and a rating form attached. The software's contribution is not the video connection, which any meeting tool provides; it is the question set every interviewer works from and the scored form each one fills in. Willo's Scale plan includes custom scorecards [2], and Spark Hire prices applicant tracking separately at $335 and $499 a month annually [1].

One-way asynchronous interviews

Candidates record answers to preset questions on their own time with no interviewer present, and reviewers watch later. Spark Hire, Willo, HireVue, VidCruiter and Jobma all sell a version of this [1][2][3][4][5]. What the employer buys is the removal of calendar coordination from the first screening round.

The option that will not appear in a vendor comparison chart

Running interviews on Zoom or Microsoft Teams with a written interview guide and a shared scoring form is a legitimate setup, and for many teams it is the correct one. Nothing in the selection literature credits a video platform with predictive power. The evidence attaches to interview structure, meaning the same questions in the same order with defined rating anchors and independent scoring, which is a process decision rather than a purchase [11].

Spark Hire

Spark Hire publishes its price, which is the main practical difference between it and the enterprise platforms. The video product lists $299 a month on monthly billing, covering five users and five active jobs, or $249 a month billed annually with unlimited users and jobs, both with unlimited one-way and live interviews [1]. Flat pricing with no per-candidate charge suits unpredictable volume. Applicant tracking is priced separately at $335 and $499 a month annually [1].

Willo

Willo prices by users and by number of assessments rather than by interview volume. Growth lists $279 a month monthly or $209 billed yearly with four users and two assessments; Scale lists $409 or $307 yearly with 20 users, ten assessments and custom scorecards [2]. The assessment cap matters more than it first looks, because a team hiring across many distinct roles hits it well before any user limit [2].

HireVue

HireVue publishes no prices; the page describes an Essential through Premium range and routes buyers to sales [3]. It is built for volume, and its published customer claims are the largest in the category, including an 80% reduction in time to offer at Emirates NBD and a 49% increase in recruiter efficiency at IKEA [7]. Those are vendor-published customer claims, not independent studies, with no control group or stated baseline. It is also the platform most likely to place you inside the AI notice and consent rules, because it sells scored assessments rather than plain recording [8].

VidCruiter and Jobma

Neither publishes a price. VidCruiter's pricing page is a request form [4], and Jobma states only that it offers custom packages based on volume, integrations and feature needs [5]. VidCruiter sells configurability, meaning structured scoring and panel review workflows that suit public sector and regulated hiring where an audit trail matters as much as speed, at the cost of setup effort [4]. Jobma competes on price in the mid-market, which no buyer can verify without a quote [5].

General meeting tools plus a scoring form

A scheduled Zoom or Microsoft Teams call, an interview guide every interviewer reads from, and a rating form each one completes independently before the debrief will deliver most of what a dedicated live platform delivers. What you give up is automatic enforcement, since nothing prevents an interviewer from improvising questions or completing the form after the debrief, and that slippage is how structured interviewing reverts to unstructured interviewing [11].

Live technical interviewing and interview recording

Engineering hiring is the clearest case for a dedicated tool, because a shared code editor with a working language runtime is not something a meeting tool provides. CoderPad publishes its pricing: a free tier capped at two tests or interviews a month, Starter at $120 a month or $80 billed annually for five, and Team at $400 a month for thirty [6]. Recording and transcription tools sit alongside both formats; they screen nobody, but they create records that carry retention and consent obligations where voice data is captured [17].

Effectiveness splits into three questions that usually get answered as one.

The efficiency case is the strongest of the three

Asynchronous interviews remove calendar coordination from the first screening round, and that saving is measurable inside your own funnel. Nearly every vendor claim in the category is an efficiency claim: HireVue's published customer figures include an 80% reduction in time to offer at Emirates NBD and 3.5 days from application to offer at Swire Coca-Cola [7]. Read those as vendor-published customer claims rather than research, since none report a control group and the baseline is whatever the employer happened to be doing before.

Validity is a different question, and the answer is about structure

The predictive evidence in personnel selection attaches to interview structure, not to delivery format. In the most recent large re-analysis of selection validity, which corrected earlier meta-analyses for systematic overcorrection for range restriction, structured interviews came out as the top-ranked selection procedure, even as mean validity estimates for most procedures fell by .10 to .20 [11]. Nothing there says a recorded answer predicts job performance better or worse than the same answer given live; identical questions, defined rating anchors and independent scoring are the parts doing the work. A one-way platform does make standardization easier to enforce, which is an argument for structure that the format happens to deliver.

Candidate experience is where the evidence is thinnest

The claim that candidates dislike one-way interviews rests on a small experimental literature rather than field drop-off data, and the findings are less one-sided than the claim implies. In one experiment, 106 participants who completed a simulated asynchronous interview rated it at 4.00 on a five-point scale, which the authors placed in the same range as other non-interactive procedures such as personality inventories and cognitive tests [12]. That is a student sample in a simulation, so it says little about how a senior candidate with other offers reacts to recording answers into a camera. Completion rate answers the question for your own roles: the rates on HireVue's customer pages sit in the mid to high seventies, meaning roughly a quarter of invited candidates did not finish [7].

Automated scoring deserves far more scrutiny than automated scheduling, because the science underneath facial and vocal inference is contested at the foundation. A 2019 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest concluded that how people communicate anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise "varies substantially across cultures, situations, and even across people within a single situation," and that the same facial movements can express different things entirely [10]. A model reading confidence off a face is inferring a trait from a signal that does not reliably carry it.

The market has moved on this. HireVue stopped using facial expressions in its assessments and announced the change in January 2021, with its chief executive saying the nonverbal data added roughly 0.25% to predictive accuracy in most cases and about 4% for customer-facing roles [9]. An algorithmic audit by ORCAA that the company commissioned raised further questions about accents and short answers from minority candidates [9]. HireVue's current position is that its video assessments "don't use facial analysis, video, or audio data to evaluate candidates" and analyze only the transcript of responses [8].

Two questions cover most of the diligence: what input the model reads, and who performed the bias audit.

General information, not legal advice. Dates below were read on the statute text or bill record on July 21, 2026.

Illinois has a statute written specifically for this product

Under the Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act, 820 ILCS 42, an employer using AI analysis of applicant-recorded video interviews must notify each applicant before the interview that AI may be used, explain how it works and what general characteristics it evaluates, and obtain consent; non-consenting applicants may not be evaluated by AI [13]. On request, the employer must delete the interviews within 30 days including backup copies, and sharing is limited to those whose expertise or technology is necessary to evaluate fitness for the position [13]. The act took effect January 1, 2020 under Public Act 101-260, and Public Act 102-47 added annual race and ethnicity reporting from January 1, 2022 for employers relying solely on AI to decide who advances to an in-person interview [13].

Illinois also amended its Human Rights Act

Public Act 103-0804, signed August 9, 2024 and effective January 1, 2026, prohibits AI use that has the effect of discriminating on a protected basis in hiring and promotion, bars zip code as a proxy for a protected class, and requires notice when AI is used [15].

New York City requires an audit you cannot run yourself

Local Law 144 requires an annual independent bias audit of an automated employment decision tool, publication of the results, and notice to candidates at least 10 business days before use; the final rules were adopted July 5, 2023 [14].

Colorado reset its rules in 2026

Senate Bill 26-189 repealed and reenacted Colorado's 2024 AI Act. Signed May 14, 2026 and effective August 12, 2026, it applies deployer duties to consequential decisions made on or after January 1, 2027: notice at the point of interaction, a plain-language description of the tool's role within 30 days of an adverse decision, a right to human review, and three years of records [16].

Biometrics and disability accommodation cut across all of it

If a product captures a voiceprint or a scan of face geometry, Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act applies, requiring written notice of collection, the purpose and length of term, and a written release, with liquidated damages of $1,000 for negligent violations and $5,000 for intentional or reckless ones [17]. An employer must also provide a reasonable accommodation so a qualified applicant with a disability has an equal opportunity to participate in the application process, absent undue hardship, so a candidate who cannot complete a recorded assessment needs an alternative [18].

Standardization is the benefit, and it can be had without software

A one-way platform enforces identical prompts for every candidate, which is genuinely useful. The same enforcement comes from a written interview guide and independent scoring on a live call, and the research credit belongs to that structure rather than to the recording [11].

Published pricing runs out where volume begins

Vendors aimed at small and mid-size teams publish numbers; the ones aimed at enterprise hiring do not [1][3][4][5].

Every recording you keep becomes a record you have to govern

Retention schedules, 30-day deletion requests in Illinois, and biometric consent where voice data is captured attach to the archive rather than to the interview [13][17]. Scored assessments add notice, audit and reporting duties on top of that, in several jurisdictions at once [14][15][16]. Teams often price the subscription and not the governance.

Completion rate is the number to watch

Completion rates on vendor case pages sit in the mid to high seventies, so a meaningful share of invited candidates never finish [7]. Measure your own, split by seniority, before extending asynchronous screening to roles where candidates have offers elsewhere.