Checking Your Setup Before a Video Interview
Five checks to run the day before an interview — not five minutes before it, which is the mistake almost everyone makes.
The cost of a technical failure in an interview is asymmetric in a way that is easy to underestimate. Nobody is rejected purely for a broken microphone, but the first three minutes get spent on apologies and troubleshooting instead of on you, the interviewer's attention starts from a worse place, and you begin flustered. That is a meaningful handicap for something you have prepared weeks for, caused by a fault that takes under a minute to find.
Timing is the part people get wrong. Running these checks five minutes before the call is barely better than not running them, because if you find a problem you have no time to fix it — you are choosing between joining late and joining broken. Run them the day before and a genuine fault becomes a solvable problem: you can find a different headset, borrow a webcam, or move to a machine that works.
One specific thing to check that people consistently miss: the device your call application will use is not necessarily the device your operating system considers default. Applications remember their own selection independently, so a headset you connected last week may still be selected in the app even though it is not currently plugged in. Confirming the hardware works is only half the job; confirming the app will use the right hardware is the other half.
The checklist
Tick each step as you go, ideally the day before. Your place is saved in this browser, so you can start now and confirm the last items in the morning.