Can you use notes in a one-way video interview?

In most behavioural one-way interviews, yes. The recording captures your webcam frame and your microphone, so a card taped beside the lens sits outside everything the platform can see. The exception is an assessment whose instructions say closed book, which some language and knowledge tests do. The invitation email and the consent screen you click before question one are the only documents that govern your specific interview.

Can a reviewer tell you are reading from notes?

Not from the notes themselves, which are off camera, but from your eyes and your voice. Reading has a signature: gaze parked off-axis for several seconds at a stretch, the upper eyelid dropping on a downward glance, and a flat delivery of unnaturally complete sentences. Short flicks between sentences look like thinking. Sustained fixation while you talk looks like reading, because it is.

Where should you put notes so your eyes stay near the lens?

Flanking the lens at the same height, taped flat to the bezel on either side, not on the desk below it. On a laptop at arm's length, a card five centimetres to the side of the lens costs about five degrees of eye movement with your eyelids unchanged. Notes lying on the desk cost twenty five to forty degrees plus a head tilt, which is the movement people recognise instantly.

How much should be written on each note card?

Five bullets per story, about five words per bullet, written in marker so it is readable without leaning in. Never full sentences. A sentence invites you to recite it word for word, which flattens your delivery and turns any lost place into a visible stall. A bullet is a trigger for a story you already know, so one glance restarts you and your eyes come straight back.

How do you check your eye-line before recording for real?

Record a thirty second test answer with the cards in place, then play it back full screen with the sound muted. Muting is the point: without the words you stop judging content and see only your eyes. Count the glances a stranger would notice, watch whether the tip of your nose moves, then shift the cards two centimetres closer and record the same answer again.

Can you keep notes on a second monitor instead of paper?

It is the worst of the options. A side monitor pulls your gaze twenty to thirty degrees off axis and holds it there while you read, and a lit document reflects as a bright rectangle in glasses, which is the one tell that survives otherwise perfect eye-line. Matte paper on the bezel does not glow and cannot be scrolled, so it forces the short bullets that actually work.

Using Notes in a One-Way Video Interview Without Looking Like It

Yes, in almost every one-way video interview you can have notes in front of you. The recording is your webcam frame and your microphone, and a card taped beside the lens sits outside both. What gives people away is never the paper. It is eye-line, eyelids, and the flat cadence of someone reciting a sentence they wrote last night. Fix the geometry and the notes stop existing.

What the recording actually captures

An asynchronous video interview asks your browser for two permissions, camera and microphone, and records what those two devices produce. Your desk is not in the file. Your second monitor is not in the file. Anything outside the frame is outside the evidence, which is why the real question is not whether you may use notes but whether a human reviewer can see you using them.

Two things overrule that. If the invitation or the instructions screen says closed book, believe it, because some language and knowledge tests genuinely are. And if the same invitation bundles a coding or aptitude section in a locked browser, those rules belong to that section, not to the video. Platforms differ and change their defaults, so read the consent screen you click before question one rather than trusting a forum screenshot.

The eye-line problem, in degrees

Sit at a laptop and your eyes are roughly fifty to sixty centimetres from the lens. A card whose text sits five centimetres to the side of that lens costs you about five degrees of eye rotation. Notes lying flat on the desk in front of the keyboard sit twenty five to forty degrees below it, and at that angle you stop moving your eyes and start moving your head.

Direction matters more than distance, and this is the part most advice skips. When you look down, your upper eyelid follows the iris and drops. A half closed eye reads as reading even in a small thumbnail, even to a reviewer who has never thought about why. When you look slightly left or right, the eyelid does not move at all. The iris shifts a couple of millimetres inside an eye that is still fully open, which is what your face does anyway while you are recalling something. That is the whole trick. Not hiding the glance, but making the glance look like the thing your face already does when it thinks.

Duration is the second signal. A flick under a second between sentences is invisible. Three seconds of parked gaze while your mouth is moving is unmistakable, because nobody stares at a fixed point off camera while speaking fluently. Your cards have to be glanceable, not readable, and that constrains what you write far more than where you stick it.

The card layout, drawn

Here is the physical arrangement, seen as if you were sitting in your own chair looking at the laptop. Everything in the top row lives on the screen bezel, taped flat, top edge level with the lens.

Left of the lens	The lens	Right of the lens
Cards 1 and 2. Story bullets, numbered large in the top corner so you can find one without shuffling.	Webcam. The top edge of every card sits level with this, never lower.	Card 3 and the facts card. One more story, plus product names, the team name, your one number.
Nothing	Browser window dragged to the very top of the screen, so the self-view thumbnail sits as close under the lens as the platform allows.	Nothing
Nothing	The desk, out of shot. Water, and nothing else. This is the surface that costs you thirty degrees.	Nothing

Constraints on the cards themselves. Use matte paper or a large sticky note, never a phone and never a second screen, because a lit rectangle reflects in glasses and the reflection shows up in the recording. Write in marker, capitals about fifteen millimetres tall, so it is legible at arm's length without leaning forward. Keep the outer edge within roughly six centimetres of the lens on a laptop, or ten on an external monitor at seventy centimetres. Then record two seconds of nothing and check the corners of the frame for a white edge, because a card that has crept into shot is worse than no card at all.

One more thing about the self-view. Most people are not looking at the lens, they are looking at their own face in the preview, which is why so many one-way clips have the candidate apparently addressing someone off to the side. Dragging the window to the top of the screen shrinks that error to a couple of degrees for free.

Five bullets, five words, never a sentence

A card holds five bullets. Each bullet holds about five words. Written out, a card for a conflict story looks like this.

PAYMENTS RETRY, LAST SPRING
MAYA WANTED THE CRON
I BENCHMARKED BOTH
SHOWED HER THE P99
QUEUE SHIPPED, KEPT HER DESIGN

The version that fails looks like this, and it is what almost everybody writes first: "Last spring our payments retry job kept falling over, and my colleague Maya wanted to keep the cron approach, so I benchmarked both options and showed her the p99 latency."

Three reasons the sentence loses. It takes three or four seconds of fixed gaze to consume, which is the exact signature described above. Recitation has an audible cadence, evenly stressed and suspiciously complete, missing the small self-corrections people make when they are genuinely remembering. And when you lose your place inside a sentence you stall visibly, because the sentence is the unit and you have to find the middle of it again. Lose your place in a bullet list and you just glance at the next bullet.

Bullets work because they trigger stories you already know, rather than scripting stories you do not. If a bullet does not restart you on its own, the story is under-rehearsed and no card design fixes that. Four cards out is the ceiling, because past that the think window turns into a search. Running the company question bank generator against the specific firm and role gives you the dozen prompts most likely to appear, which is what the cards get built from.

Placement options, ranked honestly

Setup	Eye movement	What the reviewer sees
Cards flanking the lens at bezel height	About five degrees, sideways, eyelid unchanged	Brief lateral flicks between sentences. Reads as thinking
Sticky notes on the bezel just under the lens	Eight to twelve degrees, downward	Workable, and the usual advice, but the eyelid still dips. The weaker option, not the wrong one
Notes flat on the desk	Twenty five to forty degrees plus a head tilt	Obvious. This is the movement everybody recognises on sight
Second monitor beside the laptop	Twenty to thirty degrees lateral, and sustained	Scanning eyes, plus a bright rectangle in your glasses if you wear them
Phone propped above the laptop lid	Small and upward, which is the safest direction	Fine until the screen dims. Disable auto lock first, and check it is not in frame

The test recording pass

Do this once, in the chair and the lighting you will actually use, before you open the real link.

Record thirty seconds with everything final

Cards taped, window at the top of the screen, lamp where it will be, the clothes you will wear. Answer one real question at your real speaking pace. Any phone camera works, or the platform's own practice question, which is normally labelled as practice and not reviewed, though the instructions screen is worth checking.

Watch it full screen with the sound off

Muting is the entire point. Without words you stop grading your content and start seeing your eyes. Count the glances a stranger would notice. Nought to two across thirty seconds is invisible. Five or more is reading, and no rewording fixes it.

Watch the tip of your nose

The cleanest test there is. If your nose stays still, you moved your eyes. If it swings, you turned your head, which means the card is too far out and needs to come two centimetres closer to the lens.

Now listen with the screen off

Audio only. If you hear complete, evenly stressed sentences with no restarts, the card has too many words on it. Cut a bullet to three words and record again. A little untidiness in speech is what makes it sound like recall instead of recitation.

Check the frame edges and your glasses

Pause on a frame, look at all four corners for a card edge, then at your lenses for a bright rectangle. A reflected document is the one tell that survives perfect eye-line, and it is the reason paper beats a screen.

Move the cards in and repeat once

Same question, cards two centimetres nearer the lens. Compare the two clips muted, keep whichever one you would not have noticed, and leave the tape where it is.

Where OfferPilot AI is the wrong tool

Worth saying plainly, because people often land here from a different question than the one they typed. A prerecorded interview is a poor fit for a live copilot, and not for policy reasons.

There is no interviewer to listen to. Interview Copilot works from an interviewer's voice arriving through system playback. A one-way interview gives you a text prompt, a countdown, then silence and you. Nothing is speaking.
Capture exclusion is about screen sharing, not cameras. Our overlay is excluded from screen capture at the operating system level, so it stays out of Zoom, Teams, Meet, OBS and screenshots. A webcam pointed at your face is a completely different channel. That exclusion does nothing about it, and nothing about lockdown browsers, eye tracking, somebody watching you in the room, or a phone propped up as a second camera.
Generated text arrives as sentences. Which is exactly the format this page has spent a thousand words telling you not to read from. A five word bullet you wrote yourself beats a fluent paragraph you have never said out loud.
Windows only. We run on Windows 10 and 11, and plenty of people record these on a phone or a Mac.

The useful window is earlier, in the days before the link expires, turning likely questions into stories and stories into five bullet cards. That is preparation, and preparation is the only input this format rewards.

The short version

Notes are usually allowed and almost never the problem. Put them beside the lens at bezel height rather than below it, because sideways glances leave your eyelids open and downward ones do not. Five bullets, five words each, marker on matte paper, four cards maximum. Then record thirty seconds, watch it back with the sound off, and count what a stranger would notice. If the answer is nought to two, you are finished.

Using notes in a one-way video interview without looking like it