Product · Interview
A behavioural first-round, by voice, conducted by the AI.
Not a recording. Not a one-way upload for a human to grade later. A live conversation, structured, adaptive, and scored against the role. 30 minutes. Voice for V1. Video lands with V2 where the law allows it.
Post a role →Listen to a sample (audio)
Why not just a recording
Recorded one-way interviews exist to save the hiring team's time, not the candidate's. The candidate stares into a webcam, the recording goes into a queue, someone watches it back, and the score arrives later. We do not believe in this format. The AI can conduct a real conversation now; the candidate gets a back-and-forth instead of a monologue; the score arrives with the recording. The cost is similar, the experience is better, the signal is stronger.
Quoted from /manifesto
Inside the interview
Five passes through one half-hour conversation.
01
Opening.
A two-minute calibration. Where the candidate is, what their day looked like, a comfortable opening exchange. Not scored.
02
Behavioural anchors.
Three or four behavioural questions tied to the role's must-haves. Each one drills into a specific past event with adaptive follow-ups. Scored against a rubric per competency.
03
Scenario.
One scenario tailored to the role and the company's stage. Open-ended. Scored on judgement, prioritisation, and how they handle pressure or ambiguity.
04
Candidate's questions.
Three to five minutes for the candidate to ask whatever they want. We capture the questions and pass them to you. Not scored.
05
Confidence calibration.
A short reflection at the end where the candidate rates their own performance. Used as a tiebreaker; not used to lower a score.
Sample · senior engineer · 12 minutes in
Audio sample shipping with V1. Below is the transcript snippet.
Audio · 00:00 / 00:00
Sample. Shipping with V1.
AI       The migration you ran in February. You said the rollback
         worked but the team had a difficult week. Walk me through
         what made it difficult.

CANDIDATE We did not have a clean fail signal on the new path. The
         metric we were watching lagged by about 40 minutes. So we
         spent that window thinking it was working before realising
         it was not.

AI       What changed about how you measure rollouts after that?

CANDIDATE We added a real-time canary on the request path, not just
         the metric. And we added a kill switch that does not need
         a deploy to flip. Two changes, both small.

AI       If you joined this team and saw a rollout going sideways
         on a Friday afternoon, what would you do in the first ten
         minutes?

CANDIDATE The first thing is not technical. Get someone
         in the loop who knows the system and is not me. Then the
         kill switch if we have one. Then a clear comms message to
         the team about what we are doing and what to stop doing.
         Then the diagnosis...
From the beta
What people who applied told us afterwards.
"It actually asked me follow-up questions. I have done six of those one-way video things this year and this is the only one that felt like an interview."
BETA CANDIDATE · ENG · LONDON · MAY 2026
"I do not love AI in hiring. I expected to hate this. I did not. I came off the call feeling like someone had heard what I was saying."
BETA CANDIDATE · CS · MANCHESTER · MAY 2026
"Faster than my last process and I got better feedback at the end. I have no complaints."
BETA CANDIDATE · SALES · BERLIN · MAY 2026
We will replace these with named, consented quotes once V1 ships. Until then, paraphrased from beta sessions.
Candidate rights
Any candidate can ask for a human interviewer instead.

Before the interview starts, the candidate sees a clear opt-out: a human interviewer instead of the AI, no penalty, no flag in the file. The same questions, the same rubric, conducted by a Picked-trained recruiter at a scheduled time. Roughly 3 percent of beta candidates have used this; that is the cost of trust we are willing to pay.

~$0.30
Average cost per interview at V1.
30 min
Median length across roles.
Voice only
at V1. Video lands with V2 where the law (Illinois AIVIA) allows it.
Want to hear what your candidates would say?
Post the role. The interviews will follow.
Post a role →For candidates
Interview · Picked.ai