How to make eye contact on a video interview

Eye contact on a video interview means looking at your webcam lens, not at the face on your screen. The lens is what the other person sees, so talking to it reads as eye contact. To make this feel natural, shrink the call window under your camera and hide your self-view.

That is the whole technique. The rest of this page covers how to set it up in about a minute, how much eye contact to aim for, and why the same habit matters on a one-way interview where the camera records you with no one on the other end.

Why looking at the screen feels right but looks wrong

The instinct on any video call is to look at the person you are talking to. On camera, that person lives on your screen, usually an inch or two below your webcam. So you look at their eyes, and the camera, mounted above, captures you looking down and slightly away.

To them it reads as if you are avoiding their gaze, glancing at notes, or checking something else. You feel like you are making eye contact. They see someone who never quite meets it. The gap is small in inches but obvious on screen.

The fix is not willpower. You cannot stare at a black dot for thirty minutes by force of concentration and still sound like a person. The fix is to close the distance between the face you want to look at and the lens you need to look into.

The window trick, step by step

This takes under a minute and works on a laptop or an external monitor.

1. Shrink the call window. Drag the corner so the video window is small, not full screen. A smaller window means the other person’s face sits in a tighter area, closer to the lens.
2. Drag it directly under your webcam. On a laptop the camera is at the top center of the screen, so park the window right beneath it. On an external monitor, move the window to whichever edge is closest to your webcam. The goal is to put their face as near the lens as possible, so glancing at it barely pulls your eyes off camera.
3. Hide your self-view. This is the step most people skip and the one that helps most. Watching your own face is the single biggest cause of darting, restless eyes, which can read as nervous or evasive. Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet all let you hide self-view. Check your framing once, then turn it off.

Now your eyeline to the lens and your eyeline to their face are almost the same. You can glance down to read their reaction and snap back to the lens without it looking like you wandered off.

How much eye contact to actually aim for

More is not automatically better. A fixed, unbroken stare into the lens looks as unnatural on camera as it would across a table. Real conversation has rhythm.

A simple rule that holds up: hold the lens almost the entire time you are listening, and about half the time while you are speaking. People naturally break their gaze to think when they talk. Looking up and to the side for a second while you find the next sentence is normal and human. The thing to avoid is the long downward glance at notes, or the eyes that never settle because they are tracking your own reflection.

If you tend to talk with your hands or look around when you think, you do not need to suppress it. Let the listening moments carry the steady eye contact and give yourself a little slack while you speak.

A hardware shortcut, if you want one

If you have a recent Nvidia graphics card, Nvidia Broadcast includes an AI eye-contact feature that subtly redirects your gaze toward the lens in software. It can help on a live call. Two cautions. It can look slightly uncanny if your head turns far, and on a recorded interview it is worth thinking about whether you want any AI filter on your video at all. The window-and-self-view method needs no special hardware and never looks artificial, so treat the software as a backup, not the plan.

Why this matters on a one-way interview too

This is the part most eye-contact advice skips, because most of it assumes a live call. A growing share of first-round screening is now a one-way video interview, where you record answers to set questions on your own time and a hiring team watches the recording later. There is no live person to look at. So does eye contact still matter?

Yes, and arguably more. A real person watches the recording afterward and judges your delivery exactly the way they would on a live call. The lens technique carries over directly: look at the camera, not at the preview of yourself on screen.

The one difference actually works in your favor. On a one-way interview there is no other person’s face on screen to be drawn toward, so the only thing competing for your eyes is your own preview and your notes. Hide the preview the same way, and keep notes to a few bullet points off to the side rather than a full script. That last point is the real eye-contact trap on a recorded interview. One interviewer described watching for eye contact as the way they spot someone reading: “you can literally tell if someone is reading an answer to you.” That is one recruiter’s take, but it matches what reviewers tend to say. Reading pulls your eyes off the lens in a steady, side-to-side sweep that is easy to see on playback.

So on a one-way interview the eye-contact goal narrows to one thing: talk to the lens, from memory and a couple of cues, not from a paragraph you are scanning. For the full mechanics of recording well under a timer, see how to pass a one-way video interview.

On AI scoring and your eyes

If you have read that an AI grades your eye contact, here is the grounded version. Some recorded-interview vendors used to analyze facial movement, and it drew real criticism for fairness. HireVue, the most cited example, has since dropped its facial-analysis feature. Most modern one-way platforms score what you say, transcribed from your audio, against the role’s criteria, not where your pupils point.

The practical takeaway is the same either way. Look at the lens because a human reviewer will watch the recording and respond to it the way any of us responds to eye contact, not because an algorithm is counting your blinks. Make it about connecting with the person on the other end, whenever they happen to watch.

A quick recap

• Look at the lens, not the face on your screen.
• Shrink the call window and drag it under the webcam so the gap is tiny.
• Hide self-view so your own face stops pulling your eyes around.
• Hold the lens most of the time listening, about half while speaking. A frozen stare is not the goal.
• On a one-way interview, the same rules apply, plus keep notes to bullet points so you are not visibly reading.

Once your eyeline is sorted, the rest of your setup is worth two minutes: see virtual interview lighting and camera setup for getting the camera to eye level and your face lit from the front, and where to look during a video interview if you want the question answered for panels and group calls too.