Before a video interview

1The day before: MeetBench

Sit where you’ll sit tomorrow, at the same time of day, with the same headphones, and open MeetBench. Start the check takes about a minute: the camera, the microphone, an echo test, the headphones and the network, in one pass. The picture and sound are analysed in the browser and go nowhere, and the camera and microphone switch off when it’s done.

• Camera: resolution (720p or better is good), frames per second (23 or more) and Lighting. If it says Strong light behind you: your face is in shadow, turn so the window is in front of you. A window behind your back turns any candidate into a witness under protection.
• Microphone: first 2.3 seconds of silence for the background noise, then you say a phrase for 5 seconds. Your voice should be clearly above the noise; a fan or a laptop cooler counts as noise.
• Echo: three tones from the speakers, and the microphone shouldn’t hear them. If it does, the interviewer will hear themselves. Headphones solve it.
• Headphones: a melody in one ear, and you say which. Yes, people do sit with L on the right ear.

The verdict is one of three: Ready for the call, Ready, with notes or Not ready for the call, and every problem comes with a concrete piece of advice. A camera or microphone can be checked again on its own, and choosing another one in the list re-checks it.

2SpeedBench: latency under load

Speed in megabits is the least of it: video needs only a few. What spoils a call is a delay that grows while you send video. The router queues too much data, and your words arrive a second late (that is bufferbloat). MeetBench measures it while uploading: an increase of up to 100 ms is fine, over 300 ms is a problem.

For the details, run SpeedBench. Besides download and upload it measures Latency under load and gives Bufferbloat a grade by how much the delay grows: A+ under 5 ms, A under 30, B under 60, C under 200, D under 400, F beyond. If it’s C or worse, find who is loading the network: a cloud photo backup, a game update, a series in 4K in the next room. Ask them to pause for an hour. If the router has SQM or QoS, turn it on.

3When UDP is blocked

Calls in Zoom, Meet or Teams prefer UDP: it’s fast, and a lost packet is simply skipped instead of being waited for. MeetBench checks it by asking a public STUN server for your outside address; if no answer comes in 5 seconds, it says UDP seems blocked: calls will go through a relay. The call will still work, but over TCP through a relay server, and it lags more.

This happens on office, school and hotel networks, with a VPN or with a browser extension that restricts WebRTC. What to do:

• Try another network. A phone hotspot often lets UDP through when the office Wi-Fi doesn’t.
• Turn off the VPN for the call, or the extension that blocks WebRTC, and check again.
• Ask IT to allow UDP for the call service: every service publishes its list of ports. Copy report in MeetBench gives them the measurements as text, without the picture, the sound or your IP address.
• If nothing helps, keep the video lighter: close everything that uploads, and use headphones so at least the voice is clean.

4TimeBench: don’t be late

An interview with a company in another country starts in their time zone, and that is where people miss by an hour. TimeBench shows your time zone, its offset from UTC and the next Clock change. Remember that Europe and the US move their clocks on different dates: in autumn a week apart (the last Sunday of October and the first Sunday of November), in spring about three weeks apart. In between, the difference is an hour off what you are used to.

The same page checks whether your own clock is right: Exact time measures the offset like NTP does. If it is off by more than half a second, the page explains how to turn on automatic time, and if the difference is almost exactly a multiple of 15 minutes, it hints that the time zone is wrong. And the Timer: set it to go off ten minutes before the call, not at the moment it starts.

Ten minutes before

• Charge the laptop, or better, plug it in.
• Close the cloud backup, torrents and anything that uploads. Ask your household not to start a 4K series right now.
• Put on the headphones the way MeetBench approved: L on the left.
• Light in front, window not behind.
• Join the call a couple of minutes early. Smile normally, not like in the rehearsal.