Eye contact on camera

The lens-versus-screen problem

In a room, eye contact is a single act: you look at the other person's eyes, and they see you looking at their eyes. On video it splits into two incompatible acts. The interviewer's face appears on your screen. The image of you that they receive comes from your lens, which sits above the screen. Look at their face, and from their side you appear to be looking slightly downwards, somewhere around their chin or chest. Look at the lens, so that you appear to be meeting their gaze, and you can no longer see their face at all.

No configuration solves this. Every video interview involves choosing, moment to moment, between seeing the other person and appearing to see them. Recognising it as a structural constraint rather than a personal failing is worth something on its own — a lot of people conclude from their own footage that they seem shifty, when what they're seeing is the geometry.

What you can do is shrink the gap:

• Move the window to the top of the screen. Drag the interviewer's video tile as close to your webcam as it will go. The smaller the angle between their face and the lens, the less of a downward glance you appear to have. On a large monitor this alone can be the difference between "looking at you" and "looking at your keyboard".
• Raise the laptop. A laptop flat on a desk puts the lens below eye level — an unflattering angle that also exaggerates the downward gaze. A stack of books that brings the lens to roughly eye height fixes both.
• Shrink the window. A smaller tile means less eye travel across the face, so your gaze stays closer to the lens even while you're watching them.
• Hide your own preview. Watching yourself is the most common cause of drifting, unfocused gaze, and it makes you self-conscious in a way that shows. Most platforms let you turn it off.

What to actually do while you're speaking

The workable pattern is asymmetric: lens while you're talking, screen while they're talking.

While you're delivering an answer you don't need their face — you're presenting, not reading them for turn-taking cues. That's the moment to look at the lens, because it's when appearing to connect matters most. When they're speaking, look at the screen: you want to actually see them, and looking at whoever is talking is what a listener naturally does anyway.

Don't hold the lens rigidly for a whole answer. An unbroken camera stare isn't what natural eye contact looks like — in person, people break gaze constantly, particularly while recalling something. Breaking away briefly while you think and returning as you make the point reads as normal. What reads badly is a gaze that lives somewhere else and only occasionally visits.

Why reading from notes is visible

People consistently underestimate this. The belief that you can glance at notes off to the side and have it pass unnoticed is common, and wrong — for reasons that have nothing to do with how subtle you are.

Reading has a distinctive signature. Your eyes move in small, regular jumps along a line and then flick back to the start of the next one — a rhythm completely unlike the loose, irregular movement of someone thinking. On a close-cropped video of your face, that rhythm is visible even when the movement is small. The other person may not consciously think "they're reading", but they register something mechanical.

Reading also changes your voice: it flattens the intonation and removes the small hesitations that make speech sound generated rather than recited. And it pulls your gaze off the camera for sustained stretches, so the eye-contact figure collapses at exactly the points where you're saying the things you most wanted to land.

None of this means notes are a bad idea. It means reading is.

How to use notes without looking like you're reading

Notes are legitimate and often sensible — most interviewers expect a candidate to have something written down. The distinction is between notes you consult and a script you perform.

1. Write prompts, not prose. Three or four words per example: "Roster error — checked whole roster — told manager first". A prompt triggers a story you already know. A full sentence invites you to read it, and you will. That's the whole difference, and it's decided before the interview starts.
2. Put them directly under the lens. A sticky note beside the webcam, or a single page propped below the monitor. The closer the notes sit to the camera line, the smaller the visible gaze shift. Notes flat on the desk are the worst case — they require a full head drop.
3. Keep it to one page, no scrolling. Scrolling is unmistakable: the eye movement, the hand movement, the pause. One page, large text, no need to hunt.
4. Glance between sentences, not mid-sentence. Look down at a natural break, take the prompt, come back to the lens, then speak. Checking a note while talking produces the reading rhythm; checking during a deliberate pause reads as thinking. This pairs with the silent pause — the same beat does both jobs.
5. Never write your opening line down. The first sentence sets the tone, and a read opening starts the whole answer in the wrong register. Know your first sentence cold; the notes are for the middle.

What "good" looks like

Not a fixed number. Both extremes are problems: unbroken staring is uncomfortable to be on the end of, and a gaze rarely near the camera reads as evasive or as reading. You're aiming for a gaze that spends most of an answer near the lens, breaks away briefly while you think, and comes back for the points that matter.

Two things matter more than the headline percentage. The opening ten seconds — the interviewer's initial read forms fast, so eye contact at the start of an answer carries more weight than the average across it. And where your breaks fall: brief breaks distributed through an answer are normal, while one long departure in the middle usually marks the moment you reached for a note or lost the thread. The pattern tells you more than the number does.