Is a Karat Interview Recorded? What Karat Captures and Who Watches It

What Karat can see at all

• The interview video and audio, recorded end to end
• Your code, as a playback recording
• Your behaviour on camera, watched live by a trained interviewer
• Whether you type outside the browser window without explaining why
• Whether you look repeatedly between monitors
• Whether code arrives in an unusual top-down or line-by-line shape

The interview is a conversation, and the conversation is the record

Karat's model is different from an assessment platform's in a way that changes what monitoring even means. There is no timer running against you in an empty room. There is an Interview Engineer — Karat's term is IVE — who is a working software developer, and Karat describes the hour as a brief introduction, around 10 minutes of it, followed by roughly 40 minutes of discussion questions and programming questions in a fully-tooled IDE.

Because a person is present for all of it, the primary integrity mechanism is that person. Karat says its Interview Engineers are trained to monitor for and report abnormal candidate behaviours that may indicate cheating, and names three: typing outside the browser window without explanation, frequently looking between monitors, and writing code in an unusual top-down or line-by-line manner.

What is recorded and where it goes

Everything. Karat states that all its interviews are recorded, including the interview audio and a code playback, and gives the reason: consistent assessment and alignment with customers on what good looks like. Its candidate page tells you directly that the recruiter will receive the video recording along with a summary highlighting your performance.

The output is three artefacts: a video recording, a code playback recording, and an interview report with an overall recommendation, a quantitative score and written feedback. Karat adds a handling constraint — the video and audio are viewable on Karat's platform but not downloadable — and says that after a customer relationship ends the customer keeps only the recommendation and the scores.

What happens when something is flagged

This is the part of Karat's process worth knowing before you sit down. A flag from an Interview Engineer does not end the interview or decide the outcome on its own. Karat says that where cheating is suspected the interview will be rewatched and reviewed in its entirety by a second Interview Engineer specifically trained in Karat's quality control standards.

That is a meaningfully different failure mode from an automated one. The evidence is an hour of video and a code playback, and the reviewer is a developer who has run many interviews and knows what a person thinking through a problem looks like — including the awkward parts.

What is recorded, and what is only flagged

An artefact a reviewer can open later is a different thing from an event counted on a report, and both are different from an action the platform simply prevents. Every control Karat documents, tagged and sourced:

What Karat's documentation does not say

The gaps are as useful as the features, and they are the part nobody else writes down. Where Karat states a limit, it is quoted below. Where it is silent, the entry says it is silent — undocumented is not the same as absent, and we are not going to present it as one.

• Karat's public pages describe no browser lockdown, no screenshot capture and no desktop proctoring application. The monitoring they describe is a trained human on a live video call plus a recording.
• They also describe no automated webcam analysis — no face counting, no gaze model, no object detection. The behaviours Karat names are ones a person notices.
• Karat's customer FAQ does not describe an identity verification procedure, so treat identity checks as unspecified rather than absent.
• The recording is not the hiring company's to keep freely: Karat says video and audio can be viewed on its platform but not downloaded, and that after the customer relationship ends the customer retains only the recommendation and the quantitative scores.

What candidates get wrong about Karat

The most common assumption is that Karat is an automated screen with a person attached. It is the reverse. The interview is the product, the rubric is what makes it comparable across interviewers, and the recording exists so a second person can check the first one's judgement.

The second is not realising the recruiter watches the tape. Karat tells candidates the video recording goes to the recruiter with a summary. The hiring company's impression of you is formed from an hour of video, not from a score line.

The third is misjudging where attention goes. There is no gaze model and no face-counting AI in Karat's published description — but there is a developer watching you on a call for an hour, and the behaviours Karat trains them to notice are behavioural rather than technical: typing somewhere the interviewer cannot see, eyes moving between displays, code appearing in an unnatural order.

The fourth is treating a flag as final. Karat's stated process is a complete second review by another Interview Engineer.

Worth knowing before you sit down

• Karat describes a one-hour structure: a brief introduction, about 10 minutes of it, then roughly 40 minutes of discussion questions and programming questions.
• Your interviewer is a working software developer, not a recruiter — Karat's framing is a professional developer with extensive experience leading technical interviews.
• You get live support, guidance and feedback during the interview, in a fully-tooled IDE. It is a conversation, not a silent test.
• The recruiter receives a video recording plus a summary highlighting your performance, so the hiring company forms its impression from the tape.
• Karat offers evening and weekend scheduling, which is a real advantage if a quiet hour is hard to find during the working day.
• Suspicion triggers a full second review rather than an instant rejection: Karat says another Interview Engineer rewatches the interview in its entirety.

What this means if you use an AI assistant

Karat is the clearest case where screen-capture behaviour is close to beside the point. Nothing in Karat's public documentation describes a screenshot pipeline or a lockdown application. What it describes is a trained developer watching you on camera for an hour, and a recording that a second one can rewatch in full.

The behaviours Karat names are all human observations. Typing outside the browser window without explanation, looking repeatedly between monitors, code arriving in an unusual top-down or line-by-line shape: none of those depend on any software seeing your desktop, and none of them are affected by what a capture pipeline does or does not include.

The code playback is the second channel. It is a record of how the solution was assembled, and a solution that appears in an order a person would not naturally produce is exactly what Karat trains its reviewers to notice.

If a separate video call is used and you share your entire desktop rather than a single window, that share is a full composite of your screen — the same real failure mode that applies to any overlay on any platform.

Stealth Interview is a desktop app for macOS and Windows that is not captured by screen-sharing or meeting software, and it transcribes interviewer audio in real time. In a Karat interview the constraint that actually binds is a person watching and a rubric being scored, and we would rather say that plainly than sell you a claim we cannot support.

Karat proctoring: common questions

Sources

Every page below is published by Karat or its parent company. Last checked in August 2026; vendors change these features often, so check the date on the page you land on.

• Karat — FAQs for Karat customers
• Karat — The Karat Interview Experience

Product home: Karat

Other platforms you may be facing

• Every platform in this cluster — assessments, live coding tools and meeting software, side by side.
• The blog — how the technical interview loop is actually scored.
• AI interview assistant — what Stealth Interview does during a live interview.