What Does a Microsoft Teams Recording Capture? Screen Share, Video and Audio

What Microsoft Teams can see at all

• Audio from the meeting
• Participant video, up to four streams at a time in a recording
• Screen-sharing activity, meaning whatever was shared
• Nothing on your device that you have not shared

Sharing: your screen, or one window

Microsoft's documentation for sharing content in Teams meetings describes presenting your entire screen or a window, and lists the richer live-share options separately: PowerPoint Live, Excel and Whiteboard, each of which shares a document rather than a region of your display.

The distinction between a screen share and a window share is documented as a choice, though Microsoft's page does not spell out a participant-eye comparison of the two the way Zoom's security page does. What it does note is that the presenter toolbar is visible only to the person presenting, so your own share controls are not part of the picture.

What a recording captures, and the list of what it does not

Microsoft's recording documentation gives a one-line answer and then an unusually specific set of exclusions. The answer: meeting recordings capture audio, video and screen sharing activity.

The exclusions are worth reading in full because they are rarely guessed correctly. Microsoft says recordings will not capture more than four people's video streams at once, whiteboards and annotations, shared notes, content shared by app, or videos and animations embedded in PowerPoint Live presentations.

And recording is announced. Microsoft states that all meeting participants receive a notification in their Teams desktop, web or mobile app as soon as a meeting recording starts, which means a recorded interview is a recorded interview you know about.

Teams is the call, not the assessment

Teams documents no integrity features. There is no screenshot interval, no webcam anomaly analysis, no lockdown mode and no application blocking anywhere in its meeting product. What it captures is what was shared into the meeting and who was speaking.

In a technical interview that makes Teams the least interesting surface in the room. The coding tool is where the proctoring lives, and if you want to know what an interview can actually see, that is the page to read — CoderPad, HackerRank, CodeSignal and Codility each have one here.

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 Microsoft Teams documents, tagged and sourced:

What Microsoft Teams's documentation does not say

The gaps are as useful as the features, and they are the part nobody else writes down. Where Microsoft Teams 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.

• Microsoft publishes an explicit exclusion list: recordings will not capture more than four people's video streams at once, whiteboards and annotations, shared notes, content shared by app, or videos and animations embedded in PowerPoint Live presentations.
• Recording is never silent. Microsoft says every participant is notified in their Teams app as soon as a recording starts.
• Teams documents no proctoring features — no periodic screenshots, no webcam anomaly detection, no browser lockdown, no application blocking. It is a meeting product.
• Microsoft's sharing page does not spell out a side-by-side comparison of what participants see for a screen share versus a window share. The distinction between the two options is documented; the participant-eye description of each is not.

What candidates get wrong about Microsoft Teams

The first is imagining a Teams recording is a recording of everyone's desktops. It is not. Microsoft's line is audio, video and screen sharing activity — meaning whatever was shared into the meeting, by whoever shared it.

The second is assuming whiteboard work is preserved. It is explicitly on Microsoft's exclusion list, along with annotations, shared notes and content shared by app. If a whiteboard mattered to the interview, it exists only in the interviewer's memory and notes.

The third is worrying about being recorded without knowing. Microsoft says every participant is notified in their Teams app as soon as recording starts.

The fourth, as with every meeting product, is thinking Teams tells you anything about the coding platform in the next window. It does not.

Worth knowing before you sit down

• Sharing a single window is a documented option alongside sharing your entire screen.
• Everyone gets a recording notification in their Teams app the moment recording begins, so you will not be recorded without being told.
• A recording carries at most four video streams at once, which is worth knowing if you are one of several people on a panel.
• Whiteboard content and annotations are not in the recording, so if the interview used a whiteboard, that work does not survive in the tape.
• The presenter toolbar is visible only to you while you present.
• As with Zoom and Meet, none of this changes what a separate coding platform records — that tool has its own rules.

What this means if you use an AI assistant

The mechanism is the same as it is on every meeting product. Share your entire screen and you are sharing a composited image of the desktop; share one window and the scope is that window. Microsoft documents both options. It does not document how the capture pipeline treats windows that ask to be excluded, and no vendor does.

A Teams recording follows what was shared into the meeting, not what is on a participant's machine. Microsoft's exclusion list — four video streams, no whiteboards, no annotations, no shared notes, no app-shared content, no PowerPoint Live embedded video — is a good reminder that a recording is a product artefact with limits, not a surveillance feed.

The notification is a real constraint on the other side too. Nobody records a Teams interview quietly.

None of this touches the coding tool. If the problem lives in a proctored assessment, that platform's screenshots, webcam snapshots or device checks apply exactly as documented on its own page.

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. Teams' documented behaviour is above, from Microsoft's pages.

Microsoft Teams proctoring: common questions

Sources

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

• Microsoft — Share content in Microsoft Teams meetings
• Microsoft — Record a meeting in Microsoft Teams

Product home: Microsoft Teams

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.