Google and McKinsey Are Requiring In-Person Interviews Again — Here's How to Prepare

For most of the last four years, the interview process lived entirely on a screen. You wore a decent shirt, found a tidy corner of your apartment, and opened Zoom. The rise of remote work normalized video hiring at every level — from first-round recruiter screens to final-round panels with executives. In-person felt like a relic.

That's changing. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced on The Lex Fridman Podcast that the company is reintroducing at least one round of in-person interviews for all candidates, explicitly to ensure people have mastered "the fundamentals." McKinsey now requires hiring managers to schedule at least one in-person meeting before any offer is extended. Cisco and Deloitte have made similar moves. Amazon has formally banned AI tools during interviews and requires candidates to acknowledge they won't use them.

The catalyst: AI-assisted cheating, at scale.

What Broke the All-Video Model

The numbers on AI use during interviews are striking. Recruiters reported candidates turning to AI for answers mid-interview and reading them verbatim — sometimes with noticeable latency, sometimes word-for-word from a tool running as a hidden overlay. Over 50% of technical candidates are now estimated to be using AI assistance during live coding challenges, according to reporting from Computerworld. Deepfake personas have appeared in remote interviews at companies large enough to be targets for fraud.

The cheating problem isn't new, but AI accelerated it from edge case to epidemic. What used to require a confederate reading answers off-screen now takes a $20/month subscription. Tools built explicitly for real-time interview assistance — some marketed openly with phrases like "cheat on everything" — flooded the market and made invisible AI assistance accessible to anyone willing to use it.

Companies noticed. Recruiters reported a pattern: candidates who aced technical screens couldn't answer follow-up questions with the same depth. Answers came back suspiciously consistent, almost templated. The correlation between remote-only processes and unexpected hire quality started showing up in performance data.

In-person interviews are a blunt instrument, but they work: you can't pipe AI suggestions into your ear when you're sitting across a table.

Who's Affected and What Their Policies Actually Say

Google now requires at least one in-person round for all candidates. Pichai's statement framed this as ensuring command of fundamentals — a signal that technical and problem-solving depth will be tested directly, not mediated by AI.

McKinsey implemented the in-person requirement approximately 18 months ago, ahead of the broader industry shift. The in-person round is now a prerequisite before any offer, regardless of where the candidate is based.

Amazon hasn't mandated in-person across the board but has taken a parallel approach: a formal AI ban during interviews with a required acknowledgment from candidates. Using AI tools during an Amazon interview is grounds for immediate disqualification.

Anthropic, notable for being an AI company itself, initially banned AI at every stage of its application process, then updated its policy. The current position: no AI during live interviews unless specifically told otherwise. Candidates can use AI to prepare and practice, but not to answer questions in real time.

The direction across the industry is consistent: more friction for remote-only processes, more transparency required about what candidates are actually bringing to the table themselves.

What This Means If You're Job-Hunting Right Now

If you're targeting any large tech company, a top consulting firm, or an enterprise that can afford to run in-person rounds, build in-person preparation into your process — not just video interview practice.

This is not a minor shift for many candidates. Someone who graduated in 2021 and has been in the workforce since has likely never had a substantive in-person interview at a competitive employer. The muscle memory for holding a room, reading the energy of four people around a table, and staying composed when a hard question lands — that's entirely different from managing your thumbnail on a Zoom grid.

The underlying skills are the same. Clear thinking, structured answers, specific examples, and the ability to respond under pressure matter as much in person as on video. The execution changes; the fundamentals don't.

Five Things That Change In Person

1. Your research needs to be load-bearing.

In a video interview, you can have a browser tab open with the company's recent news, the interviewer's LinkedIn, or a list of your talking points. In person, you have nothing. Everything you know about the company, the role, and the interviewer needs to be in your head before you walk through the door.

This means building a real briefing pack: the company's recent strategic moves or product announcements; the interviewer's background; two or three things that genuinely interest you about the role. Not surface-level facts — substance that lets you ask a smart question at the end of every round.

2. Your answers need to work without a script.

In a video interview, candidates can scroll through notes at the bottom of the screen or consult a list of examples off-camera. In person, all of that is gone. Your answers need to come from internalized examples — real moments from your work history that you've rehearsed enough to deliver fluently without reading.

The STAR format (Situation, Task, Action, Result) still works, but you need to practice it aloud until it sounds natural, not recited. Record yourself. Watch it back. Most people are surprised how different their delivery sounds versus how it feels from the inside.

3. Physical presence is read differently.

On Zoom, your face is everything. In a room, interviewers are reading your whole posture: how you walk in, whether you fill the space or shrink from it, how you behave in the first 90 seconds before anything substantive starts. None of this is unfair — it's how humans assess each other when the buffer of a screen is removed.

Come in with energy. Greet everyone in the room, not just the most senior person. Don't check your phone. These are obvious, but they matter more than most candidates expect when people are trying to answer: "Can this person represent us to clients?"

4. Questions land differently when they're live.

In video there's an implicit social contract: latency happens, a slight pause after a question is normal. In person, you're expected to respond promptly and without visible discomfort. If you blank, "that's a great question — let me think through this" works, but it has to be delivered with composure, not panic.

Practice your "buy a moment" moves. A calm pause with eye contact while you think reads as confidence. A visible freeze reads as a gap.

5. The whiteboard is real again.

For engineering roles, whiteboard sessions are back. The system design discussion or coding exercise that happened in a shared doc or Coderpad window now happens in person: marker in hand, in front of people, while talking through your thinking out loud.

The mechanics differ — no autocomplete, no Googling, no syntax highlighting. Practice writing code and system diagrams by hand. Your ability to organize a board visually and explain your reasoning in real time is suddenly relevant in a way it hasn't been in years.

Prepare Like the Meeting Matters — Because It Does

The single highest-leverage thing you can do before an in-person interview is remove the crutches and practice without them.

Run through your top five examples until you can deliver them clearly without notes. Build a proper briefing document on the company and the role, then test yourself — can you answer "what do you know about us?" without looking at it? Do a mock interview with a friend, in person, and record it. Then watch the recording with the sound off to see what your body language is communicating.

Meeting Copilot's interview assistant lets you load your resume, the job description, and your research into a single briefing pack, then run through likely questions in a practice session before the real thing. That preparation goes into the room with you, even when the tool itself stays at your desk.

The Broader Shift

The return to in-person isn't purely reactionary. Companies that genuinely select for judgment, communication, and presence — not just pattern-matching on technical questions — have always known that a live room tells you more than a video grid. AI cheating gave them the justification to make a change some hiring managers already wanted.

The candidates who adapt fastest are the ones who already understood that an interview is a performance, not just a quiz — and who prep in conditions that match the pressure they'll actually face. If you've been relying on the implicit safety nets of remote formats, now is a good time to close that gap.

The job is the same. The room is just real again.