Andy Burnham Is Right About Bad Interviews and Wrong About the Camera

Andy Burnham told a podcast he doesn’t like “this culture now of interviewing via Zoom or Teams,” asking, “How does a young person shine in that situation?” He has diagnosed a real problem. Too many interviews fail to reveal personality, passion or fit. But he has pointed the finger at the wrong culprit. Swapping a screen for a room does not fix an interview process that was never built to surface any of that in the first place.

The Formulaic Answer Is a Question-Design Problem

Burnham’s own language gives this away. He worries that video interviews “work against people who have that side to their character and work for those who are just giving the more formulaic answer.” Read that again. A formulaic answer is not a symptom of the camera. It is a symptom of a formulaic question, asked by an interviewer with no structure, no rubric and no training in how to draw out evidence rather than performance.

Ask a candidate “tell me about yourself” over Zoom and you will get a rehearsed answer. Ask the same generic question across a boardroom table and you will get the same rehearsed answer, just delivered with better eye contact. The format did not cause the formula. Poor question design did, and that flaw travels with the interviewer into any room you put them in.

The REC Already Named the Real Issue

The Recruitment and Employment Confederation’s response to Burnham, in the same BBC piece, was not a simple defence of video interviewing. The REC said online interviews are useful, particularly earlier in the hiring process, but cannot replace the value of in-person connection further down the line. Maxine Bligh, the REC’s chief membership and innovation officer, added: “AI tools are helpful, even essential, when dealing with a huge volume of applications, but it takes skill and professionalism to make the right call.” Her advice to recruiters: “go digital where it matters and human where it counts.”

That is a claim about which stage of the process needs which kind of judgment, not a verdict that a screen produces worse candidates than a room. Strip skill out of a virtual process and you get formulaic answers on Zoom. Strip skill out of an in-person panel and you get the same result, with worse cost economics and less reach.

A Room Doesn’t Cure Bias, It Relocates It

Here is the part Burnham’s framing misses entirely. In-person interviews are not some neutral, bias-free format that virtual interviews corrupted. In our experience, they carry their own well-documented failure mode: rewarding confidence and charisma as if those were proxies for competence and motivation. A candidate who fills a room with presence is not automatically the candidate with the strongest evidence of the job-relevant behaviour you are hiring for.

Removing the camera does not remove that risk, based on what we see across TA teams running both formats. It just changes which bias gets rewarded. An untrained interviewer in a conference room can be charmed by warmth as easily as an untrained interviewer on a call can be fooled by a polished script. Neither format substitutes for a structured question set and a scorecard tied to evidence rather than gut feel.

The Access Math Burnham’s Framing Ignores

There is also a practical cost to treating in-person as the fairness fix. Vacancies in the UK sit at a five-year low, according to the BBC’s reporting. More than one million 16 to 25-year-olds are not in work, education or training, the highest level in more than 12 years on official figures. LinkedIn data cited in the same piece shows 89% of UK recruiters plan to use more AI in hiring this year. That is a system already straining to move a shrinking pool of opportunity toward a growing pool of candidates.

Scaling back virtual screening across the board to satisfy a fairness argument would not widen access for that group. It would narrow it, favouring candidates who can afford the time and travel cost of showing up in person over those who cannot. Alan Milburn’s review warned in May that “we are at risk of a lost generation” with young adults facing a “perfect storm” of challenges. Adding a travel requirement to every first-round interview does not calm that storm. It adds friction exactly where the labour market can least absorb it.

Where the Fix Actually Lives

None of this means Burnham is wrong to worry. He is right that too many candidates leave interviews having never shown who they actually are. The fix is not retreating to a format. It is building structure into whatever format you use: consistent questions tied to the role, interviewers trained to probe for evidence of motivation rather than reward a smooth delivery, and a shared standard for what a strong answer actually looks like. That discipline works on a video call. It works in a boardroom. It is the only approach that has ever reliably worked in either.

Burnham asked how a young person shines through a screen. Shining was never the interviewer’s job. Drawing out evidence was, and that job does not change format by format. If your interview process still rewards a polished delivery over a real answer, look at the questions before you blame the screen.

Original reporting: BBC.