Screen Sharing Is Not Proctoring: The Gap Most Companies Miss
By Vaibhav Devere, Founder, Zero Assist · 2025-01-22 · 4 min read
What Screen Sharing Catches
Screen sharing shows you what the candidate wants you to see on their primary display. That is genuinely useful for watching them code, confirming they are in their IDE, and checking that they are not browsing to a direct answer page.
It catches:
- Blatant tab-switching to a search engine
- Copy-paste from a visible browser tab
- A second person visible in the background
What Screen Sharing Misses
Secondary monitors. Most candidates have more than one screen. Screen sharing typically captures only the primary display.
Screen overlay tools. Parakeet AI and Cluely render in a separate window layer that most screen-capture software treats as transparent. You cannot see them through a standard screen share.
Audio-based tools. Final Round AI and similar tools deliver answers through audio channels that your video call software's audio is not capturing.
Phone-based tools. A phone propped at an angle just off-camera can run ChatGPT. Screen sharing on the laptop does nothing to catch this.
Background processes. The candidate can have 10 AI tools running without displaying them in any visible window.
The Correct Mental Model
Think of screen sharing as a deterrent, not a detection system. It stops unsophisticated cheating because unsophisticated candidates know they will be seen. Sophisticated cheating tools are specifically designed to be screen-share-invisible.
A real detection system works at the OS layer — monitoring processes, not pixels. That is the layer where AI overlay tools cannot hide.
What the Right Answer Looks Like
A complete interview integrity setup uses screen sharing for behavioral oversight and process-level monitoring for technical detection. Neither alone is sufficient. Both together create a meaningful deterrent and a reliable signal when something is actually wrong.
If you are currently relying only on screen sharing, you are catching the candidates who did not bother to research their tools — not the ones who did.