Most of the engineers I have hired in the last several years I have met mostly on video. Some I have met in person a few times a year. Some never. I think that has changed what an interview should be looking for, and I have slowly changed what I look for to match.
The medium is the job
When a team is spread across time zones, most of the work happens in writing and most of it happens while you are asleep. A design is a document before it is a meeting. A disagreement is a thread. A decision gets made at three in the afternoon in one city and read at nine in the morning in another.
So the question I am trying to answer in an interview is not really how this person comes across in an hour on a call. It is how they will come across in a pull request description, a planning document, and a message that has to be understood without a follow-up. The interview is a poor sample of that, unless it is designed to be a better one.
What I weight more
How clearly they write. I think writing is the most underrated engineering skill on a distributed team, and the interview can test it directly. A short written exercise, a design note, or simply how they describe a past project over email tells me more than most verbal questions.
How they explain a decision they made. Not whether it was the right decision, but whether they can lay out what the options were, what they knew at the time, and why they chose. That is the skill they will use every day in a document someone else has to act on.
The questions they ask. Someone who asks about how the team plans, how handoffs work, and what happens when something breaks overnight is already thinking about the job as it actually is.
Evidence of self-direction. Across a time difference nobody is there to unblock you at four in the afternoon. I look for people who have a history of finding the next thing to do and saying what they are doing while they do it.
What I weight less
Polish on camera. Some people are at ease on video and some are not, and I have come to believe it tells me almost nothing about the work. A halting answer followed by a clear written summary is a better sign than a smooth answer that leaves nothing behind.
Speed of answers. Fast on a call does not mean fast on a problem, and the job rewards the second. I would rather hear I would want to look at that than a confident guess.
Whether they would be fun in the office. I used to think about this more than I should have. It matters, but it is not the signal a video interview can read, and it is not the signal the job depends on.
Where this stops being true
Some roles are mostly in a room. A lead who will sit with a co-located team every day, or an engineer whose job is working with customers in person, should be interviewed for that. And none of this means ignoring how someone treats people in a conversation. It means not confusing comfort with a camera for the ability to be understood from eight time zones away.
Photo source: https://photos.robertstowe.com/bermuda