Where should you position the AI interview assistant overlay?

The single biggest tell during a video interview is your eyes darting to the side or down to read something. The SubcueAI overlay is a small, floating window you control, so the goal when positioning it is simple: put it as close to your webcam as you can while keeping it readable.

On a laptop, that usually means just below or beside the camera notch, overlapping the top of the meeting window. On an external monitor with the camera mounted on top, anchor the overlay to the upper edge of that same monitor. The less your gaze travels, the more natural your eye contact looks.

Both setups work, but they call for different placement strategies:

• Single monitor: Keep the meeting window centered under your webcam and dock the overlay along the top edge of the screen, just under the camera. Resize it so it occupies a thin strip rather than a tall block — you want to glance, not read paragraphs.
• Dual monitor: Run the meeting on the monitor with your webcam, and put the overlay on the secondary monitor only if that monitor is physically close to the camera. A far-away second screen is worse than a well-placed overlay on your main display, because your eyes have to travel further.

Some interviewers ask candidates to share a specific application window or their entire screen. See detectability and privacy for what that means for any on-screen tool.

If you are asked to share your screen — common in coding and system design rounds — the overlay needs to live outside whatever you are sharing. Concretely:

• If you share a single application window (for example, just your IDE or just the browser tab with the coding pad), keep the overlay anywhere outside that window. It will not appear in the shared stream.
• If you share an entire display, move the overlay to a different display, or be aware that anything visible on that display is visible to the interviewer.
• If you share your entire screen on a single-monitor machine, there is no safe on-screen position. No floating overlay can avoid being captured in that case — this is a hard technical limit, not a SubcueAI-specific one.

For more on what is and is not in scope, see security.

Position is only half the problem; size matters too. A huge overlay forces long reading saccades and pulls your attention away from the interviewer. A useful starting point:

• Make the overlay wide and short, not tall and narrow — most answer text is read left-to-right in short bursts.
• Keep font size large enough that you can read it from your normal sitting distance without leaning in.
• Trim it down to show only the latest suggestion or the last couple of bullet points, not a full transcript.

If you want a full walkthrough of setup before your first call, the tutorial covers installation and a dry run.