EY vs PwC vs KPMG Video Interview 2026: Stage by Stage

🦈 A recorded interview has no interviewer to rescue you — you talk into a lens for a minute and the take is gone. SpeakShark gives you daily spoken-English reps with pronunciation feedback while you speak, and an AI teacher that remembers what you fumbled last session. Free tier, no card. Start a free speaking session →

The three firms do not run the same stage. PwC and KPMG each have a standalone recorded video interview after their online tests — PwC's runs on SHL with an expected duration of one hour and a one-week window, KPMG's is six questions in 40 minutes. EY has no separate video interview stage at all: its official application page folds "recorded video answers" inside Stage two, mixed with rank-order and written items. That single difference reshapes how you prepare for each. And a second one matters just as much: none of the three names HireVue anywhere on its own careers site. PwC names SHL. EY and KPMG name no platform. Everything below comes from the firms' own pages, opened in July 2026 and linked so you can check.

In this guide: at a glance · does EY use HireVue · the PwC SHL interview · the KPMG video interview · question style · one rehearsal plan · how we compared them · where this guide stops helping · FAQ

EY vs PwC vs KPMG video interview at a glance

Everything in this table is quoted or paraphrased from the firm's own careers site, checked July 2026. Blank cells mean the firm does not publish it — not that the answer is unknown to them.

Sources: EY UK application process and EY early careers FAQs; PwC UK assessment and selection process; KPMG applying to KPMG.

The practical read: KPMG is the tightest and most defined, PwC is the longest and most generous with time, EY is the least documented. If you are applying to all three, prepare for KPMG's constraints and you will comfortably clear the other two. Deloitte runs a fourth variant, covered separately in our Deloitte HireVue guide.

Does EY use HireVue, or is the video hidden in the assessment?

This is the single most-searched question about EY's process, and the honest answer is not the one the prep-site headlines give you.

EY's official UK student application process page lays out the journey stage by stage, and the number of stages depends on your programme:

• Career Starters — a two-stage process: application form, then online assessments. That is the whole thing.
• Apprenticeships and Discover EY — four stages: application form, online assessments, EY Experience Day, final interview.
• Summer internships, industrial placements and graduate programmes — three to four stages on the same spine.

Nowhere in that list is a stage called "video interview". The video lives inside Stage two, described in EY's own words: the online assessments "will involve a selection of rank order, written and recorded video answers, and, where applicable to your programme, a time-recorded Numeric Reasoning Test."

So the recorded video is genuinely there. It is just not packaged as a separate branded round, and EY does not name the vendor behind it. If a site tells you "EY Stage 3 is a HireVue interview", it is describing a stage EY's own page does not publish.

What EY does publish is unusually useful. From the early careers FAQs:

• "Most of our assessments are not timed, however our Numerical Reasoning Test is time recorded" — so unlike KPMG's 40-minute clock, EY does not advertise a countdown on your video answers.
• "The video section of this stage should be completed in one sitting, so be ready and in a quiet location when recording your answers."
• Use a modern browser: "We recommend using Google Chrome as your browser, as this is the most reliable," on "a laptop or desktop device", with Windows recommended for reliability.
• The Numerical Reasoning Test instructions page "contains a link to complete a short practice test" — free official practice, from the firm itself.
• EY assesses "your scores in the online assessments alongside your academic attainment at A level or equivalent" and expects "a minimum threshold to be achieved."

Two small honesty notes on EY's pages. The application page writes "Numeric Reasoning Test" while the FAQ writes "Numerical Reasoning Test" — the same test, two spellings. And when we read the FAQ in July 2026, it still stated that EY Experience Days "will begin from mid-October 2025", a leftover from a previous cycle. Employer pages drift. Your invitation email is the only timing that binds you.

For the broader mechanics of recorded interviews across employers, our how to pass a HireVue interview guide covers setup, framing and delivery in depth.

The PwC HireVue interview is really an SHL interview

PwC publishes the most detailed process of the three, and it names its vendor. From the assessment and selection process page, the full sequence is:

1. Apply online
2. Online assessment — "hosted in the SHL platform", in two parts: an untimed behavioural profile test, then a timed cognitive assessment covering "numerical, inductive and deductive reasoning". Outcome within 48 hours.
3. Video interview — "an on-demand video interview which will be conducted virtually via the SHL platform. The expected duration is one hour". You get log-in details in advance and "will have one week to complete the video interview."
4. Assessment centre — virtual and immersive, where "you will meet and work with up to five other candidates", supported by a facilitator. Typically run November to April.
5. Finding you the right role (graduate programme only) — a recruiter call that matches you to a business area and office, including feedback from earlier stages. Job matching happens December to May.
6. Business assessment — the final stage, "an interview with a senior leader from business area you're matched to", in person, in your matched office.
7. Your offer, then pre-employment screening.

On the video interview itself, PwC is precise about the format and vague about the content: "you will be presented with a series of questions on the screen and asked to describe your experience. Instead of having an interviewer, your answers will be recorded and reviewed afterwards."

Note "reviewed afterwards" — PwC does not claim a machine decides. SHL's own product page for Smart Interview On Demand says recruiters pick questions from a bank or write their own, that candidates "record responses at their convenience", and that its AI "standardizes scoring using pre-defined evaluation parameters". Both things can be true: algorithmic scoring plus human review.

The one-hour figure is the detail candidates most often misread. It is an expected duration for the session, not a per-answer limit, and PwC explicitly recommends allowing extra time "to get into the platform, test your tech, and logout afterwards." With a week's window, there is no excuse for recording at 11pm on the deadline with a flatmate's TV audible.

Two PwC rules deserve a hard read before you practise anything:

• The once-a-year application rule. "You're restricted to one application at a time for our Early Careers roles. We'll only consider one application for our 2026 programmes." If you are unsuccessful or withdraw, you wait for the 2027 intake.
• Candidate professional conduct. PwC says it reviews applications for activity that undermines the process, "including, but not limited to, comparing candidate video interview responses, assessing if transcripts are identical and proactively looking for duplicate accounts across our systems."

That second one is why memorising a model answer from a prep site is now an actively dangerous strategy: identical transcripts are exactly what PwC says it looks for. More on that below.

The KPMG video interview: six questions, 40 minutes

KPMG publishes the cleanest numbers of the three. Its applying to KPMG page shows a four-stage funnel with a time budget on every stage:

Six questions in 40 minutes averages under seven minutes per question including reading, thinking and recording. That is not tight if you are fluent and prepared — and brutal if you are composing sentences in your head while the clock runs.

KPMG frames the purpose plainly: the stage "gives you the opportunity to showcase your skills and strengths, so we can understand if they're aligned with those required for success at KPMG, as well as your motivation to join your chosen programme."

Motivation is doing real work in that sentence. Stage 1 is an unassessed job preview quiz whose whole point is helping you decide whether the programme fits. By Stage 3, KPMG expects you to have an answer for why this programme, why this location. A generic "I want to work in a fast-paced environment" answer fails a question KPMG has told you in advance that it will ask about.

Fifteen minutes of daily spoken practice is what turns a prepared story into one you can tell cleanly on the first take. Start a free daily session → — three sessions a day on the free tier, no card.

Question style: what each firm is scoring you against

None of the three publishes its question list, and we will not print a fake one — copied "real question banks" are both unreliable and, at PwC, the exact thing being screened for. What each firm does publish is the framework it scores against, which is far more useful.

PwC — the PwC Professional. Two dimensions, six named behaviours, on PwC's behaviours page. Trusted Leadership: Inspire ("I understand my impact and people want to work with me"), Empower ("I coach and work side by side with others"), Evolve ("I grow as a person and guide us into the future"). Distinctive Outcomes: Champion, Build, Deliver. PwC tells you outright to "think of examples of where you've demonstrated these behaviours in your past work experience, or at school, college or university."

KPMG — twelve skills. Its site lists Career Motivation, Learning & Curiosity, Resilience, Relationship Building, Effective Communication, Initiative, Planning & Organisation, Results Focused, Critical Thinking, Inclusive Collaboration, Integrity, and Applying Expertise & Technology. Effective Communication is defined as "not just understanding but being able to engage and communicate with clarity and impact" — a spoken-delivery criterion, not a content one.

EY — strengths. EY's language is consistently strengths-based: the Experience Day is "designed to see if you have the strengths needed for your role", and the final interview is "your opportunity to share your strengths and motivations". EY does not publish a named competency grid for early careers on that page.

Here are six original rehearsal prompts we wrote for this guide — they are our own, written to hit the published frameworks above, and are not taken from any firm's real question set:

• Describe a time you changed your mind after hearing someone else's argument. What made you change it?
• Tell me about a deadline you were going to miss. What did you do first?
• You spot an error in work a teammate has already sent to a client. Walk me through the next hour.
• What is one thing you taught yourself in the last year, and why that thing?
• Describe a group where you were not the leader but the outcome depended on you.
• Why this programme, at this firm, in this office — and what would make you leave it?

Answer each in 90 seconds, out loud, on camera. For a wider set of rehearsal formats, see our HireVue interview questions guide and English job interview role-play scenarios.

One rehearsal plan that serves all three

Fourteen days, 20 minutes a day. It works for all three firms because it trains delivery, which is the shared variable, rather than firm-specific trivia, which is not.

Days 1–3: get your voice working. Talk out loud in English for 15 minutes daily, on anything. Most candidates have not spoken English aloud for weeks before recording day, and cold delivery reads as hesitancy on camera. If the camera itself spikes your heart rate, our guide to overcoming the fear of speaking English covers graded exposure.

Days 4–7: build your eight stories. Not scripts — stories. One each for: a conflict, a failure, a deadline, a leadership moment, a teaching moment, an ethics call, a data-driven decision, and your motivation for the programme. Map each to a published behaviour: PwC's Inspire/Empower/Evolve, KPMG's Resilience or Initiative. Tell each aloud in 90 seconds. Time yourself. Do not write them down word for word — written answers read aloud sound written.

Days 8–11: rehearse under the real constraints.

• Do a KPMG-style run: six of the prompts above, 40 minutes total, no pausing between them.
• Do a PwC-style run: a longer session, questions on screen, no interviewer, one take each.
• Do an EY-style run: record in one sitting, on a laptop, in Chrome, in a quiet room — exactly as EY's FAQ instructs.
• Watch one recording back with the sound off, then with the picture off. The audio-only pass is the honest one.

Days 12–14: fix delivery, not content. By now you know which words come out mushy and where you stall. Drill those inside full sentences, not in isolation. Do one full dry run on the device and in the room you will actually use.

This is where SpeakShark fits, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not do. It is a conversation trainer: Role Play mode lets you rehearse interview-shaped scenarios against an AI that responds rather than reads a script, real-time phoneme-level pronunciation feedback flags the exact sound that failed during the conversation, and cross-session memory means the teacher carries your recurring mistakes, your level and your topics from one session to the next — so day 12 already knows what day 4 exposed. No other tool in this niche does that; most greet you as a stranger every single day.

The free tier is $0 with no card: 3 sessions a day, 5 minutes each, teacher Sarah (American), 64 topics, basic feedback and 7-day history. Premium is $10/month or $69/year, about $5.75 a month — unlimited sessions, 10-minute conversations with unlimited turns, 4 teachers (American, British, Australian, Canadian), 320 topics across 10 categories, advanced feedback and full history. Applying to UK offices? Rehearse with the British teacher. Full detail on pricing. If you want a baseline before committing to a plan, take our free English speaking level test first.

How we compared these three processes

Every fact in the table and the three firm sections comes from a page we opened on 29 July 2026 and linked in the text. Specifically:

• EY: the UK student application process page for stage structure and the exact wording of Stage two, and the early careers FAQs for timing, browser and device guidance, the one-sitting rule, reapplication windows and assessment terms and conditions.
• PwC: the assessment and selection process page for all seven stages, the SHL platform name, the one-hour expected duration, the one-week window, the 48-hour outcome, the once-a-year rule and the professional-conduct statement; the behaviours we look for page for the PwC Professional framework.
• KPMG: the applying to KPMG page for the four stages, the per-stage time budgets, the six-question figure and the twelve skills.
• Vendors: SHL's Smart Interview On Demand page for how on-demand interviews are scored; HireVue's candidate FAQ, which states that "most video-based assessments include between five and eight questions" and "take under 20-30 minutes to complete", with 45 minutes set aside to be safe; and HireVue's candidate tips page for practice questions and setup advice.
• On AI and faces: Fortune's January 2021 report that HireVue stopped using facial expressions in its algorithms, quoting chief data scientist Lindsey Zuloaga that non-verbal data contributed "about 0.25%" to a model's predictive power.

What we deliberately did not do. We did not print a pass rate, a cut score, a scoring bar or a "questions they always ask" list for any of the three firms. None of them publishes those, and inventing them would be worse than leaving a blank cell. We also did not reproduce anyone's real question bank. Where a firm's page is silent, this guide says so.

Where this guide stops helping

Four honest limits.

Read PwC's own warning about prep providers. On the same page as its process, PwC writes: "We're aware that there are providers selling guidance and assistance on how to complete our recruitment assessments. We have no relationship with, and do not endorse any of those providers." EY's assessment terms go further: "You alone must complete all assessments independently, without any assistance and answer honestly and as yourself," and any suspicion of help means the assessment "will be suspended, and your application could be rejected and/or any offer withdrawn." Practising speaking is not assistance. Reciting someone else's answer into a camera is the thing PwC says it screens transcripts for. Use practice to make your own stories fluent, never to import someone else's.

If your English is the bottleneck, two weeks is not enough. Recorded interviews punish hesitation because there is no interviewer to rescue a stalled sentence. If you are below roughly B2, the right move is a longer runway of daily conversation — months, not a fortnight — before you burn a once-a-year application slot.

If your content is the bottleneck, a speaking app is the wrong tool. If you cannot explain why audit rather than consulting, no amount of fluent delivery saves the answer. Go to the firm's business-area pages first. Speaking practice sharpens how you say it; it cannot supply what you have not decided.

If a live interview is the real hurdle, prepare that instead. The recorded stage is minutes of audio; PwC's business assessment with a senior leader and KPMG's Launch Pad final interview are where offers are decided. Those are two-way conversations, and the skill is different — our role-play scenarios guide and office small talk in English cover the human rounds and the coffee-break minutes around them.

SpeakShark is a speaking-improvement tool, not an exam-prep or assessment-prep provider, and is not affiliated with or endorsed by HireVue, SHL, EY, PwC, KPMG, or any other employer named on this page.

FAQ

The recorded interview rewards one thing above all: sentences that arrive already formed, at conversational pace, on the first take. That is not knowledge you can revise the night before — it is a reflex, and reflexes are built by speaking every day between now and your deadline.

Start your free daily speaking session on SpeakShark → — three sessions a day, no card, with pronunciation feedback while you speak and a teacher that remembers what you got wrong yesterday.

All stage names, timings and rules on this page were verified on 29 July 2026 from the official EY, PwC and KPMG careers pages linked above. Employer processes change between recruitment cycles and vary by programme, country and business area — the deadlines and instructions in your own invitation email always override anything here.