For a few years, a final round could mean another video call. Computerworld’s 26 August 2025 report says a share of employers pulled some of those rounds back into a room. In a Gartner survey cited there, 72.4 percent of recruiting leaders said they hold interviews in person to combat fraud. The article also reports that Google, Cisco, and McKinsey reinstated some in-person rounds, and that Google barred AI tools in virtual interviews. HireVue, the piece notes, ran nearly 3 million video interviews in the second quarter of 2025. Video has not vanished. A room has returned beside it.
72.4 percent is a share of recruiting leaders in that survey. It is not a share of all interviews. The respondents were not students. Some of your process can still be remote. The planning implication is narrow. If you reach a late round, pack for the chance that someone will watch you explain your work without a second screen to lean on.
Fraud, in this reporting, includes candidates who cannot explain answers that looked polished on a resume or in a remote round. The defense is not a performance of suspicion. The defense is being able to walk through a project you actually did: what the input was, what you changed, what broke, what you would do differently. If a tool helped, say what the tool did and what you checked. A ban on AI tools in a virtual round, where an employer has one, means you should assume you will be asked to work in an empty editor or on a whiteboard. Practice that once before you need it.
What “in person” is measuring
@randomrecruiter wrote on 17 September 2026 about a client who holds final rounds as coffee meetings and watches how candidates treat the person behind the counter. That is one recruiter’s client. The Gartner number is a different source. The coffee meeting is a useful exaggeration of the same idea. A live meeting has a dozen small facts in it that a portal cannot see. You do not need to perform warmth. You do need to be coherent about your work and ordinarily considerate to the people in the room, including people who are not the hiring manager.
The Computerworld piece is about fraud and cheating, which is a harsher frame than coffee. Read it that way. Employers are reacting to answers they do not believe were produced by the person in the chair. Your task is to make the work legible. Bring the project in a form you can open without theater: a laptop you can unlock, a notebook with the architecture in your own handwriting, or a link that loads. If the work lives in a repository, be ready to point at the commit you wrote. If a classmate wrote half of it, say so before they ask. A clean admission is a smaller problem than a diagram you cannot explain.
Do not treat the 72.4 percent as a reason to refuse every virtual screen. The same article’s HireVue volume says recorded and remote interviews are still happening at a large scale. Early rounds can be cameras. Later rounds can be rooms. Prepare for the round you were offered, and keep a live explanation of your work ready because the format can change between round two and round three.
How to prepare for a room
Reread the posting the night before and mark three skills. For each, choose one example you can draw or narrate without notes. Practice the narration out loud once. If you used a tool, practice the sentence that separates your judgment from the tool’s draft. “I asked it for a first pass at the tests. Two of the cases were wrong. I replaced them with these.” That sentence is the difference between a project you did and a project you submitted.
Plan the logistics as if the round matters, because you already spent the earlier rounds to get there. Know the address, the time, and whom to ask for. Bring a paper copy of your resume even if they have it. Paper survives a bad network, and a room sometimes has no screen for you to drive.
Ask one question at the end that you could not ask a recording. Who reviews the work in the first month? What does a strong first project look like? You are in the room. Use the room.
If they switch you to in person on short notice, say yes only if you can arrive prepared. A same-day flight you cannot afford is not a character test you must pass. Ask for another slot. A process that will not offer one has told you something about the job. The Gartner share does not oblige you to go into debt to satisfy it.
How Flightpath helps
When a round is scheduled, put the format and the place on the tracker next to the role. The weekly check-in should show that row before the travel day. Pin the posting so the three skills you practice are the ones the role named, matched against facts you confirmed.
A read-only GitHub connection stays partial until you confirm the line, which is the same rule as the interview: a repository counts when you can stand next to it and say what you wrote. A tailored resume is there for you to review, and you approve anything before it is sent. Flightpath does not coach a fake version of the project. Eligibility labels stay on the role. The 72.4 percent stays in the Gartner survey as Computerworld reported it in August 2025. The explanation of your work stays yours.