Why an AI recording failed

When an interview shows no recording, no transcript, or a status like "AI Recording Denied," it's rarely one single cause. This article walks through the common reasons a Notetaker recording fails, in roughly the order worth checking, and what — if anything — can be done about each.

The notetaker never joined at all

If there's no bot in the participant list and no recording attempt logged, check these before assuming it's a one-off glitch:

• The interview is on an unsupported platform or format. Phone calls and in-person interviews aren't supported at all — there's nothing to troubleshoot there. See Setting up AI Notetaker.

• The Notetaker wasn't actually enabled for that specific interview. This is easy to miss: whether the Notetaker is on for a newly scheduled interview depends on how the interview was created, not just your org's mandatory setting. An interview scheduled from the interview plan, including one booked by the AI Coordinator or through candidate self-scheduling, uses the Notetaker setting on that interview plan activity, which is on unless someone switched it off in the plan. An ad-hoc interview that someone schedules by hand starts with the Notetaker off, so they need to turn on the Enable AI notetaker? switch. If one stage never gets a Notetaker, check the Notetaker setting on that interview plan activity.

• A broader, temporary outage. If several interviews across different jobs and interviewers all fail the same day with no other explanation, this is worth raising immediately rather than troubleshooting individually.

The bot joined but was never admitted (Google Meet)

• Google Meet doesn't let bots join automatically — a human has to click Admit. If nobody does, the bot waits roughly 20 minutes, times out, and the interview is left with no recording. This failure is unrecoverable once the meeting ends — the (empty) media is deleted automatically after the timeout, so there's nothing to retrieve afterward.

• The standard advice is to make sure your interview panel expects the "Notetaker" participant and admits it promptly.

The bot joined a Zoom call but recording was denied

• This looks different from the Meet case: the bot successfully joins, then gets kicked or times out after about 1–2 minutes, sometimes with a visible "recording permission denied" reason.

• This is almost always Zoom's own account-level Local Recording setting, not a Kula-side problem. Have a Zoom admin go to Zoom Admin → Account Settings → Recording and enable Local Recording and "Hosts can give meeting participants permission to record locally," then use the lock icon so it applies to everyone rather than relying on individual users to enable it themselves. See "Setting up AI Notetaker" for the full setup-side detail on this.

The bot joined a Microsoft Teams call but nothing was captured

Some organizations' Teams tenant policies silently block third-party bots from capturing audio, even after the bot has visibly joined the call. There's no error shown to the interviewer in this case — it can look like everything went fine until you check for the recording afterward and find nothing. If this happens consistently for one Teams tenant but not others, it's worth having that organization's Microsoft 365 admin review their meeting/bot policies.

The interview started late

The Notetaker joins at the scheduled time and can go inactive during a period of silence or delay. If the actual conversation starts well after the scheduled time — a common occurrence with back-to-back interview days — the Notetaker may not be actively capturing once people finally start talking, with no explicit warning that anything was missed.

The call reconnected or restarted

If a call drops and reconnects, or moves to a new meeting link, the Notetaker doesn't rejoin automatically. If your interview process regularly involves multi-part or reconnecting calls, expect to re-add the Notetaker manually each time.

Someone removed it, or two bots showed up

Two other real, non-technical-failure explanations worth ruling out before assuming something's broken:

• A recruiter or interviewer intentionally removed the Notetaker from the call — a valid, deliberate action (see "Telling candidates the interview is being recorded" for why someone might do this), not a system failure. Check whether that happened before escalating a "failed" recording as a bug.

Good to know

• A failed recording generally cannot be recovered after the fact. Once a Meet admission times out or a Zoom recording request is denied, the media isn't kept — there's no way to retroactively pull a recording for an interview that failed to capture.

• "AI Recording Denied" doesn't necessarily mean the candidate declined to be recorded. It's far more often one of the technical causes above (Zoom permission settings especially) than an actual candidate refusal. Check the technical causes first.

• If a specific stage or scheduling method never gets a Notetaker while others on the same account work fine, that's a distinct, real root cause (how the interview was scheduled) — different from a one-off admission miss, and worth flagging to Support as a configuration issue rather than training people to remember to add it manually each time.

FAQ

• My candidate's interview shows "AI Recording Denied" — does that mean they refused to be recorded? Not necessarily, and often not at all. Check whether your Zoom account's Local Recording setting is enabled first — that's the most common real cause.

• The Notetaker joined the call but there's no recording or transcript afterward — what happened? Depends on the platform: on Zoom, it's almost always the account-level recording permission setting; on Microsoft Teams, tenant policies can silently block capture even after the bot joins.

• Can a failed recording be recovered? No — once the failure has occurred (timeout or permission denial) and the meeting has ended, the media is not retained.

• The Notetaker didn't rejoin after our call dropped and reconnected — is that a bug? No, that's expected behavior today. The Notetaker has to be manually re-added if a call restarts or moves to a new link.

Need help?

If you've ruled out the causes above and a recording still fails, or you're seeing a pattern across multiple interviews, reach out to us at support@kula.ai