How Long Should a Video Interview Answer Be? Program Timers

The short answer: as long as the program gives you, minus five seconds

A recorded university interview is not a conversation where you judge the length. A prep timer runs, the camera starts by itself, an answer timer runs, and the recording stops when it hits zero whether or not you have finished. So the question “how long should my answer be” has two parts: what is the clock, and how much of it should you use. The clock is set by the program, not by the platform, and it ranges from 45 seconds to three minutes across Canadian undergraduate programs. The amount to use is nearly all of it, landing with five to ten seconds in hand. The rest of this guide is the detail behind both.

Prep and answer timers by program

All for Fall 2027 entry; the numbers come from the program pages and the guides linked, and every one of them should be confirmed on the official page before you plan around it, because programs change formats without warning.

Outside Ontario the shape is the same. UBC Sauder’s BCom video, covered in the Sauder guide, has run on 30 seconds of prep and 90 seconds of answer in recent cycles. The Kira Talent practice guide explains where to find your exact numbers before you press start: the Assessment Details slide on the check-in page lists every question with its prep and answer time.

Words per second: turning a timer into a word budget

Conversational English runs at about 140 words a minute. Nervous students speak faster, which sounds rushed on a recording, so plan for 140 and let adrenaline add a little. That gives you roughly 2.3 words a second, and a budget for each common clock:

• 45 seconds: about 105 words. One short paragraph.
• 60 seconds: about 140 words. The worked answer in the Kira guide is 60 seconds and 150 words, spoken briskly.
• 90 seconds: about 210 words. A full STAR story with one number in the result.
• 2 minutes: about 280 words. A full story plus a sentence of reflection that is not a platitude.
• 3 minutes: about 420 words. Long enough that structure, not content, becomes the risk.

Two uses for the maths. First, it tells you why writing answers out backfires: a page of prose is 300 or more words, which is over the clock on every program in the table except a three-minute U of T Engineering video, if that timing returns. Second, it tells you where to cut. If you are running over on a 90-second answer, you are trying to say 250 words in the space for 210, and the 40 you cut should come from the situation, never from the result.

What to do with each length

45 seconds (Schulich’s prep window; short-answer clocks)

Forty-five seconds as an answer clock is one point and one proof. There is no room for a full story. State the claim in your first sentence, give one concrete example in two sentences, and close with what it shows. About 105 words. If 45 seconds is your prep window rather than your answer clock, as at Schulich, use it for two decisions only: which story, and what your last sentence will be. Do not plan the middle. The middle takes care of itself if you know how it ends.

90 seconds (Schulich, McMaster IBH, Waterloo Engineering, Sauder)

Ninety seconds is the most common answer clock and the one worth mastering. It fits a complete STAR story if the setup is disciplined: situation in one sentence (ten seconds), the task or the tension in one sentence (ten seconds), two specific actions with the word “I” in them (forty seconds), a result with a number (fifteen seconds), and one line of reflection (ten seconds). About 210 words. The failure mode is a 40-second situation; the fix is to start with the tension, not the backstory.

2 minutes (Queen’s Commerce, Queen’s Health Sci, McMaster Engineering, U of T Engineering)

Two minutes is the 90-second story plus thirty seconds you should spend on the parts students usually skip: a second consequence of the result, or a sentence on what you would do differently, or, for the McMaster scenario questions, a second option you considered and rejected. About 280 words. Note that McMaster gives ten seconds of prep in front of this clock, so the story choice has to be instant; that is what the six-story bank is for.

3 minutes (U of T Engineering, in earlier cycles)

U of T has not published its 2027 timings, and earlier cycles gave up to three minutes on one video. Three minutes is long enough that a single story will sag in the middle. Use a structure with visible parts: name the two or three points you will make in the first sentence, take each in turn with an example, and close by connecting them. About 420 words. The U of T Engineering guide has a worked three-minute answer. Reviewers watching a three-minute video are grateful for signposting; it is the one clock where saying “the second thing” out loud helps.

Should you use the whole time?

Nearly. The target is to finish your last sentence with five to ten seconds on the clock. That is close enough to show you filled the space with content, far enough that you are not cut off. Two failure modes sit on either side.

Finishing early. Ending at 35 seconds of a 90-second clock looks worse than it feels. To you it feels efficient. To the reviewer it reads as a story with no result and no reflection, because those are the parts a short answer omits. If you find yourself consistently done with half the clock left, the missing pieces are almost always the number in the result and the sentence about what changed. Add those, never padding.

Padding to fill. The opposite mistake is noticing twenty seconds left and inventing a second conclusion. Reviewers hear the shift in register. If you land at 70 seconds of 90 with everything said, stop, look at the lens for a beat, and let the clock run out in silence. Silence at the end is fine. A second ending is not.

What happens when you are cut off

The recording stops. There is no grace period and no warning beyond the visible countdown. What the reviewer gets is everything up to that second, and it is scored on what is there. So a strong 85 seconds with the last clause missing is still a strong answer; the result was already in it. What actually hurts is the ten seconds before the cut, when a student who sees the clock at 0:08 speeds up, crams a conclusion, and ends on a garbled half-sentence. Do not do that. If you see 0:08 and the result is already said, stop talking. If the result is not said yet, say it in the plainest four words you have and skip the reflection.

On the day, if you get cut off on question one, let it go. The programs in the table all run one attempt per question, and Ivey requires all five in one sitting, so the only useful response is to trim the setup on question two. A student who carries a cut-off into the next answer loses two questions to one mistake.

How to calibrate: the same clock, ten times

Nobody knows what 90 seconds of their own talking feels like until they have done it on a timer with a camera on. Estimating is hopeless: students asked to talk for 90 seconds without a clock stop anywhere between 40 seconds and three minutes. The calibration method is simple and it is the same one the practice guide builds three weeks around. Set the prep and answer timers to your program’s numbers from the table. Answer a question you have not seen, on camera, one take. Then read the transcript and note two things: where the clock was when you reached the result, and how many seconds were left when you stopped. Adjust the setup, not the result, and go again. After about ten runs on the same clock, you stop looking at the countdown, because your sense of the length has become physical.

AcceptMe’s custom interviews are built for exactly this: you set the prep window and the answer timer to your program’s timings, the coach draws a fresh question each run, records one take, and gives you the transcript with notes on what you said and how it was structured, so the “where did the result land” check is done for you. Two runs are free. If you are calibrating without it, a phone timer, a webcam recording and a free transcription app get you the same measurement with more effort.

Where to go from here

For the method around the timer, the practice guide lays out the three-week plan and the transcript review checklist. The STAR method guide is the structure that fits a full story into 90 seconds with a result intact, and the video interview questions guide has the question bank by competency to draw from. If your invite is from Kira, the Kira Talent interview guide covers the platform itself. If what eats your 90 seconds is filler, how to stop saying um in an interview explains why structure beats suppression. Then set the clock: AcceptMe’s custom interviews take your program’s prep window and answer timer, give you an unseen question and one take, and return the transcript with the coach’s notes. That is how 90 seconds stops being a guess.