HireQwik Interview Link Not Working: Triage Guide

On 8 June 2026, the day HireQwik’s interview capacity guard went live, its count included 179 stale rows: interviews whose agents had stopped without ever writing a final status. Left running, it would have turned away real candidates trying to join. We caught it during the deploy, switched the guard off within the hour, and changed it so a row counts as live only if it was touched within the past 30 minutes.

During that window, a perfectly good join link could have looked broken from the candidate’s side. That is worth remembering when a HireQwik interview link not working message lands in your inbox. The link itself is usually fine. Something around it is refusing entry: a time window, a capacity limit, a cancellation, a reschedule cap, or the candidate’s own microphone, and each has a different fix. This triage guide covers all five. If you cannot find where a candidate is in the process at all, use our checklist for a candidate stuck somewhere in the screening pipeline instead.

Key takeaways

• A broken-looking link usually means one of five states: a closed join window, full capacity, a cancelled campaign, a reschedule lock, or a blocked microphone.
• Ask three questions first: what the screen says, which link they clicked, and when their slot was.
• Resending the invite fixes almost none of these.
• Many reports of the same state on one morning point to a setup problem, not the candidates.

Why does a HireQwik join link stop working?

A HireQwik interview link usually stops working for one of five reasons: the join window has closed, live interview capacity is full, the campaign was stopped, the booking is locked after too many reschedules, or the browser is blocking the microphone. Only the last is a technical fault, and it sits on the candidate’s device.

From the candidate’s side, every failure looks the same. They clicked, and they are not in an interview. From the system’s side, the reasons are specific and mostly deliberate. The first four are rules doing their job. Treating all five as “resend it” means you will resend a link to a cancelled campaign, or give a new booking to someone who just needed to press Allow.

The instinct to resend and hope fixes some cases and makes others worse. What follows is the diagnosis that avoids that: the questions to ask, each state a HireQwik interview link can actually be in, what the candidate sees in each, and what the recruiter should do.

Questions to ask before you check the HireQwik dashboard

Send a holding reply first

Candidates who report a broken link often worry that the delay itself will count against them. Send a holding reply before you investigate. Confirm you received their message, ask them not to book a second slot or apply again while you check, and ask for a screenshot if they have not already sent one. Duplicate attempts only make the trail harder to follow.

The three triage questions

In the same reply, ask the candidate three things. Their answers do most of the diagnosis.

1. What exactly does the screen say? A message about the interview being cancelled, a message about being busy, a lock, or no message at all point to very different causes.
2. Which link did you click? The booking link from the first invite and the join link from the confirmation are different things, and candidates mix them up.
3. What time did you click, and what time was your slot? Many “broken” links are simply late ones.

Then come back with the actual fix as soon as you know which state applies. Even when the answer is simply that they need to rebook, a clear explanation keeps a capable candidate from quietly giving up on the process. The holding reply costs you one sentence; losing that candidate costs you a shortlist place.

The 5 causes of a broken HireQwik interview link

Each cause below shows what the candidate usually says and what the recruiter should do about it.

Cause 1: the join window has closed

A join link belongs to the slot the candidate booked. It opens for that slot and closes 10 minutes after the slot ends. It is not a link that stays usable all day.

That was a deliberate change. Join links used to stay valid for 8 hours, which meant a 9:00 interview could still be started at 16:50. That sounds generous until you see what it does to capacity planning: nobody could predict how many interviews would actually be running at once, because bookings stopped meaning anything. We tell that story in what a full interview slot actually means.

What the candidate usually says: “I clicked the link from my confirmation and it will not let me in,” often mentioning they were travelling, in class, or held up at work.

What to do: check the booked time against when they tried. If they missed the window, they need a new booking. If they still have reschedules left, they can pick a new slot themselves. If they are unsure how, send them back to the booking link rather than resending the old join link.

Cause 2: capacity is full right now

HireQwik enforces interview capacity across the whole system, not slot by slot. When a candidate clicks Join, the system lets them in only while the count of live calls sits below the ceiling. The production ceiling is 25 at a time.

If it is full at that exact moment, the candidate does not get a broken call that cuts out halfway. They get a busy response, and their interview goes back to scheduled rather than disappearing. A related case happens at booking time: if a slot filled up while the candidate was confirming it, they are asked to pick another slot instead of being quietly double-booked.

What the candidate usually says: “It said it was busy” or “it told me to choose another time.”

What to do: reassure them nothing was lost. For a busy response at join time, their interview is still scheduled. For a full slot at booking time, they simply choose another. If this happens to many candidates at once, your campaign is concentrating bookings into the same few slots, which is a scheduling setup question worth raising, since total capacity runs to up to 1,300 interview slots a day and the pinch is usually in how slots are offered, not total volume. We covered that pinch in how many candidates can join at 9 AM.

Cause 3: the campaign was stopped

Recruiters can stop a running campaign from the dashboard, for example when a job description was set up wrongly. Stopping does more than pause new invites. Interviews that were booked or waiting are cancelled, and their join links return an HTTP 410 response with a message that the recruiter cancelled the interview. MDN describes status 410 as a resource that is gone on purpose, which is exactly the intent. Interviews already in progress or finished are left alone.

What the candidate usually says: “It says my interview was cancelled,” often with confusion, because nobody told them.

What to do: first check with your own team. This state means someone on your side stopped the campaign. Resending the same link will not help, because it is meant to be dead. If the campaign is being relaunched with a corrected setup, the candidate will need a fresh invite from that new run, and they deserve a short note explaining why. We cover this in what happens when invites have already gone out.

Cause 4: the booking is locked after reschedules

Candidates can move their slot, but only 3 times, and only inside the first 72 hours after they booked. Beyond that, the slot picker answers with HTTP 423, the status code for a locked resource, and the candidate cannot rebook on their own. A recruiter can reset it.

What the candidate usually says: “It will not let me pick a new time,” usually after they have already moved the interview more than once.

What to do: decide whether a reset is fair. A candidate who was ill or had a clashing exam probably deserves one. A candidate who has moved four times without explanation may not. Either way, it is a recruiter decision, and our reschedule limit explainer goes through when to reset and when to hold the line.

Cause 5: the browser is blocking the microphone

Sometimes the link works perfectly and the candidate still cannot take the interview. The HireQwik interview happens inside the browser using WebRTC, and it cannot start without the microphone. Browsers only allow that after the person grants permission, and if they tapped Block once, many browsers remember the choice for that site.

What the candidate usually says: “The page opened but it cannot hear me” or “nothing happens when I speak.”

What to do: walk them through re-allowing the microphone. Google’s Chrome help page on site permissions covers Chrome on desktop and Android, and iPhone users can check microphone access for their browser in Settings. Also ask whether another app, such as a video call left open, is holding the microphone. If they are still inside their join window, fixing permission is all they need. If the time has run out while they troubleshoot, you are back to cause one.

HireQwik link problem decision table

The first-response table

For recruiters handling a batch of these reports, this table turns the five states into a first response:

Paste it into the internal notes your recruiters use during a drive. It turns a vague complaint into a quick, specific fix.

Spotting the same state across many candidates

The table also works as a tally. One candidate hitting a closed join window is a personal scheduling problem. Many candidates hitting the same state on the same morning is a pattern, and patterns usually point back to setup rather than to the candidates. A cluster of cancelled-interview reports almost always means a campaign was stopped, sometimes by a colleague who did not tell the rest of the team. A cluster of busy responses around one start time suggests bookings bunched into a handful of slots. A cluster of reschedule locks can mean the offered slots clash with something those candidates share, such as an exam day or a college event. A cluster of microphone complaints from one college may point to shared lab computers with restricted browser settings.

Using the tally to plan the next drive

When you plan the next drive, the states that came up most tell you what to change first: offer more slots across the day if busy responses piled up, check college calendars before choosing dates if locks clustered, and add a line about allowing the microphone to the briefing if permission problems dominated.

How to prevent HireQwik link reports on your next drive

Almost every state above is easier when candidates know the rules in advance. Tell them the join link works around their booked time, not all day. Tell them they can move the slot a few times, but not endlessly. Tell them to press Allow when the browser asks about the microphone. Those three sentences prevent a large share of “link not working” emails.

That briefing is in our guide to briefing candidates. It also helps to be clear about what the system’s own messages do and do not say, which we walk through in what each HireQwik invite message covers. And if a candidate did get in, but the call ended far sooner than they expected, that is not a link problem at all. Read the explainer on knockout-shortened calls before replying.

“The link is not working” is almost never one problem, and almost never a bug. It is usually a candidate meeting a rule they were not told about. Every one of those rules exists to keep a large drive predictable and fair. The recruiter’s job is to identify which rule the candidate hit, fix the one that is theirs to fix, and explain the rest plainly. A candidate who gets that answer quickly stays in your pipeline. You can see each candidate’s booking and interview state in the HireQwik HR dashboard.