More About Phone Interviews
As Darlene said in her post on How To Prepare For A Phone Interview, phone interviews are about weeding out. So, like every other kind of interview, it’s important to set yourself apart from the other candidates.
How you answer phone interview questions should be no different from how you answer in-person interview questions. Ideally you’ll need to do a few extra things to make sure that the fact that you are interviewing on a telephone doesn’t cause you to perform differently. Here are some things to remember when you are preparing for your phone interview.
- Make sure your telephone is in good working order and charged. Static or a beeping warning that your battery is going dead will annoy the interviewer and freak you out.
- Dress for the interview even though it’s taking place at home. If you are sitting on your couch in your PJ’s during your interview, you may come off slouchy and not even realize it.
- Prepare your interview space. Make sure you are sitting at a desk or the kitchen table, upright, with your resume and the job description in front of you. You’ll feel and sound much more professional.
- Take advantage of your privacy by making bullet points that highlight your skills or examples of great projects you’ve worked on so that you’ll remember to work them in to the conversation.
- Don’t use a speaker phone, even if your interviewer does. Almost everybody that I know is annoyed by this. At work it can be absolutely necessary, but there is no need to annoy your interviewer by placing him/her on speaker.
- Silence all background noise. This includes TV, pager, cell phones, dogs and kids.
- Try to disable your call waiting during the phone interview so that you and the interviewer won’t be distracted by incoming calls.
I bet there are some really great phone interview horror stories out there. If you’ve got one, please tell us about it so that we can learn, and laugh.
Tags: How to Prepare for a Phone Interview, interview-chatter, job interviewsRelated Stories
POSTED IN: The Interview
2 opinions for More About Phone Interviews
Jason Monastra
Jul 25, 2008 at 6:37 pm
I could not agree more with your comments and I like your idea about dressing the part even though you are not attending a physical meeting. That will assist in placing the candidate in the right frame of mind. I find that communication is the hardest aspect of the phone interview, since we communicate in so many additional ways other than verbal. I just wrote about this a few days ago so this is quite timely. http://lambentpath.com/2008/07/23/the-phone-interview/ is the blog posting I put out there for some of the things I prep people on to be aware of and do to make the process better.
Gina
Jul 26, 2008 at 12:37 am
Hi Jason - thanks for visiting Interview Chatter and for the link to your post with more phone interview tips. I’ll be sure to check it out.
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