Telephone Interviews

Quite often the hiring process starts with a telephone interview. This is much harder than a face to face interview, because so much of normal communication is visual. To make a good impression you need to make sure that you treat a telephone interview with as much importance as a face to face interview.

First impressions:

• Answer your phone professionally and smile
• Make sure your answer phone or voicemail have a decent greeting
• Make sure you can hear and you can speak clearly
• Sit up straight and speak as if you were in an interview, it will make a real difference.

Bad Reception

In my experience telephone interviews with bad reception never go well. If you cannot get to an area with good reception, you are not going to be able to communicate effectively. If possible use a land line. Remember spending 2 minutes calling back from a different phone or location might make the 30 minute interview worthwhile.

An example of a dire result on a telephone interview is this beauty:

Email from candidate: "The interview went reasonably OK I think. I had bad reception at times but seemed fine overall. Unfortunately it was very noisy where I was because I was on site."

The feedback from the client was: "Not for us, thanks."

If they could have spoken to each other properly, would the outcome of the telephone interview have been different? 

Hanging on?

If you are sat waiting for the call but you can't call anyone because it will block the line text your recruitment agency and ask them to chase up the interviewer and find out what is going on.

Good luck with telephone interviews, they are a very tough part of the recruitment process
 

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