Surviving Telephone Interviews
Long time no see!
I am back with a semi-serious blog today about how to survive telephone interviews. Recently I was promoted at work and I volunteered to do some pre-interview work calls with people who had applied to my place of work. It was very weird being on the other side of the phone but there were a couple of unique experiences that I had noticed that I would like to share with you all.
A summary of my advice will be found at the bottom of this blog if you do not wish to read the explanations.
stress, stress and a whole lot of people to call
One thing that is critical for you to understand is that people who do telephone interviews are doing them for a reason. The amount of people that have applied. If tonnes and tonnes of people apply the first wave that you have to jump through is having a good CV but I am not here to discuss that today, so let's say you have gotten through that stage and are now awaiting a phone call.
I had a lot of people to call in a short amount of time and it got to the point where if someone didn’t pick up, that was it. The opportunity was gone, there was a lot of pressure on getting through as many as possible. Personally I was quite lenient and did do call backs if the people got back in contact shortly after, but I can imagine its a completely different story in the concrete jungle.
So my first piece of advice is that if you are applying for oppurtunities always make sure you make yourself as available as possible during working hours. You are not really going to receive a call at 7am in the morning or 10pm at night but if you just keep a close eye on your device between 9–5 you should be able to catch any incoming calls.
do your dam research and prepare
I can’t disclose any of the questions that I asked due to being at risk of gross misconduct. However it’s probably a good idea to write down questions that you think you might be asked. For example, do you actually know what the job you are applying for is? Have you read the job description? What do you know about the company that you are applying for?
It was extremely obvious and very unattractive when someone didn’t know what they were actually applying for. And to be frank it doesn’t actually look good in comparison to the people that did. When people actually did their research and told me things that other people hadn’t they instantly stood out (more on this later). What was even more impressive is when you could tell someone had done their research and they were prepared to ask a question about the role, it showed that they were actually genuinely interested in the business.
One thing I want to warn you about though is that you should do thorough research, but when it comes to the time to discuss what you have found, under no circumstances should you list what you found. It makes it seem like you rehearsed it really heavily; worst case scenario it is quite an unattractive thing to do.
DO SOMETHING TO STAND OUT
See what I did there?
One thing I noticed was that after I had done a large amount of calls, I started to forget the differences between generic applicants, but there were a couple of applicants that stood out. The really generic people were hard to differentiate without looking back at the notes that I made during the interviews.
For example one thing that made one applicant stand out, was that they did their research and threw in a random but relevant fact about the business in the middle of the conversation and I caught onto it, it was subtle but noticeable. And these things were interlaced in the conversation, it was then finished with a decent question! Hence the impression the person gave me was that they knew about the job/business but they were willing to learn more. And that is a very, very attractive thing to do. But you have to be careful to not overdo it.
work experience makes you look sooooo much better
This is a bit of a 50/50, some industries require you to have it. For that case there is no further discussion on it. However in industries that don’t, it makes you a much more attractive applicant when you do, if you don’t you should prepare to “spin” it. For example lets say you were applying for a kitchen position. You have no professional kitchen experience, SPIN IT. This goes hand in hand with prepartation. You could say you are a big fan of *insert famous person or youtuber that does cooking tutorials* and that you regularily follow their recipes, then actually make a suggestion that the interviewer should look it up after.
Not only does it show you are enfusiastic, but it helps you stand out. Now that person has something to associate you with! So don’t stress out if you don’t have experience but prepare to show that you are still interested in whatever it is that you are applying for.
summary
For those of you that didn’t want to read all of that (I don’t blame you) I have tried to summarise all my above points in the table below. Thank you for reading if you did and I hope that this has given you some things to think about the next time you apply to something that has telephone interviews as part of the process!
