During your job search, you’ll often find that a phone interview is a prerequisite to an in-person, on-site interview. Frequently, the phone interview process will start with the recruiter and then may move on to someone at the company site who is part of the hiring team.
Phone interviews tend to be much less intimidating than on-site interviews. This is because people, as a rule of thumb, tend to be more relaxed when talking on the phone as opposed to dealing with the pressure of a face-to-face confrontation during the hiring process.
Still, you should be on your game during the phone interview. You want to be sure you leave a great impression so you get called in for that onsite interview as well.
Here are some ways you can ace your phone interview.
1. Smile
It may sound weird, but a smile can come through over the phone. This is even true during audio-only communications that aren’t using anything like Skype, a Google+ hangout, or Facetime.
It’s been well documented that smiles are a great way to leave a first impression. Don’t neglect to use it even during a phone interview. It’s quite likely that your happiness, even though it’s manufactured, will work its way to your interviewer and leave a good impression.
2. Know the answers
If you’re in engineering, you’re probably going to find a lot of the questions that get thrown your way on a phone interview deal with specific aspects of your particular discipline. Make sure you’re ready with those answers.
For example, if you are interviewing for a software engineering position, you’ll likely find that you get a lot of technical questions about the specific programming language you use to develop software. Make sure you know your stuff before going into the interview. Feel free to actually study before the interview as a means of ensuring you are completely familiar with the finer points of your specialty.
3. Take notes
Your interviewer can’t see what you’re doing during the interview, so taking notes won’t present a bad image. Just make sure that you’re also paying attention.
Why take notes? Because during the interview process, it’s likely you’ll get asked the same question a couple of times, sometimes by different people. When you get asked a question, make a note of the question while delivering your answer. After the interview, go over those questions and determine how you could have answered each one better.
If you get called in for an on-site interview, you’re likely to hear those questions again. However, you’ll be in a position to give solid answers because you studied the questions beforehand.
Feel free to contact us at Selectek to learn more about job opportunities available for professionals with an engineering background. Our ability to match skilled candidates to exact-fit opportunities has been the basis of our success, and why we’ve become the staffing solution of choice for your engineering and technology industry.
