Formal Phone Interviews:
A formal telephone interview is usually conducted because the employer is quite a distance away. It’s usually set up in advance and the employer wants one because you’re a long distance away perhaps in another state or country. It might be just an initial screening and it’s much more efficient and effective to speak to you on the phone than to get you to travel long distances. A formal interview is really just like any other interview that you might have, like a face-to-face interview. They’ll expect you to be as prepared and organized for that interview as you would for others. And you might want to look at the other videos that we have on interviews, to get a generic idea of what to expect in an interview. So you do need to be organized. When you’re setting up your telephone interview and you’re making a time, it is always better if you can talk on landline rather than a mobile. Landlines are often more reliable, often the line is clearer than a mobile might be.
Informal Phone Interviews
You might have a very informal telephone interview. Perhaps because the employer wants a few more pieces of information to help process your application. And that might be because they forgot to ask for the information or you forgot to provide it. For instance if you’re going for a casual job, they might want to know if you’ve got a drivers license or what your availability was. If you’re going for a graduate position, they might want more details about your degree or perhaps more details about a technical skill you might have. Either way a very consistent factor about informal telephone interview is that they’re unexpected and they come out of the blue and you’re going to get a phone call when you might be in a place that’s noisy, distracting or very public. So if you’re called when you’re in a very noisy, public, distracting environment, do have the wherewithal to say to an employer; “Can you just wait five minutes while I walk to somewhere where it’s quiet where I can conduct a business conversation?” Or ask them to call you back in five or ten minutes. If they are calling you back, it’s really useful where possible, if you can get as much information as you can about the application that you put in to that employer because you’re not going to look or show yourself in your best light, if you can’t remember which application it was or what you said in that particular situation.
Tips
Some general tips whether you have a formal or an informal interview, is that remember that you are speaking on the phone so people get none of the usual visual clues or any of the body language that you’ll show. They’re going to have to rely entirely on your tone on your voice and how you come across. So you need to be very clear and be aware that people aren’t going to see all of those hand gestures and face gestures that you might be using. One final tip about telephone interviews, remember even if they do feel easier than a normal interview because you don’t have somebody actually in your face, they are a very important part of the selection process and you need to take them as seriously as you would a face-to-face interview.