The Ten tips for Telephone Interviews

Source : SAPJOBS.COM

The Ten Commandments for Telephone Interviews

At James Rushmore Ltd, we have extensive experience in coaching people through interviews and we have compiled a unique guide to help you manage your next telephone interview.

The telephone interview will be shorter and may be more intensive than the face to face interview. The telephone interview is often arranged at the last moment allowing less preparation time, plus you will be interviewed through a medium that is renowned for its erratic behaviour.

However there are ten important steps that you can take to prepare for the telephone interview. A telephone interview is not an opportunity that should be wasted; that vacancy with an attractive salary and great benefits may just depend on how you handle yourself the next time the phone rings!

• Arranging the Interview

When arranging the interview, pick a time when you have no pressing appointments. Probably 75% of all telephone interviews are up to 15 minutes late, a totally unacceptable number can be an hour or more late. You therefore need to schedule a time that will allow you to over run.

Steer away from arranging interviews in your coffee break or 20 minutes before another meeting. It is very important to sound unhurried and in control when you are speaking on the phone.

• Morning or Evening?

Are you are morning or evening person? Try and arrange a time that suits your natural daily rhythm. This may prove more difficult to achieve with long distance calls.

Be aware of when you perform best and if your interview is scheduled for a natural ‘low’ time in your day, then allow yourself more free time around the interview to energise yourself.

• Distractions

Make sure you will not be disturbed by your colleagues at work, or your family if you are at home. Make sure that your printer, PC or fax machine does not spring into vociferous life right in the midst of your call. If you are receiving the call on a standard phone, then also make sure your mobile phone or pager is switched off.

• Allow the call to ring briefly

When the interview phone call come through, allow the phone to ring several times. This serves two useful functions -

First it allows you time to inhale deeply, calming your breathing and heartbeat. Your voice will sound better and warmer as a result.

Secondly, it allows the interviewer time to hear the phone ringing and thereby prepare themselves. One of the great unsolved mysteries of the phone system is it’s ability to ring at your end with out the caller realising. If you answer the phone on the first ring, the caller may not even know the call was connected! This can be a bad start to the most genteel of social calls, let alone an important telephone interview.

• Answering the call

Answer with "Good morning/afternoon/evening,…..John Smith speaking."

It is very important to smile when you speak. It imparts confidence as well as adding a warm and friendly timbre to your voice. At the start of the conversation speak at a medium pace. The caller may be interviewing you in their second language, so you may need a little time to evaluate their fluency. As the conversation proceeds, be sure to match your speech to the pace and tone of the interviewer.

Speak directly into the phone, keep the mouth piece about one inch from your mouth. Be aware of any background noise that could be distracting for your interviewer. Another magical property of the telephone is it’s ability to pick up unwanted and embarrassing background sounds and amplify them to volumes far beyond the power of our own voice.

• Listening

"No one listens, we all just wait for our turn to speak".

This is a very important point to remember during telephone interviews. As human beings, one of our weaker senses is our ability to collect information through our ears. Only some 15% of what we hear is actually retained. It is therefore vital in telephone interviews that your answers are kept factual and clear. The interviewer will only have their ears by which to judge you.

Ideally you should never take more than a 90 seconds to reply to any question. If it is a complex answer then break your answer in to 90 second segments. After each segment be sure to allow a break for the interviewer to respond. Remember long answers can be boring and you can easily talk yourself out of the running. Short, precise and digestible answers are the key to success.

• The Rule of Three

Don’t be afraid to repeat your self three times in a subtle way.

A rule of thumb is :

"Tell them what you want to tell them;

Tell them;

And tell them what you told them".

However use this technique with the utmost discretion and creativity. No prizes will be awarded to those who simply repeat the same statement three times. Use this technique only for the key selling points in your interview.

• Ask intelligent questions

Remember to ask questions as you go along. It will show you are interested and intelligent. Ask questions that can be answered relatively easily and quickly by the interviewer. This technique will make the interviewer feel positive about themselves and therefore positive about you.

Background research will pay dividends here. With the sheer quantity of the information on the Internet there can be no excuse for not asking a few informed and relevant questions.

• Conference Calls

Conference calls pose additional problems over the one-to-one telephone interview. You may not know how many people are on the call at the other end, or if you are being broadcast through a loudspeaker.

Our advice is to treat the conference call as a series of one-to-one calls, making sure that you greet and handle each person in the same polite manner. You may not know the pecking order of the people on the conference interview, but they certainly will!

• The Graceful Exit

Interviews can be misleading and signals can be so easily misinterpreted.

Never assume either that you have got the position, or that you have been rejected.

Be very positive about your self and your skills throughout the call. Your parting impressions should be ones of enthusiasm, competence and openness. Parting impressions are almost as important as opening impressions. Therefore smile when you say goodbye to leave the best impression.

The telephone interview is becoming increasing sophisticated with the wider introduction of video links. However the basic advice remains timeless and can be applied to whatever communication medium the world of technology throws our way.

Whether its a piece of copper cable or the very latest word in fibre optics there will always be a human being hanging on either end of it, striving to communicate with another member of species. Quiet remarkable when you stop to think about it!