Acing the Telephone Interview

Part Two

In the first part of this discussion, we talked about the unique challenges presented by telephone interviews and how to prepare for them. Now we'll talk about techniques you can use during a telephone interview that will be just as helpful in acing a face-to-face interview.

Most interviews start with a fairly innocuous warm-up question, "Tell me a little about yourself." This is intended to give you a short grace period to find your voice, and the interviewer a focal point. As most other candidates are simply going to use their fingers to flap their lips for two minutes, you can galvanize the interview when you prepare a brief potted history of your professional life, with this target job as the next natural step. In a telephone interview you often don't have much detail about the job, so your answer can be fairly brief, for example a young Pharmaceutical professional in sales/marketing might say, "I have a bachelor's degree in communications, and have worked in pharmaceutical sales for three years, and I am currently ranked fourth in the region. I have long competed against your company, know and respect your products, and your position in Southampton will help me get closer to family."

Once the questions start flying, try to avoid giving yes/no answers, they give no information about your abilities and do nothing to forward your candidacy; at the same time your answers need to be concise and thorough. As you will almost always be asked about specific skills that relate to the job requirements, try to explain your possession of that skill and illustrate it with a real world example, "Yes I have tackled new markets before, with my current employer we launched a new-for-us product right here in the Metropolitan area. Would it be helpful if I talked about my approach?" or, "That's interesting, I was involved in an audit like that a couple months back and it presented some interesting challenges," you then go on to illustrate your answer with a short discussion of the challenges and how you handled them. As a rule of thumb you want to keep your answers to less than two minutes, if the interviewer wants to know more s/he will ask.

"What are you looking for?" With so little real knowledge about the company's needs and opportunities at this point, you need to be careful about specificity, "I want to move out of administration and into marketing" is inappropriate unless you know such opportunity exists; instead couch your answer in terms of professional growth, making a contribution, and the opportunity to work with similarly motivated people.

When asked, "What are your strengths?" Slant your answer toward the known skill requirements of the job, and address your possession of admired professional behaviors such as time management and organization, determination, or analytical skills (see Knock 'em Dead 2006: The Ultimate Job Seeker's Guide, chapters 13 and 14).

When you are asked about strengths, you can bet a question about weakness is coming up. Always a tough question, it is made more so by a lack of detail about the job's requirements. You might say safely your greatest weakness is finding the time to stay abreast of all the new technologies/skills required in the profession; then go on to talk about the time you have taken to develop skills with a new technology, perhaps adding that you always try to keep abreast of the latest innovations in the profession, and that it is a real time management challenge.

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