Written by Whether you are applying for a graduate level position in Berlin or a director level role in Sydney; you’ll find the first contact you have with IQPC is over the phone. A telephone interview is the first step in our recruitment process and it’s also the first impression we form about you!
I recently spoke with the global recruiters at IQPC to find out what typically goes wrong at telephone interview stage, some of these are obvious and most of these are easily avoided. Below is the list of phone interview faults that you will definitely want to avoid…
- We phone you and we get your voicemail – if we arrange to call at a set time make sure you are ready, it’s an interview after all
- You have little/no reception on your mobile – if we can’t hear what you’re saying or it takes us several attempts to understand what you said then it makes it that bit harder to build rapport
- You can’t talk easily – you need to be in a room where you can talk about your application openly, doing this whilst you are walking through the centre of town probably isn’t the best idea. Doing this on the train home probably isn’t either…
- You answer the call by saying “What?” If we have set a time to speak answer the call in a professional way, first impressions really count!
- We arrange the call and you have no idea what we do as a business – shocking, but it happens. You need to prepare thoroughly otherwise you’re limiting the chances of your application moving forward
- You give us generic answers like “I am looking for a new challenge”. We wouldn’t anticipate anyone telling us that they don’t want a challenge so try to give answers that tell us more about you – you only get a short time to convince the person on the other end of the phone.
- You are too vague. It’s not a bad thing to keep your options open, but we need to put you in front of the right hiring manager
We’re all human and we understand despite our best efforts sometimes some of these situations happen! The bottom line is that we want to engage candidates over the phone and hopefully this is a useful checklist… We look forward to speaking with you soon!