5 Tips for Nailing a Phone Interview

If your business or recruiting agency is like many others, you probably use phone interviews as a way to connect with job applicants and whittle down the number of people asked for in-person interviews. To better help applicants understand what your company expects of them during a phone interview, it could be useful to offer a section such as “What to Expect During a Phone Interview with Us” on your website. Including the following tips along with your company’s general policies should help.

1. Dress Properly

Advise candidates to dress for a phone interview as they would for an in-person interview. Doing so helps put them in the right frame of mind, leading to more professionalism all around.

2. Put Critical Information on the Wall

It is a great idea to keep a resume, job history, and other relevant application materials handy. For easy viewing and to avoid the sound of rustling paper over the phone, tape or tack them on the wall.

3. Prevent Distractions

Urge job candidates to work proactively so that distractions such as screaming children or insistent pets do not occur. Candidates should be alone if possible; coffee shops are not good locations because of the amount of background noise.

4. Use a Landline Phone

Cellphones are great, but encourage candidates to use landline phones if possible. They are more reliable. If nothing else, have your interviewers give their phone numbers to candidates at the beginning of an interview so that reconnecting is easier if a call gets dropped.

5. Visualize

Give candidates ready access to information about their phone interviewer. For example, providing a link to the person’s bio on the company website could bring up photographs and interesting background information. The photographs are important because they make the interviewer seem more real and can facilitate smoother conversations.

Other information to include in the phone interviews section on your website could entail what you will do on your end. For example, the company may emphasize transparency and not letting interviewers dominate the conversation.