Tips with phone interviews

Mr.Stu said:
I applied for the ANCE role, based in Brussels :)

Also for a different role based on their NSITE dept in Reading, UK.
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Did you have to do the personality test? Took bloody ages! I can't see how relevant it is to the recruitment process either, unless you're evidently an axe murderer from your answers or something :p

I applied for the Associate Systems Engineer role (ASE). I'm interested to see what the feedback is like, as it was my first telephone interview and didn't really go as well as previous interviews I've had.
 
It's all run by a 3rd party organisation afaik Bunka - Hobsons I think. I guess they go through all the basic stuff to weed out the crazy people and monkeys.
 
Find out whether they interviewer is writing / typing as you go, or recording to be written up later. Choose the speed of your speech accordingly.
Stand up.
Make sure you are in a silent environment, and that you will not be disturbed.
 
If you use a dect phone make sure it's a semi decent one that doesn't run out of batteries in half an hour. My current job I had a phone interview for as I was living in Cyprus at the time, and my phone (fully charged) ran out of batteries half an hour in, we had to resume it the next day. Still, I got the job. :)
 
I do a little bit of recruitment for my company (we are a software house). It has more of a technical focus so I'm not sure if its totally applicable but here is a couple of tips

1. Sound interested or better yet, be interested the number one thing we look for is passion

2. You should have a rough idea about the sort of things you would be asked. If its technical stuff just brush up on the stuff you know so you dont doubt yourself., for example we ask about networking and SQL (e.g what is ping? how would you diagnose a dns problem? how would you drop a table in sql?) Its pretty easy just look up the night before

3.Dont ********, If you dont know the answer to a question thats fine you can either say, "Im not too sure about that one" or much better just give a rough idea say "i dont really know, I'd guess that its something like this"

4. Be honest - This ties into the above, we ask people to rate themselves on SQL between 1 -5 . Some people say 5 and are really **** poor, but we have hired plenty of people who said 1, had a rough idea, and were open about it.

5. Be nice, this is less of a techincal one but the interviewer will get a much better impression of you if you are nice, dont interrupt or be arrogant and pretend you know best. (If you do though, just justify your beliefs)

6. Have some boilerplate answers ready. An easy part of interviews is that they often ask very simple same questions. A common one is "Give three words that describe you" or "What is your biggest weakness" Having an answer in advance will save you umming and ahhing and tripping yourself up.

7. Just be down to earth, give the answers they are looking for if you can and if you dont know any of the answers maybe it isnt what you are looking for right now

Also heres a couple of things to definitley avoid that we have seen:

Me: So what is dns?
Him: Hmm, ooh <tappedy tap> thats a tricky one <bang> let me think..... oh yeah.. its The Domain Name system (DNS) associates various sorts of information with so-called domain names; most importantly, it serves as the "phone book" for the Internet by translating human-readable computer hostnames, e.g. www.example.com, into the IP addresses
Me: Did you just read that off wikipedia?
Him: No.
Me: Hold on
dns.JPG


Or

Me: So can you tell me what a MAC address is?
Him: Oh, I use a PC not a mac
 
Thanks for the advice there eternityeight :) Should be a similar thing, the company I'm applying to does system integration. Will just have to research what they do properly and make sure I know the terms in that area then
 
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