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Telephone interviews are becoming an important part of the recruitment process. They are now used frequently by many organisations, as the first stage in selecting a candidate. |
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Telephone interviews save time and cost relatively less |
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Employers conduct telephone interviews for a variety of reasons. They
may have received hundreds of responses to a vacancy advertisement and
do not want to go through a face-to-face interview with each applicant.
A number of applicants may be residing in other cities, and the organisation
wants to save on the time and cost involved in arranging in-depth interviews
across the table for these applicants. The pile of resumes received can
be significantly reduced by just conducting a short telephone interview
and then short-listing the suitable applicants. |
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Employers, therefore, use the telephone interview as an initial screening interview. It is a short, cost-effective way of finding out the answers to the following questions about the applicant:
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Is the applicant serious about the job and the organisation? |
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Has he/she made any effort to research the company/position or has just sent in his/her resume? |
3. |
How good are his/her communication skills? |
4. |
Why does he/she want to quit from his/her existing job? |
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Telephone interviews could be scheduled or unscheduled |
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There is no fixed system for when a telephone interview is held, unlike
a face-to-face interview where the time, date and venue are scheduled
well in advance. Some employers could inform you before-hand when they
are likely to call. Others may just decide to pick up the phone and call
you in the evening when they expect that you would be back from work.
You also cannot be sure who is making the first call, whether the HR person
or the recruiting agency.
In this scenario, it makes sense to be prepared because you never know
when you will receive the telephone call. In case you receive the call,
without prior notice, at a bad time, when you are in the middle of some
domestic chore, you could take down the person's name and telephone number
and say you would call back after 5 minutes. Or, you could request the
caller to hold on for a few seconds till you get your act together in
terms of getting a paper/pencil and your documents ready. Otherwise, you
may not be psychologically prepared and could be caught on the wrong foot
from the word go.
If you are lucky, you may be informed of a date and time when the telephone
interview will be held. This will may things easier for you in terms of
being mentally prepared, having the relevant papers by your side, speaking
suitably for the occasion etc.
Through this article, we will provide guidelines on how you can prepare
for a telephone interview - to improve your performance and increase your
chances of being short-listed.
Try to get short-listed to the next stage of the face-to-face interview
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