Winning at Telephone Interviews

Telephone interviews are becoming more popular with organisations because they are cheap and quick. Organisations can sub-contract them out to recruitment agencies and HR consultants and so avoid their own staff being involved in lots of face-to-face interviews.

There are two types of telephone interview although both are used for screening or pre-screening candidates. The first is the classic headhunter type interview trying to establish suitability to their brief and level of interest prior to a face-to-face interview. The second type of telephone interview, which more people will experience, is the structured competency based interview often used by large employers who because of expansion or high staff turnover need to fill a large number of positions.

This ebook focuses on the structured competency based telephone interview.

The first thing to realise is that this type of interview is used to screen people out of the recruitment process. The questions will have been devised on that basis. Later I will give detailed examples of two telephone interviews and you will see how the rating mechanism works. At this stage it is enough to know that the recruiting organisation can limit the number of candidates it sees by simply ‘raising the bar’.

For example, with a scoring system from 1 to 5 for each competency the interviewer would use a rating chart like this:

Please circle your overall evidence rating

1 No evidence or responses fail to meet requirements
2 Some evidence of competency shown, but gaps or further development needed
3 Evidence meets competency requirements
4 Evidence meets and sometimes exceeds the competency requirements
5 Evidence constantly exceeds competency requirements

Clearly someone who is rated with all threes meets the job competency requirements. But suppose there are 200 people who meet this standard. Will the organisation interview all 200? Not unless they have 200 jobs they won’t. Instead they will ‘raise the bar’ for selection to those rated four. Still too many to interview; then ‘raise the bar’ again to five.

You can begin to see why organisations are learning to love the telephone interview. The result of this for you, the candidate, is not so good. You can meet all the criteria and exceed some of the criteria and still not get through to the next stage.

So, it is important for you to perform well during the 30 minutes (average) time you have.