A phone interview sounds much easy. You don’t have to panic to choose a dress for interview, move to a company’s office or have to appear in an interview as one-on-one. Instead, you are easy at your home and interviewing on the phone. But it is not as easier as it sounds.
You usually have less time in telephone interview as compared to in-person interview. So it is necessary to focus on questions that will help you to be assessed rapidly. You intend to turn it into a face-to-face interview, so be concise in your answers. As a rule of thumb, your answers should be less than two minutes. If interviewer wants to know something more, he/she is free to ask.
Tell me a little about you is often the first question. Try to assess, interviewer is not interested in your life story; but they want to have basic information about your work history and experience to assess if meeting with you is a good use of time. Your answer should be concise with a short work history with clear words to show how each job and project helped you to get experience for this job, also give an outline about your professional abilities that address your skills and relate to this job well.
What experience do you have in? Not the second but a common asked question in telephonic interview. Discuss any of your experience and precise skills you have in a good way. Discuss everything you do professionally but its core should be concerned with identification, solution of problems and prevention within your area of liability.
What are your strengths? Incline your answer toward your particular skills and needs of the job, your problem avoidance, solution headset, and your control of the moveable expert skills such as Critical Thinking, Multi-tasking and Communication skills that motivate success in every job.
What are your weaknesses? You can securely and sincerely say that finding time for all new technologies that are needed in your work is your biggest weakness and you take it as a challenge. Then you give an example of how you have made time to expand an in-demand new skill.
How much amount do you expect? If the interviewer asks about your salary expectation, be clear and say, you don’t have sufficient information about job responsibilities and company, to answer at the time. Say like “I have no understanding of the job or post responsibilities, your company or any kind of benefit that could be offered by the company, so I can’t tell my expectation without all information. However, after analysis of other employment sites and talking with colleagues, I would surely expect in the range of 000000-000000.”
The telephone interview usually comes to an end with the question “you have any questions”. So this is time to take the initiative, “yes I want to ask, when we can meet?”