Welcome to Short and Sweet #12! Today we’re going to talk about how to ace a telephone interview.

Telephone interviews are a bit different in their dynamic, in some ways their easier because you can take notes, but in some ways they are harder because a lot of how we can impress an interviewer is by being there face to face, and being able to get the feel form someone and being able to interact with them. So on a telephone interview, you really need to take every advantage you can to impress the interviewer on the other end of the line. Hopefully today’s Short and Sweet will help you do that.

First thing to do is make sure you have all the details. It’s so easy for the technical portion of telephone interviews to get screwed up. So what you need to make sure to do is confirm the telephone details, Skype details, Zoom details, whatever details you need, make sure that everything is prepared, you technically have everything set up; if you’re using a computer, you have that set up and you’ve tested it. If you haven’t, get a friend, a recruiter, whoever, make sure it’s working smoothly.

Next point, is to have a quiet background. You don’t want a lot of noise in the background. If you have the noise, then it’s going to really disrupt what’s going on, and the interviewer might not be able to hear. You want your message to come through clear so that you sound great.

Listen, and don’t interrupt. It’s really easy sometimes, when we’re on the telephone, to interrupt the other speaker. You have to make sure that the person on the other end of the line is done speaking before you give your answer.

Make sure you have a glass of water incase you start coughing or incase your throat gets dry when you’re speaking. You’re on the phone, so it’s OK to have that glass of water and take a drink.

Smile: you can hear a smile on the phone. It sounds energetic and engaging, and people like energetic and engaging people. So make sure to smile even though you’re in a room by yourself and it may feel strange, remind yourself to smile. In fact, it’s not a bad idea, like lot of sales people do, to have a mirror right in front of you so it reminds you to smile.

You can take notes. Take copious notes if you need to. That gives you a chance to really remember what the interviewer was saying, and later on during the interview you are able to refer back to something that they said.

And finally, remember that your goal for this meeting is to make it a face to face interview. If you’re in a far away place and you can’t physically do a face to face interview, ask the interviewer to do something like a video conference with them so that at least you can kind of have that face to face experience. If you’re on the end of the phone, ask the interviewer, “When can we have a face to face interview? I really enjoyed our conversation.”

So there’s some tips on how to ace a telephone interview.