Help! I’ve been called for a telephone (or Skype) interview tomorrow, and there’s no time to see a careers adviser. Can you help me prepare?
It’s one of our most common enquiries, and it’s also typical that postdocs get very little notice for these first-round ‘screening’ interviews. So we thought we’d put together some top tips to help you, if you find yourself facing a remote interview at short notice.
A short telephone or Skype interview is frequently used in all sectors – for lectureships and jobs outside academia – as a time and cost-efficient way of meeting candidates and deciding whether to invest in taking them further in to the process. As a result, they tend to be quite broad in scope aiming to assess in some way each of the elements that will be addressed in detail at a later stage.
So time is short, and the scope is broad – what should you focus your preparation on?
Find out who’ll be interviewing you. This could give you some useful clues about what to expect. For example, if you’re being interviewed by someone in an HR function, the questions will probably focus on your career path and CV, but if you’re going to be interviewed by someone in the team you’ve applied to, the questions may well focus on knowledge needed for the role or sector. If it’s a lectureship interview, knowing the research interests of the people you’ll be talking to will help you decide at what level you need to pitch your answers.
Anticipate some questions, and plan your answers.
In lectureship interviews, the questions are usually quite predictable, and you can see an extensive list of examples in our Quick Guide. Be ready to talk about your current research, major achievements, and future plans, as well as your teaching experience, and how you hope to contribute to the University or institution you’ve applied to.
If your interview is outside of academia, it’s harder to generalise, but you should always be ready to answer the question ‘why do you want this job?’, and to talk about the skills and experiences you think you can bring to the role. Check back to the job description for clues about what skills might be most important to emphasise, and have at least one example, preferably more, to show how you’ve demonstrated each skill. It’s also a good idea to read a bit about the company that’s interviewing you – what issues are they currently facing? What recent achievements are they proud of? What’s happening in the wider sector that’s relevant to them?
Be specific 
Where a lot of people fall down in interviews is by being too generic in their answers. Your goal in an interview is to show how you stand out from other candidates, and to do that you need to make your examples personal to you. For instance, if you’re telling the interviewer about your experience giving presentations as an example of your excellent communication skills, don’t talk in general terms. ‘I regularly give presentations to a variety of different audiences’, makes you sound just like every other candidate. Instead talk about a specific presentation, and furnish the example with detail. What was the presentation about? Where was it, and for whom? Did you do anything different to address this audience? How was it received? What did you learn from it? By making the example your own, it becomes much more convincing.
Rehearse but don’t script!
You need to be confident in delivering your answers, but you don’t want to sound like you’ve scripted them. It’s a tricky balance, and if you’re nervous or English isn’t your first language, it can be tempting to learn answers off by heart. Instead, try to jot down two or three key points that you’ll cover for each question. Practice saying the answers out loud by following these points – perhaps even record your answers and play them back to see how they sound.
Find a good place to have your interview.
Find somewhere quiet for your interview where you won’t be disturbed – the last thing you want is a colleague walking in on you, or your baby crying next door… If it’s a Skype interview, make sure there’s nothing messy on the wall behind you, dress smartly, with no distracting patterns, and aim to look at the camera when you speak (a good trick is to put the screen with your interviewer right at the top of your screen, under your camera). The advantage of remote interviews is you can have your notes accessible to jog your memory, as long as this doesn’t become distracting. The downside is that you lose some of the useful non-verbal cues that show your interviewer understands you. Don’t be afraid to use phrases like ‘Have I answered your question?’ or ‘Would you like me to talk more about that?’.
Have a question to ask.
Finally, think of a question you’d like to ask them. It’s practical at this stage to ask about when you’ll hear about the outcome of the interview, but it’s also a good opportunity to ask questions about their organisation or the role that show you’re genuinely interested in the job.
By Liz Simmonds, Postdoc Careers Adviser