A former client called me recently to ask about how I’d suggest wrapping up a successful phone interview. It got me thinking about a few more ideas forgetting your ducks in a row to ensure phone interview success. These tips, together with the suggestions in my last post, will arm you to rock your next phone screen!
- Be a Sleuth! With all the resources available today, there’s no excuse for going into any interview without doing your research. If nothing else, this will show that you’re intelligent, interested in the opportunity, and a fairly savvy candidate. Use Google, Linked In, Plaxo or Facebook to see what you can learn about the person on the other end of the phone prior to the call. If a staffing industry/agency recruiter has set this interview up for you, ask them about the experience placing prior candidates with this organization. Find out how prior interviews have gone, and what you should expect. Be sure that you’ve taken time to fully review the hiring firm’s web site and understand at least their structure, what they do, and some recent news about them. Use this information both to generate better questions to ask, and to tailor your answers to questions so that they not only reflect your personal truth, but also jibe with the company’s culture and direction.
- Get Your Facts Straight! The purpose of many phone interviews is really a brief technical screen. The interviewer wants to spend 10-15 with a handful of candidates to quickly determine if they have the appropriate technical expertise, or hard skills, to do the job. In other words, they want to see if you really know all the things you say you do in your resume. Then if you pass muster, they’ll bring you in to assess fit for the environment, soft skills, level of interest, etc… By technical skills, I don’t necessarily mean technology, but the hard facts and processes needed to be successful in any job. For an accountant, these might be finance/tax/regulatory questions, for a computer programmer, these would be questions on how you create a certain type of code or application, and for a sommelier, they’d be questions focused on various wine terroir and vintage. Be sure that you fully understand the direct competencies and hard skills needed for the role and if you have any weaknesses in these areas, study up prior to the interview. Don’t be afraid to use notes either. You’re invisible to the interviewer, so allow that to work to your advantage. I’m not suggesting you totally fake it! If you don’t have the basic skills to do a job successfully, getting through a phone screen will not help you. It will just draw out the inevitable result of you being weeded out, and waste both your time and the employer’s time.
- Line Up Those Ducks! The worst thing an interviewer can hear is “NO, I don’t have any questions”. This makes you sound uninterested in the opportunity, or (worse yet), not analytical enough to dig into any of the covered topics. By all means, have some questions prepared! Don’t ask about benefits, pay, flex time or related topics at this stage of the game. Keep your inquiries professionally-focused and ask about their expectations, vision, past successes or failures in filling this role, culture, or tools/methodologies/processes used in the role. The best questions are “high octane” – they get you information and cast you in a more intelligent light with the hiring manager.
- Lock and Load! If you decide you want a “second date” with this employer, don’t be shy! When the interview is over, tell them you’ve genuinely enjoyed speaking with them and getting to know more about the organization and the role. Share how you feel you are a good match for their need and how you could make an impact. Ask them what the next step would be and whether they have any hesitations moving forward. This gives them the opportunity to share their concerns with you so that you can overcome their potential objection. Conversely, if you don’t think it sounds like a match, let them know this (nicely) as well. If it makes sense, inquire about other more appropriate roles for which you would be better suited. Thank them for their time and be sure that you’re helping to drive the next step that you want to achieve.
In New York, Tuesday marked the beginning of the long awaited trial of hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam, who ran the $7 billion Galleon Group and whose personal wealth is estimated at $1.3 billion. He is being prosecuted by the SEC for insider trade deals. Rajaratnam is said to have made $45 million in illegal profits. He has denied the charges and is free on $100 million bond. If he is convicted he could go to prison for as long as 20 years. The SEC historically has been such a handmaiden of the finance business that it's hard to imagine anything serious coming out of its prosecutions, but one never knows.Whatever happens to Rajaratnam, it would be simple enough to prosecute many of the high rollers on first civil, then criminal charges, fining them millions of dollars and taking them out of circulation for up to 20 years.
"Contrary to prevailing propaganda, there is a fairly straightforward case that could be launched against the CEOs and CFOs of pretty much every US bank with major trading operation," writes Yves Smith in her popular Naked Capitalism blog. "I'll call them 'dealer banks' or 'Wall Street firms' to distinguish them from very big but largely traditional commercial banks.’’ She proceeds to lay out the case, the key points of which I have excerpted below:
Since Sarbanes Oxley became law in 2002, Sections 302, 404, and 906 of that act have required these executives to establish and maintain adequate systems of internal control within their companies. In addition, they must regularly test such controls to see that they are adequate and report their findings to shareholders (through SEC reports on Form 10-Q and 10-K) and their independent accountants. “Knowingly” making false section 906 certifications is subject to fines of up to $1 million and imprisonment of up to ten years; “willful” violators face fines of up to $5 million and jail time of up to 20 years.
• • • • •
At Daily Kos on this date in 2009:
It is difficult to muster any sympathy whatsoever for the goddamned banks. This is a crisis entirely of their own manufacture. Yes, the housing market went down -- which anyone with an ounce of sense could have predicted, and did. Any bank betting the entirety of its assets many-times-over on that not happening deserves to fail as spectacularly as possible, its corporate leadership condemned to no greater future responsibilities than bussing tables. ...We are aware of Japan's "Lost Decade", a period of real estate collapse and economic stagnation. We have, though, been in our own Lost Decade since the turn of the millennium, and only now that the higher echelons of our society have found themselves in as unpalatable a situation as the rest of us have been in has anyone important deigned to notice. We have had a decade of doing nothing, and two decades of offshoring our every competence, leaving us to putter in our financial closets and declare ourselves kings of all we could see.
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