Tips for Telephone Interviews

Many job seekers dread phone interviews, and who can blame them? Face-to-face interviews are difficult enough, but trying to sound enthusiastic and coherent over a phone line is challenging. These tips can help make the best out of a difficult situation.

1. Conduct trial runs. Practice to sound confident and well prepared.

2. Be ready to answer common questions. Rehearse answers to typical interview questions. Lists of such questions are easily found online.

3. Answer with enthusiasm. Be ready to speak with the interviewer and respond with a remark that demonstrates a positive attitude.

4. Offer to come to the office. If the office is nearby, candidates with hard-to-understand accents or who know they will perform poorly on the phone should request an in-person interview. At worst, doing so conveys enthusiasm for the position.

5. Ask for advice. When the recruiter initially sets up the phone interview, ask for pointers.

–From Payscale.com

Employers Scoff at Online Classes

Taking an online course to broaden technological skills or completing a certificate from a coding boot camp are not sure-fire pathways to a job. Even if a firm is eager to hire employees with technical and digital skills, courses offered by providers such as Lynda.com and Udemy and massive open online courses (MOOCs) given by edX and Coursera don’t hold much sway with hiring managers.

The reason? These upstarts are not trusted or recognized the way degrees from colleges and universities are. The director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce explains that although firms need workers with technological skills, providers of the new online classes and tutorials have not yet developed consistent standards.

The solution, however, is on the way. Academic researchers and business groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation are working together to create standards for online credentials. Many recruiters say that until such specifications are solidified, students who elect to forego traditional university or college courses online may be wasting their time and money.

–From the Wall Street Journal

Don’t Sleep on Big Decisions

We’ve all heard the advice to “sleep on it” when we’re about to make a big decision. However, Harvard Business School researchers have found that the time worn recommendation is actually counter productive.

Research has long shown that a good night’s sleep helps make people more attentive, creative, and rational. Previous research has also shown that sleep benefits memory by stabilizing information learned during the day. The current experiment focused on how sleep might aid decision-making as well as memory.

The study, Should You Sleep On It? The Effects of Sleep on Subjective Preference-Based Choice, found that sleep does not boost peoples’ confidence about their ability to make good decisions.

The participants who slept on a decision ended up remembering more positive facts about their upcoming decision than negative ones. Consequently, the participants felt less sure about their decision rather than more. The researchers concluded that decisions should be made before sleeping on them.

–From the Harvard Business Review

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