Why do people want to give telephone interviews unless it is to filter out people that might not be of the right calibre for a job?

Whenever I am after testing staff, if I am sent a resume which I think may be a bit weak or something just doesn’t stack up then usually I will give the candidate a telephone interview to see whether they are worth having a face to face interview with. Now telephone interviews are not very happy occasions for the interviewee as obviously there is no eye contact which makes it is easy for communications between the two parties to go wobbly.

Yet half the positions I apply for I end up with being asked to have a telephone interview with the client first. With my resume this is bit daft as invariably I have a longer testing record than most people I am employed by. Oddly I have never got through a telephone interview successfully, even when I have felt that I have acquitted myself well.

I have a sneaking feeling that the reason some companies give telephone interviews is that it just as an easy way to lose some prospective staff through a confused telephone interview. It is far easier to fail an interviewer via a telephone interview than a face to face interview. The only reason I can think of why these companies do this is that an agent has sold your resume to them very well, then the company see it and realise that the prospective interviewee has too good a resume and they are intimidated by it, so to do due diligence they request a telephone interview and ensure that it will not go well.

I now refuse to have a telephone interview as they are just a waste of time. Invariably the agent gets a bit upset by this, so I then tell them that I only give telephone interviews when I am taking on staff, when I am not convinced by the agent sent resume, and why my long career resume why would anyone not want to interview me face to face? And agents hate that argument as I am arguing the case from both sides, as an interviewer and an interviewee. Agents appear to have a view of the world where the applicant is always the interviewee and if I mention myself as, a previous interviewer i.e. I know that side of the fence as well, then that mucks up their whole world, with their ‘as I see it’ view.

Of course agents these days are far more salesman than they ever were. And the hiring company is always right and can never be wrong, well that is the agents bread and butter, so what do you expect. The agents obviously put in a lot of work marrying up resumes with open positions so when they get a tie up between the two parties they want the interview to work, so that they can get their commission. If the interview doesn’t result in a job offer then, from their point of view, it has to be the interviewees fault for messing it up.

An agent called me the other day about a position which sounded OK and he asked whether he could put forward my resume, to which I agreed. The following afternoon I phoned him to see what the client thought and he said that he was just about to call me about that. Apparently he’d had a couple of people telephone interviewed that morning and the interviews hadn’t gone well and that the client company wanted to see more resumes. I said to him don’t worry about that as telephone interviews often go wrong and it didn’t necessarily mean the two telephone interviewed people weren’t any good. He asked why, and I gave him the explanation I mentioned earlier. He said so you wouldn’t be too keen on a telephone interview yourself then? I said there was no point. He’s answer to that was that the two people who had failed the telephone interview that morning had been asked to have a face to face interview. Eh!

He was obviously so rattled by my explanation of why telephone interviews invariably failed and that I was not prepared to have one that it upset his ‘as I see it’ view and came out with that nonsense. He-he.

Quote of the day

‘People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like’ Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

I started playing WoW last Sunday and since then I have not written a single blog entry. Is there a connection?

Yes. It’s taken me 8 days to get to level 15. Dunno whether that is quick or slow. I did get a guidebook on WoW and it does start off a bit preachy. It goes on about the etiquette to use in WoW though I don’t see many other players sticking to it that much. No doubt the guide will prove invaluable. 

On the Vista PC, that I play WoW on, I have a wireless mouse and keyboard and as you are forever leaving your finger pressed on the W, A, S and D keys the keyboard battery runs out. What is annoying is that Vista, when it thinks the battery in the wireless mouse is about to go flat, it warns me incessantly about that. Even I uncheck the don’t remind me for awhile checkbox. Shame it doesn’t bother to tell you that the battery in the keyboard is going to go flat, at all. Of course when that happened the other day I didn’t realise the battery had run out, all I knew was that the keyboard stopped working and without that you are a bit stuck. I did a hard reboot hoping to cure the problem, and did Vista get upset about that. It ran its version of chkdsk on bootup, and found a whole load of messed up files that it needed to fix.

I don’t think that the hard reboot and the messed up files were connected, hopefully. I might dig out an old wired keyboard to use for playing WoW just to save on batteries.

I am having some very interesting conversations about agents these days (That’s not what you said a month ago. Ed). One agent phoned the other day and said that every time he advertises a position he gets about 60 resumes in response. Other times he gets one resume in response. He read most of them which took an age and found only a couple that were any good. There were the usual resumes with job histories that didn’t look very plausible plus numerous user acceptance testers. But the position he was advertising for were for a system or function tester.

I suppose to a UAT person he might not appreciate the difference between one and the other. As far as he is concerned testing is testing and he would regard testing from the user perspective as being as valid as anything else.

Well yeah, but the difference between a UAT person, who let’s face it comes from a system user perspective to a system tester who comes from a development perspective is huge. And if that system tester was a developer prior to testing then that difference is a lot. It’s almost like a user of a car - a car driver - thinks he is in the motor engineering business because he drives a car and tests it as a user, by making sure everything in the car manual works as described. Whereas a system tester, who would work from requirements documentation and lots of other documentation he can get his hands on, would be testing at a much lower level of functionality, and hopefully, will be able to talk knowledgably with the engineers.  

Seems that the IT recruitment business over here is going through a bit of a shakedown period.

Quote from a newspaper

‘At the height of the gale, the harbourmaster radioed a coastguard and asked him to estimate the wind speed. He replied he was sorry, but he didn’t have a gauge. However, if it was any help, the wind had just blown my Land Rover off the cliff.’ (Aberdeen Evening Express)