3 Interesting Ways to Improve at Phone Screen Interviews

The phone screen interview is different than any other interview in the interview process. Although at first a phone screen appears deceptively simple, it’s actually one of the hardest interviews for smart candidates to pass. In this post I’ll share three unconventional techniques I’ve discovered to improve performance during the phone screen interview:

1) Dancing with a professional interviewer

Most phone screen interviews are done by a recruiter or someone on the HR team of the company you’re applying for. In addition to sourcing great candidates for a company, a recruiter’s main job is to screen those candidates.

This means that all day, every day, a recruiter is interviewing candidates. While we, the job candidates, might have done 20 or 30 interviews in our lifetime, a recruiter literally conducts hundreds of interviews every single year.

One of the biggest traps that good job candidates fall into during the phone screen interview is that they don’t take the recruiter’s role into account. I’ve seen dozens of great candidates try too hard during the phone screen interview and fail as a result. 

I like to approach the phone screen interview the way I would approach a professional dancer. Back in 2016, I went to Buenos Aires and decided to take some tango lessons while I was there. I remember how I went into those lessons with a very open mindset. I wasn’t trying to show off to my dance partner, after all she was a professional dancer and I wasn’t. 

Instead I remember that:

1. I asked questions
2. I was genuinely curious
3. And I tried to share my own style and experience

Since then I’ve taken a similar approach to my phone screen interviews and it completely changed my success rate. This is a technique that I consistently recommend to my students and it’s always fun when they come back with shocked expressions on their faces because of how well it worked.

This is partly because before they were…

2) Confusing the interviewer with details

Another common mistake that candidates make during the phone screen interview is that they try to sound smart and qualified. While showing your qualifications during a phone screen is certainly important, it’s also important to keep in mind who you’re talking to.

The recruiter is not nearly as well versed in your field as you are. A recruiter is typically responsible for recruiting a variety of roles at a company. That means that, in addition to your role, this recruiter is also screening candidates for the marketing department, sales department, and maybe even the operations department. You can see some of the things recruiters look for here.

Often candidates that don’t have much experience doing phone screen interviews will get too into the weeds on their particular subject matter. 

I remember when I was applying to jobs and doing interviews (for over 14 months) how I would fail phone screen after phone screen because I would start going too deeply into my background. 

The worst place this happened was with this one simple question:

“So, tell me a little about your background.”

This would kick off my response that lasted 10 minutes and went into all the details of my work experience.

At the time, I thought that I was showing the recruiter just how incredibly qualified I was. But, what I was actually doing was confusing them and making them check out of the interview.

When you go on a phone screen interview you should stay high level with your experience. Drop in a few examples of projects you’ve worked on, but there’s no need to go into the details of how it worked. 

Remember that the reason it’s called a “phone screen interview” is because they’re just screening your qualifications before passing you on to the real interview. In the Interviewing for Introverts course, I show candidates how to time their answers to get them to the appropriate level of detail and length.

3) Overcoming your nerves during the phone screen

One of the tough things about a phone screen interview is that it’s usually your first interaction with the company. If you’re like most people, this means that you’ve been applying for weeks or even months and this is your “big chance” to show them how great you are.

It’s a lot of pressure.

When I was interviewing with companies, I remember how my throat would literally close up as I said, “Hi, how’s it going?” My voice would change and my heart would start beating super hard even though I was sitting down. I would then begin talking super fast and most of the time I would say completely idiotic things that I would then regret as soon as I hung up the phone.

One technique I accidentally found to overcome these nerves is from an obscure documentary about Tony Robbins. For those that aren’t familiar, Tony Robbins gives workshops that last for days and where he presents to crowds of thousands of people.

Understandably, he sometimes gets nervous and tired. To overcome his nerves, he uses one of his “priming” techniques where he jumps on a trampoline for a few minutes before he goes out on stage. In the documentary he explains that this technique shakes the lymph nodes in our bodies and causes our body to wake up because it thinks it’s getting ready to do some kind of activity.

Having already failed so many interviews because of nerves, one day I decided to try this technique for my job interviews, here’s how it worked:

1. 5 minutes before the interview I jumped up and down for 1 minute.
2. I then walked around for 4 minutes and concentrated on letting my heart rate slow down to a calm beat.

When I did this for the first time, I was shocked by how much better my nerves felt afterwards. Now I do this technique before every interview and have since successfully completed over 67 interviews and received offers from multiple companies (including LinkedIn where I learned a lot more interview techniques).

I suspect this technique works well because it gets that nervous energy out. It literally shakes the nerves out of your body and then the 4 minute cool down period helps you relax your heart rate so that you can approach the phone screen interview with a calm composure.

These three techniques seem a little unconventional, but they are some of the best that I’ve found through my years of experimentation. If you’re a smart, strong candidate, you already know that you’re well qualified for the roles you’re applying to. In a lot of cases, candidates don’t fail interviews because of they aren’t qualified, they fail because they get nervous and don’t know what to talk about.

In the Interviewing for Introverts course I share techniques like these, as well as more practical techniques that help you practice your interviewing skills so you can nail your phone screen interview.

In one of the chapters, we even go over how to turn the screening interview into your advantage so you can nail all the interviews after it too. I highly recommend you check out a few of the free videos and hope they help you as much as they have other job candidates.