Not only are interviewing skills and good phone skills crucial to getting a QA job, but they are crucial for client communications as well. If you are hired by a QA firm, communicating with the clients of that firm is pretty important.
As for the interviewing itself, there’s a kind of interviewing chain, where what kind of phone interviews you have depends on what position you are applying for. The following chart shows a potential interview process, with who is interviewing you when.
| Permanent Position | Contract Position | ||
| 1 | Screen interview | Recruiter | Placement spec |
| 2 | General interview | General Hiring Manager |
Project manager |
| 3 | Technical Interview | Tech guy, lead QA/QC |
Tech Guy, lead QA/QC guy, etc. |
| 4 | Formal Interview | General Hiring Manager | Seldom occurs |
| 5, 6, 7... | (Confirming Interviews) | Partners, colleagues (sometimes not necessary) | Seldom occurs |
| Reference checks | Variable | Too seldom occurs |
Note that not all of these potential interviews will occur for each company. Some companies, depending on size, may well combine several of these types of calls into one. However, each of these is a phone interview, and any of them could be a place to run your candidacy aground. Of course, this is never a good thing!
So, there are all these interviews that may take place. The question is, then, how many will take place at that company? That’s one of your first pieces of information to find out.
As a general rule, you’ll get a call — and it’s usually at some inopportune time. Murphy’s law will have the call come right in the middle of a meeting with your current employer, so the best thing to do is to set up an appointment for your first interview. You don’t want to turn off your potential new employer or ruin your chances or even get fired by your current employer for conducting a full-scale phone interview at the wrong time!
The General Screening Call
The first interview, and the first hurdle, is the general screening call. This call is mainly for the company to get a general idea of your skills and goals. This means that you may be asked technical questions, but probably not many – or not, at least, on the first call. The most important thing to do in this first interview is to have an engaging, comfortable relationship with the hiring official interviewing you. No rambling!
Don’t forget, many clients only care about one particular skill, and it might be a skill that you are not be up to speed on completely. Hopefully, though, you are a fast learner!
The Technical Screen
Next comes the technical screening call. This is growing ever more important as time goes on. Be very prepared for this one, which includes being prepared to discuss any relevant experience you may have with the client. There’s a lot of difference between quality control for a manufacturing firm that sells mechanical equipment versus, say, a clothing manufacturer.
The ''technical'' aspect of this call can involve lots of things, but usually refers to the process of actually doing quality control or quality assurance — from how to spot faulty items on an assembly line to testing items to finding bugs in software. The technical part of a phone interview will focus on how well you know these processes. For example, in a software world, do you know how to test boundary conditions, find borderline cases and security holes, and so forth? For a manufacturing concern, on the other hand, this might involve testing for random defects, for how things will stand up to typical abuse, and so forth.
This can’t be emphasized enough: the company interviewing you doesn’t care about what you know, per se, just how you can help them with what you know. Keep your history handy — stuff like performance reviews, project outlines, and so forth.
Keep the focus on impressing the client with how you can help them, not on how wonderfully big your head is. There are plenty of people out there, by the way, who have lots of certifications but know absolutely nothing about the job they are supposed to be doing. So don’t rely solely on your skills, but on how you can be an asset to your potential employer — that’s what they are looking for, after all.
After the technical screening call, there is usually a face-to-face interview. That’s the goal, though, of the phone interviews: getting to a face-to-face interview, where you can dazzle them with how wonderful you are.
But if you continue with the phone calls for whatever reason, the next one will likely be the money talk. Focus on impressing the client, not on your per diem demands — that should only be brought up after they already want to hire you. Indeed, depending on the job, you may be lucky to just get what they offer — don’t be greedy. Don’t come off like a mercenary, though — and definitely don’t say stuff like ''Whatever the market will bear.'' They could always outsource your tech job, after all.
Some General Interviewing Tips
In the phone interview, how you dress isn’t important (unless it is a video call). How you sound, however, is crucial — so don’t have anything in your mouth! No smoking, eating, or other stuff to interfere with your voice. Don’t forget, background noise can happen and can be astonishingly clear on the other end of the connection. Stuff like nervous drumming of the fingers might be heard (as could your cat having a disagreement with the neighborhood dog!) Be prepared. Seriously, be prepared! Have your resume and job history right there. Be prepared with stuff written down so that you don’t have to depend on your memory. Usually, your memory will freeze up — it happens to everyone. Things like questions you want to ask the company; possible answers to questions they might ask you — if you have them written down, you can always look down to check.
Otherwise, don’t multitask, and speak clearly and a bit more slowly than you normally would. Nothing is worse than a phone interviewer who can’t understand you very well.
Money talk should wait until you have the offer in hand. Negotiate after that point — you are then in a position of strength. They want to hire you, after all, at that point.
Be positive — don’t badmouth your current client or employer. If you badmouth who you are currently working for, the interviewer may think that you’ll badmouth your next employer, too. Focus on where you want to move with your career, not on why your current job sucks. And finally, request a personal interview — they may say yes! At which point, you can dazzle them in person.
For video phone interviews, such as with Skype or iChat, your options are somewhat more limited: how you dress is important, as are your surroundings. It’s still okay to have a cheat sheet in front of you and to consult it from time to time. But please, don’t interview in front of your three-month-long collection of pizza crusts! Even in the QA/QC field, dressing nice is important, and being a slob turns off people.
Good luck with those phone interviews!
