Careers: How to ace the telephone interview

Computerworld - If he played baseball, Kevin Arensdorf would be an all-star; he's batting .500. A Unix systems administrator at Iowa Telecom in Newton, Iowa, Arensdorf has had phone interviews for four different jobs, and he's landed two of them, including his current one. Rick Sheeley is also hitting well in the telephone-interview game. Previously an independent IT contractor who had many jobs and now a data warehouse administrator at a major Las Vegas casino company, Sheeley has had about 100 telephone interviews over the past 25 years and estimates that he has landed 15 to 17 jobs from them.
Telephone interviews are becoming more common in today's soft IT hiring market because they save time and money compared with face-to-face interviews. Here are some tips for job seekers to boost their success rates when interviewing by phone.
First, recognize that in most cases, telephone interview are used to screen candidates, not to hire them, says Edwin Pollock, regional president in San Francisco at career management company Bernard Haldane Associates. "They're asking questions to cut down the pack."
That means your goal for the interview should be to secure a face-to-face interview, not to get the job, notes Laurie Levenson, president of DirectAccess Staffing Inc., an IT staffing firm in Carlsbad, Calif. Show your enthusiasm. If you're in another city, say you'd be happy to fly in for a personal interview.
Don't be overbearing, and don't oversell yourself; just work to get to the next level, recommends Ken Hill, who worked for 17 years in human resources before moving over to IT. He's now CIO at defense contractor General Dynamics Corp. in Falls Church, Va.
Make clear how technically adept you are. Look for articles about a prospective employer's IT department, Hill advises. For example, you might learn that it has just finished an SAP implementation. Try to tie that piece of information to your own background and experience.
And don't assume that it will be easy to get the next interview. For instance, for any given IT position, Jace Mouse, manager of application development at Cars.com in Chicago, conducts about 15 telephone interviews and asks only four candidates to come in for a face-to-face meeting.
Don't try to wing a telephone interview. "My first objective [in a telephone interview] is to see how seriously the candidate prepared," says Oren Ezra, vice president of products services at Atlanta-based Jacada Ltd., which develops legacy-integration applications. "If they haven't taken the time, I get disinterested very quickly."
Preparation Is Key
One benefit of a