Phone interviews are great for a couple of reasons. You can do it in your pajamas. You can do it in bed, with a cup of tea. You can do it with all your notes and talking points at the ready. You can do it in a box, with a fox, Sam I Am!
Keeping all that in mind, though, I’m still nervous about a phone interview I have coming up. (Side note: I have a phone interview coming up! Eee!) I just got an email a couple of days ago from a woman at an office asking me for my availability to “answer a couple of questions.” Of course I can answer a couple of questions! Yeah, I’m available to talk any time before noon Mondays through Thursdays. I’d LOVE to, um, uh, yes. Eep.
A big part of this apprehension comes from the fact that I’m just getting over a pretty nasty cold, and my voice, while miles better from the raspy smoker’s-voice-slash-mice-from-Cinderella-squeak, is still kind of weak. I don’t want to go into this interview coughing and wheezing and hacking away—or worse, that weird low voice that accompanies a clogged nose—but as the date draws nearer and I stay raspy and clogged up, I’m getting a little freaked out. Would you hire someone who sounds like Marcel the Shell’s (http://youtu.be/VF9-sEbqDvU) geriatric uncle? Me either.
I’m also not sure that I’m a very good, well, talker. I’m one of those annoying people who always ends thoughts in “so, um, yeah!” and throws in gratuitous “you know”s and the dreaded “like”s. My greatest fear is that they’ll hit me with a hardball question and I’ll end up hiding my iffy under a sea of filler phrases. While I think I exaggerate my inabilities with the spoken word, this point is a serious concern. Hopefully I’ll be better than one person, at least. Miss Teen South Carolina (http://youtu.be/lj3iNxZ8Dww) I am not.
My last concern: you know those stock interview answers that people always give? You know, like when the interviewer asks for your worst quality, you say you’re overly detail-oriented and tend to micromanage? I am sure that every single employer in every single state gets that answer for that question 99% of the time. I think that is so boring. I’ve spent the past few days thinking of better answers to that question, but everything I think of just makes me sound neurotic and weird, which, well, I’m not. So if they ask me this question, am I better off giving the stock answer or something that stands out a little more that makes me seem kinda bizarre? Keep in mind that the frog voice is going to up the bizarreness ante by 100% or more.
Last last concern: is it really worth stressing out over a phone interview to this extent? I feel like all through the internship search I end up making mountains out of molehills, and this, while a particularly exciting molehill, is nothing I can’t handle—in my pajamas, cozy in my room, in a box, with a fox, in a house with a mouse, Sam I Am Going to Land This Internship.