12/10/20

How to get through a video job interview

With the shadow of COVID-19 hanging over every aspect of our daily and professional lives, safe alternatives have been promoted to reduce the risk of contamination. This also applies to the recruitment world, where there's an obvious shift towards video job interviews.

For any laywer who is looking to find a (first) job or change employers during this Covid-affected period, chances are that most of the recruitment interviews in 2020-2021 will be through video link. However, during the "CV & Interview - best practices" workshops that we regularly give to law students and young lawyers, we get the feedback that video interviews are perceived as a lot more stressful and difficult than 'in person' interviews. 

It's not the best nor the worst way to conduct a job interview, but holds its own caveats. So we present here some useful tips for candidates to prepare and conduct video job interviews.


Tips:

  • Find a distraction-free environment (e.g. during the lockdown, I sometimes sat in my car in the garage to be as isolated as possible from my other family members) with the strongest possbile WIFI and make sure your laptop battery is fully charged. 
     
  • Warn your housemates that they should not be streaming or downloading stuff during your video interview and turn of all notifications from other apps.
     
  • Make sure the place is lighted, avoid bright colors in your outfit. 
     
  • Practice beforehand on the platform (Zoom, Whereby, Skype, Google Meet, Teams, …) with a friend (you can record the session, so you have some 'self-teaching material) to chase out all the bugs, learn the right volume, speed of your speech, etc.
     
  • Log in early (5-10 mins.) but don't switch on your video/microphone until you are 100% ready.
     
  • in case of a bad connection, don't start to gesticulate and shout “I can't hear you”, but type the message in the chat.
     
  • Open your CV in window that you can screen-share, if need be, but also keep a hard copy at hand. 
     
  • Maintain eye contact (if you're afraid your gaze might start wandering across the screen, put a post-it with a big arrow next to your laptop camera) and avoid moving around.
     
  • Say goodbye properly and switch off the video connection elegantly (so you should know beforehand where the controls are and have practiced your exit ).
     

You can find a lot more information on how to improve your CV and prepare for a job interview in these videos of workshops we organized in collaboration with ELSA:


Session in English (24/04/2020)


Session in French (12/10/2020)


We wish you the best of luck with the job hunt!

Hugo De Maertelaere (LexGO)

dotted_texture