The impact of the Coronavirus will clearly have long lasting results on all of us, with new ways of working having to be quickly established in real time to cope with the challenges of going about our business under a lockdown with strict social distancing measures.
New and existing technologies have quickly become household names, with ‘Zoom’ and ‘Houseparty’ meetings now a regular occurrence for all of us – whether with work colleagues or friends and family.
From a recruitment perspective, video technology had been slowly emerging over recent years, but has now burst in to the mainstream in a matter of days, and we anticipate this technology will be here to stay long after lockdown period is over.
This will be unfamiliar ground for the majority of job seekers, but as with traditional interviews there is plenty you can do to prepare and to give yourself a competitive advantage over your competition.
Here are our Top 10 tips for video interviews:
1. Firstly, make sure you’ve chosen your location wisely. When at home, where possible, you want to isolate yourself from distractions, but also ensure you’re sitting in an area with a solid WIFI connection.
2. Background – where possible, try to ensure you have a distraction-free background behind you. Avoid having a window or other source of light behind you to ensure you can be clearly seen.
3. Kids at home? Make sure they’ve got plenty to occupy themselves with for the duration of your interview slot, and that they know they can’t interrupt you. Bribery helps!
4. Sound quality is important. If you’re able to use headphones with a microphone, this will help to isolate your voice and reduce background noise. If not, make sure you don’t have any nearby household appliances running nor anyone loading/unloading the dishwasher.
5. If possible, familiarise yourself with the video technology being used beforehand. Zoom has already stood out as the most popular we’ve seen, but there are plenty of others. Always take a demo if given the opportunity.
6. Find the Mute button! You hopefully won’t need it, but it’s good to know where it is if you do get interrupted and need to shoo someone away.
7. Camera level – try to have your camera at eye level. Having a laptop or mobile device at desk level will give you the appearance of looking down on the interviewers. Remember to look in to the camera too – not constantly, but it does help to mimic eye contact.
8. Make sure your laptop or mobile device is fully charged, and preferably plugged in. Battery life can be unpredictable and drop off quicker than you expect.
9. Smile! It may be an uncomfortable experience, with some additional anxieties to contend with, but your facial demeanour will still be on show. We all know someone who spends Zoom meetings looking confused and distracted throughout. Don’t be that person!
10. Lastly – practice! Record yourself answering some common interview questions to camera in your own time. Play it back and see how you come across. You can also ask a friend, your recruiter or a trusted colleague (anyone who’s comfortable giving you honest feedback) to do a dress rehearsal a couple of days beforehand. The more you do it, the more natural it becomes. Richard Hooper
Richard Hooper is one of the founding Directors at Balance Recruitment. Despite his management responsibilities in the London office, he is still heavily involved in recruiting and is passionate about delivering a high quality service to our clients and contacts. He’s one of the longest serving recruiters within the ‘Legal Accounts’ niche, having recruited in this field since 2004, and focusses on senior accounting and finance systems appointments in the UK and overseas.
richardhooper@balancerecruitment.com
Salary Survey 2020 Results
Despite our lives being turned upside down over recent weeks, we still had a great response to the annual salary survey from our members. Balance Recruitment have compiled the data and we hope that this will prove useful when the normal course of business resumes.
As always, we start with a big thank you to all of you who took the time out to contribute to our latest Salary Survey. We’ve once again had a huge response from the combined networks of the ILFM and Balance Recruitment. This year’s results will clearly be delivered during a period of significant uncertainty for us all, but we hope the data will provide some useful guidance for reference over the coming year.
Whilst we are mindful that things have changed and will continue to change; and we want to be sensitive to the uncertain situations many people will be in dealing with. However, we thought we should share the data many of you kindly contributed too. View and Download Full results here...
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