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I am sorry to hear that you were disappointed with the quality of your phone interview. Very often, this is the first exposure someone has with our company, so we would like it to be a positive one.
I’d like to begin this letter by offering you the opportunity to interview again. I’d be happy to speak to you myself and encourage you to contact me via LinkedIn to arrange this. I find anonymous feedback rarely offers much opportunity for actual learning. If you choose not to pursue this option, I’d like to at least offer some points for you to consider regarding the phone screen.
Please consider that the phone screen is exactly that; a coarse screening tool used to see if the big rocks will fit through the screen. Does the applicant have the basic qualifications? Is the salary going to be a match? Will the applicant be willing to relocate? The hiring process is a big investment of time and resources, so before committing the actual hiring manager we conduct this first level screen. Yes, ideally our front line HR professionals would know as much as possible about the technical aspects of the company (for a great read on this topic see “Powerful” by Patty McChord) but that’s not always possible. What I can tell you is that if there was some struggle with how interview questions were phrased, it probably wasn’t because of a lack of mastery of the English language on behalf of the interviewer. I work with this person almost every day. She is a degreed professional and fully capable of communicating at an appropriate level for this activity. I suspect the very specifically, even if unusually worded questions were designed to actually get at the information we were looking for in the shortest amount of time. I often find that when people are disappointed about the outcome of some event its because they have different expectations of the event itself. Perhaps that is what happened here.
Again, I’d be happy to invest some time myself and conduct a phone interview to make sure that all your question were answered.
Best Regards – Bill Meredith
