Our CEO Deborah Sweeney wrote her Four Tips for Skype Interview Success over at the Forbes Blog last week, so we decided to write a response looking at the four ways to utterly ruin a Skype, or other video based, interview. Interviews via webcam are a fairly new thing, and most people have simply transferred what they would typically do in a phone based interview to their video interviews.
This guy is not being all that he can be.
But what if this interview is for a job you don’t want? How do you make sure you adequately scare away any potential employers and mark your Skype username as one to avoid at all costs. Well… we first off recommend you don’t try to scare away employers. A simple no will suffice if you choose to look for other avenues of employment. But, in the spirit of fairness and equality, here is our tongue-in-cheek response: four ways you can completely ruin any Skype interview.
1. Dress like you would at home.
There is no one to judge you when you are alone at home, so a stained t-shirt and some baggy sweats are perfectly fine if you want to spend the day vegging on the couch while watching re-runs of Maury. However, Maury isn’t going to hire you. One of the best ways to completely ruin your chances at landing this job is to dress like you aren’t going to be leaving the house for a few days. Unkempt hair, unshaven, dirty clothes; all of these and more can be used to thoroughly disinterest the interviewer. Don’t forget, they can see you and everything that you are doing on camera. When you are talking to someone on the phone, they may not be able to tell you haven’t showered in three days and are currently drinking a beer at 11 in the morning. On Skype, it is pretty obvious.
2. Use your regular username.
Are you known by the handle hotpartyanimal4567? Well then, you must be quite the hot party animal…4567. While that may be something you are willing to share with your friends, potential employers may not want to know your level of hotness or about your affinity for partying. If you want to ruin your chances of being hired, be sure to use the username you registered back when you were a Freshman in college and Skype was the hottest new thing. That is of course unless you have a normal username, like your actual name. Dialing that won’t leave a sour taste in the interviewer’s mouth and works to establish a good first impression. Or that you at least know how to register more than one username.
