5 Tricky Phone Interview Questions and How to Tackle Them

Importance of Preparation Before The Interview

Preparing before the phone interview is crucial for putting your best foot forward and to reap the benefits of having control over your performance. You must showcase your dedication and genuine interest in the open job position and the company overall.

Taking time to prepare for a phone interview dramatically increases your chances of impressing recruiters and hiring managers and getting hired. It also shows your attention to detail and a strong work ethic, but more importantly, it can help you boost your confidence and reduce the stress before the interview. Additionally, preparing for phone interview questions allows you to understand better what to expect and perform better when answering all the tricky questions.

What Is Your Biggest Weakness?

Answering what your biggest weakness is in a job interview may seem challenging. Still, when you have an action plan and you combine it with self-awareness, you can take the opportunity to stand out from the crowd and give a compelling answer that will grab the reader’s attention. The key to answering this phone interview question is to identify your weaknesses but still know how to communicate your strengths. This can allow recruiters to see that you’ve made a thorough introspective analysis and know the areas of self-improvement.

Discussing your weaknesses in phone interview questions can help you gain ground rather than lose it, as hiring managers already know you have a weakness, but they want to see how you can handle it regarding the job.

How to Tackle This Question?

Once you have established what your weaknesses are, craft a clear response that will put your weaknesses in a positive light, and you can do so by:

Talking about how you’ve managed to transform your weakness into a strength
Emphasise positive words
Show that you understand all the areas in which you can self-improve
Address how you’ve turned your weakness into a strength in your last job

This question, although challenging to answer, is not an obstacle you should avoid. Instead, it is an opportunity to show employers, especially during a phone interview or in-person interview, that you can learn from constructive criticism, show your willingness to learn from challenges and gain the ability to gain skills that will help you tackle the next challenge.

What Can You Bring to The Company?

A lot of people may seem qualified on paper for a specific job. However, recruiters want to narrow down their talent pool and choose candidates that stand out from the pack, and asking these tricky questions helps them do so.

What’s great about this question is that it allows you to showcase what makes you stand out during a phone screen interview. Some things that make you stand out may be a particular skill or passion as well as a connection to the company that helps solve a specific challenge they currently have. Companies want to see whether the candidate understands what’s required for the job and whether they have the needed experience and unique skills. It is interesting to see what the candidate can bring to the role, especially because some skills aren’t fully explained on a resume.

How to Tackle This Question?

When answering this question, you must focus on specific skills and qualities relevant to the job. Go through the job description and see how you can quantify your skills that align with the requirements.

Why Should We Hire You?

Employers ask many questions during a phone interview process to determine whether you are the right candidate for the job and whether you are the perfect fit for the company. Companies also want to understand how you can contribute to their short-term and long-term goals, and one of the questions that may give them a glimpse of an answer is, “Why should we hire you?”

Some of the things companies can learn from asking this question include:

What makes you different, and what sets you apart from other candidates
How you can handle challenging situations

How to Tackle This Question?

The question “Why should we hire you?” lets you explain in your own words why you would be a great asset to the company. Answering this question increases your chances to move forward in the hiring process.

Consider speaking about your ability to bring fresh ideas and feedback while also answering how you will fit in within the company culture and contribute to stronger, more diverse and engaging experiences and perspectives. Although this question may seem intimidating to answer, it can help you prepare for a confident response ahead of time and craft phone interview answers that will be compelling and engaging.

How Do You Handle Stress?

Many jobs can be stressful, so it is essential to be prepared to answer this question about how you handle stress. Come to the interview with examples of how you handled stress or any high-pressure situation and how it helped you boost your performance.

How to Tackle This Question?

Interviewers want to know how you tackle challenging and job-related stress and what you do in stressful situations. Hiring managers may also want to know whether these situations impact your job performance since they are looking for candidates who can tackle various challenges creatively and proactively.

To answer this question successfully, you would want to provide examples of how you’ve handled stress in your previous roles. You can also provide examples of times when pressure helped you become more productive, but be wary of how you respond. If you say you are stressed when given more projects and juggling many assignments, companies may think you are not the right fit.

Consider answering that a bit of stress can be a motivator for you. Give an example of a time when a stressful project helped you become more creative and productive and always focus on answering questions in a positive tone.

Where Do You See Yourself in Five Years?

Interviewers ask this question for many different reasons. For example, they want to see if your professional goals align with the job requirements and whether the candidate will fit the company in the short and long term. Employers use this question to assess whether you will remain engaged and satisfied in the role in the next few years and what your salary expectations in the upcoming years may be.

How to Tackle This Question?

Tackling this question may seem challenging since knowing what you will do in five years is sometimes tricky. The hiring manager will be looking to hire candidates with a sense of growth and career progress. Employers are also interested in learning about your goals within this role and your ability to focus on achieving your ambitions.

When crafting your response, review the job posting carefully and consider which required skills and traits you would like to enhance and gain more experience. It can also be helpful to look into what the job entails and what it would mean to advance in these areas in the next five years. In any profession, there’s room for growth, and in most cases, it may be a particular area of interest that you would want to focus on, as it can take you a few years to reach an expert level.

Great Candidate Experience with Olive Recruit

Olive Recruit provides efficient recruiting solutions and matches suitable candidates with the right companies to ensure a cultural fit for both sides through a seamless process.

Our goal is to pair candidates with companies that match their values, goals and skills, so we make finding the right candidate an effective and seamless process that guarantees the development of long-lasting relationships, trust and respect.