Video Interview

I was assigned to do a mock video interview with Alyson Peterson and to write about my experience here.

One thing I noticed about doing a video interview is that it required a great deal of preparation. I spent a lot of time preparing my PAR stories, notes, and a copy of my resume to be prepared for the questions she would ask me in the interview. It also occured to me during the interview that I wanted to avoid the impression that I was looking at notes. The interview will be much more effective if the interviewer feels that your answers are all off the cuff, and to give this impression you must maintain eye contact and look away from the screen as little as possible.

The biggest problem we ran into was predictably technical difficulties. For some reason the microphone on my computer was not working, and I wasn't able to quickly identify the source of the problem. Rather than using FaceTime on my Mac as we had previously agreed, we had to use Skype from my iPad. Alyson mentioned in her response email that this created a very dark image for the interview and that next time I should choose better lighting.

I reallly appreciated this experience mostly because it taught me that next time I will need to test my interviewing technology beforehand, because it would not look good to an employer to be all prepared to interview me just to find out awkwardly that we would have to make multiple unsuccessful attempts at connecting and my inability to fix the technical problem.