Phone Interviews

Does anybody like them? I personally rather dislike talking to strangers on the telephone, probably because I can't tell if they are getting my sarcasm or not, and unlike on text based communications they don't expect some level of misunderstanding or a need for clarification. Not that one should be sarcastic in a phone interview anyhow. That would be a serious case of personality leakage, which is usually bad in an interview, but that is a whole different topic.

I understand why phone interviews are cool to interviewers after all they can interview dozens of people in a single afternoon for the cost of a dozen phone calls. This is very unlike real interviews, where you may be expected to pay for people to travel to interview, and you get stuck spending half a day with someone you knew after 10 minutes didn't have the stuff for the job you wanted. But to the interviewee they are torture. You can't tell if the person on the other end is busily surfing the web and ignoring everything you have to say, or if they are really interested. You can't tell if you just glazed them over with some bit of technical info, which really did answer their question, but not in the way they wanted it answered. So much of making a good impression relies on good communication, which is nearly impossible over the phone with a stranger. I find phone interviews to be a subtle form of torture, not that I ever turn them down, and I do try to make a good impression but it is so darned hard. I suppose everyone suffers the same though.