Super strange experience with a phone screening
Interview Experience
hi all! i’m a recent college graduate and i had a weird experience with a phone screening a week or so ago. this is with a very large company and i’m still in the interview process (somehow??) so i’m
Full Details
hi all! i’m a recent college graduate and i had a weird experience with a phone screening a week or so ago. this is with a very large company and i’m still in the interview process (somehow??) so i’m not going to name the company but i’ll try to get as specific as possible otherwise. basically, i got a referral from a family friend for a data analyst role and was scheduled for a screening less than a week after i applied. this family friend coached me and told me what types of questions to ask, what research i should do on the company, and to prepare examples of leadership experience i have that i could share. the interview was a video call and the woman on the other end had her camera off. she told me i could turn my camera off or leave it on if i wanted to but i left it on because i figured that was the most professional thing to do. she asked me to tell her about my journey as it relates to my career goals (almost verbatim) and i gave her my elevator pitch, which i kept vague but gave info about my experience that was not on my resume. for context, i have no professional experience in SQL or tableau but i do know R and python and i am a fast learner so i made sure to mention this. she then asked me what my salary expectations were and i gave her a number within the range of the job posting. she didn’t ask me any other questions so all the research/preparation of examples i did didn’t even end up being relevant for this call. after this, she goes on about how i am not going to get past the first interview if i don’t improve my presentation (i’m generally a good public speaker so this was surprising to me). she said i needed to be more specific when talking about my experience and that i needed to give examples. then she asked if i had any questions and i asked her some variation of the questions my family friend told me to ask, and she somehow turned her answers into lecturing me on how i need to improve my presentation again. this was my first interview post-grad so maybe i’m totally missing the mark here, but i thought the question she asked pointed toward a short-but-sweet vague elevator pitch. i would have given her examples if she had asked more specific questions, but the way she phrased her initial question made it sound like she wanted an elevator pitch. she did send me through to the next round of interviews and the interview is this week. if they (or any interviewer in the future) ask this question again, should i go into more detail and give specifics or should i assume this was a quirk of this HR person? tia for your help!