Video Interview Myths | JobSearchTV.com
People often have goofy ideas about video interviews and how to prepare for them. This is Part 1 of my interview with Thea Kelley, a job search and interview coach based in the San Francisco Bay Area and serving job seekers nationwide. Her book, the Amazon best-seller Get That Job! The Quick and Complete Guide to a Winning Interview (Amazon: https://amzn.to/3tT0KuY), was hailed as “Excellent” on Forbes.com, and she recently released a 2nd Edition updated for 2022 and beyond.
For smart job search tips and a free gift, subscribe to Thea’s blog at www.GreatJobSooner.com. That site also provides information on contacting Thea for one-on-one services–to help you get a great job sooner.
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Jeff Altman
This is Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter and if you’ve been watching me for any period of time, you know, when I interview someone, it tends to be one interview. But this one, I thought it was worth breaking into two parts. So I was interviewing Thea Kelly, the author of Get That Job: The Quick and Complete Guide to a Winning Interview. And on this part of my interview of her, we talked about video interview myths that people buy into that aren’t true. Hope you enjoy it. And next week, I’ll be back with the next episode. And now, let’s get going.
Thea Kelley
So my guest today is Thea Kelley. Thea is a job search and interview coach based in the San Francisco Bay Area, serving Job Hunters nationwide. Her book, the Amazon best seller, Get That Job: The Quick and Complete Guide to a Winning Interview was hailed as excellent on forbes.com. And just released the second edition for 2022 and beyond. Now, this, there’s a lot more at the end of the interview, she’s going to talk about a free gift. You get in some job search tips from her from her blog at greatjobssooner.com. So hang in there till the end. Thea welcome. Great to see you there.
Thea Kelley
Yeah. Likewise, I always love talking with you and talking to your listeners.
Jeff Altman
Thank you. It’s very sweet of you. And now let’s get down to business. We’ve got two topics we’re gonna cover today, one video interviews, that’s going to be Topic number one, and Thea, you and I both know, that as many video interviews as people have been doing over the last two years. It’s a new creation for a lot of folks. And even now they’re making mistakes, they have beliefs about how they should be done. And their beliefs . . . they’re not factually accurate. So we’re going to talk about some of those myths that people hold dear, and sabotaging themselves, because they’re paying attention to wrong things. So, what would you say the first myth is that people have?
Thea Kelley
Okay, this one’s maybe a little more obvious, but it’s the idea that video interviews are a pandemic thing, and that they’re kind of going to dwindle away afterwards. Really, they’re not. There was a survey of recruiters, the job I did that showed that about 60% of recruiters going forward are planning to continue with a combination of virtual interviews and in person, so it’s here to stay. And 22% of them said they were planning to stay all virtual. So it’s very much here to stay.
Jeff Altman
I agree. You know, I was in search for a long time. And I remember when people used to do first interviews with HR in person. Ooooh! And it wasn’t even the phone interview days, folks. Ooooh!. Video’s replaced the phone interview. It’s really that simple. And thus, they can see you get a feel for you, get a sense of the personality and presence. It’s gonna be here for a long time. So, no, not a pandemic thing. It just accelerated.
Thea Kelley
Right? And in fact, sometimes now it’s going to be AI enhanced. There might be a robot listening to you, and we’ll get to that later. That’s a little bit further along in the list of myths. Stay tuned.
Jeff Altman
And I’ll share some stuff about that later. Number two Myth number two.
Thea Kelley
Okay, so the second myth is that interviewers understand, if you have some technical glitches, they’re not going to hold it against you. They don’t expect you to do it perfectly. Yeah. And you can’t help it anyway.
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Jeff Altman
It’s so 2019!
Thea Kelley
Yeah, like millions of years ago. So now, the video space is a workspace increasingly. And so you’re expected to be proficient in the workspace, including the video space. And also, glitches not only reflect poorly on kind of your professionalism and your savviness, but they make the interviewer and you kind of tense and uncomfortable. It interrupts things. And an interview is always going to be going better if people are enjoying the process and things are going smoothly. So that’s why it matters. Another recruiter survey said that of the top three video interview mistakes, biggest mistakes, one of them, perhaps the biggest one was poor connectivity. So even your connectivity matters in how you’re being evaluated. So you want to have an internet speed of at least one to four megabits per second. And you want nobody in your household hogging bandwidth, playing online games, or downloading or uploading things, or streaming music, streaming videos. So ask everybody not to do that, just to be on the safe side, and close any tabs, you don’t need any apps you don’t need. And that’s probably going to be enough to take care of it. But if it still isn’t, what you might need to do is check that you are that your computer is connected to the router with an ethernet cable and not Wi Fi or that if you are using Wi Fi, you might want to get a Wi Fi extender. But there we’re kind of getting down into the weeds. The most important thing is decent bandwidth, not hogging bandwidth with anything else.
Jeff Altman
Agreed, having had enough calls at the beginning of the pandemic, because I coach over Zoom, and I have and preceding the pandemic, it’s one of those awful things. And folks, there’s not going to be a problem on your end, I’m just going to imitate what it’s like to be in a situation where (fake interruption) suddenly, there’s the interruption in the connection. And you have to kind of stare, be puzzled at the confusing sounds. And then wave like you were doing before the beginning of this interview, where for some reason I connected, I didn’t have audio. It worked fine earlier in the day.
Thea Kelley
And wisely, Jeff, you had gotten online with me ahead of the time when we plan to start. So we had plenty of time to problem-solve that.
Jeff Altman
Absolutely. So again, you can notice things if you do some homework in advance, that allows you to be able to see what your connections are like. So that this way, you don’t sabotage yourself, which is really what we’re trying to avoid is sabotage through poor connectivity. Three!
Thea Kelley
Okay, So the third myth is about eye contact in video interviews. And so the lowest level of skill on that and most of you listeners are probably past that is to just look at the interviewers face as you’re doing the video interview, in which case, you’re not looking at the camera, so they’re not getting a feeling of eye contact. So the next level up, if you’re getting a little more savvy, is you think, okay, I need to look back and forth between the camera and occasionally look at the interviewer or just look at the camera the whole time, but then you’re missing out on the facial expressions, and you don’t see how you. So you could just look at back and forth and on some platforms, you might have to. But here is what I always do. On zoom at any way, you can shrink the video window. And what that does, see, if I was looking Jeff at your eyes, and then I had you filling up my whole window. I’d be looking right about here. Does that seem like eye contact to you.
Jeff Altman
For those who will be hearing this as a podcast, she’s, she’s looking at my navel.
Thea Kelley
Yeah, that’s that’s what it gives the impression of if I’m looking at you in the middle of my screen. So what I’ve done is I’ve shrunk the zoom window and moved it up close to the camera so that now even when I look at Jeff’s face, I’m looking close enough to the camera that he’s still getting the impression of eye contact. And even to put that, to put his face even closer to the camera, I have hidden the view of myself that in zoom appears right above his image. So that that moves him up another three quarters of an inch. So now I don’t have to choose, I can look at Jeff’s face, and he feels like I’m looking right at him. Now, if on some platform, if you’re on some platform where you can’t do that, you can’t for some reason, and you need to figure out ahead of time to practice with the platform and figure out how to shrink that image and move it next to the camera. But if you can’t do that, the next best thing might be to use a laptop because the laptops are pretty small screen. And on that screen, even if you’re looking in the middle of the screen, you’re still not that far from the camera. You could maybe do a little back and forth thing and swell.
Jeff Altman
I know my setup. I have a standing desk but I don’t really stand at it anymore. But I keep it positioned, I’d say probably eight to nine inches off the bottom. And what that does is elevate my laptop sufficiently that when I’m looking at you, I look like I’m making eye contact.
Thea Kelley
Right? Super important if you’re going to use a laptop elevate it enough because another thing is if the laptop is below you on a table, the interviewer feels like they’re looking up your nose. And it’s a really weird perspective.
Jeff Altman
Yes, awful. I look at some of my early videos that I did on a laptop where I didn’t have them elevated. Yeah, you’re right. It’s “the distorted head” looking up my nose. Awful stuff. The content is good. But yeah, the appearance isn’t. We hear about appearance, right? Also, I’m going to add one thing, when you elevate yourself, you occupy more of the screen, which gives you a bigger presence on camera. And presence is important. There’s someone I was talking to earlier in the week, I knew he was 6’4″ but where he was on camera was from the middle of the screen down. So there was this huge head space above him that he wasn’t as tall as he was. So you want to have presence on camera, because that creates authority just with that.
Thea Kelley
Right? It is just more comfortable. Even if you’re not trying to project authority, it’s more comfortable if the person’s looking at you if you want your eyes to be about three quarters of the viewing window. So that’ll put you in a nice comfortable space there.
Jeff Altman
You betcha. Yeah. Next one, next one.
Thea Kelley
Okay. So you might think, well, if, if a laptop is a good way to be able to look at the person’s face, while still looking close to the camera, maybe be even better to use a smartphone. So this myth is that a smartphone is a good video interview tool. It is a last resort. With a video with a smartphone, you have more chance of technical glitches, the camera may distort your face, like taking a selfie, where your nose winds up looking really big, so you’re not going to necessarily look your best. And if you’re using a smartphone, you’re very likely in a car, or outdoors or something like that. And it doesn’t come across as professional. But let me tell you, if you must do an interview on your smartphone, make sure you’re someplace where you have a strong signal, prop up the phone so that, you know as Jeff was talking about, you know, you have the right angle and they’re not looking up at you, or looking down at you. And you want to not use speakerphone. You’re not going to get the best sound that way. Better to get some microphone enabled headphones. And of course, turn off your ringer and your notifications. So if you do all that you can have a decent interview on a smartphone if you have to. But better to do it with a laptop or a desktop.
Jeff Altman
I agree. And, you know, when I use smartphones to record video, I have a small stand I work with to try and keep it stable. If you don’t have time to get one because the interviews tomorrow, and Amazon won’t deliver on time for you. What you can always do, and it’s not ideal, is sit in a chair and keep your arm on the armrest and just hold the phone in front of you. Because that will stabilize it much more than if you have it propped up on something. So try and get comfortable, because you don’t want the vibration of moving around to be distorting you and distracting the interviewer from you.
Thea Kelley
Yeah, if you have to do . . . if you’re gonna have to do a phone video interview, practice it ahead of time. Make sure you get these kinds of things sorted out.
Jeff Altman
Excellent. How many more do we got? Two?
Thea Kelley
That was number four. So we’ve got three
Jeff Altman
More. Good. Okay.
Thea Kelley
The next myth that is very common is that you should dress more casually for a video interview. Now the only time I would say that’s true is once in a while I have heard people say well, the recruiter told me to dress business casual or to dress casually. In which case, okay, the recruiter said so and and they probably know. But in most cases, since again, the video space is the workspace now. You need to treat it like a normal workspace. And the general rule for dressing for an interview is one level of formality up from the way you would dress on the job. So if on the job you would be dressing in business casual, which is not the same as casual, it means like a shirt like I’m wearing that is not a t shirt and slacks that are not jeans and maybe a blazer or something wearing
Jeff Altman
A shirt with a collar, as well.
Thea Kelley
Yeah, yeah. So if if if that’s how you would dress to do the job, then I’d say wear a suit for the interview. Even though it is a video interview. You’re going to make the impression of being more motivated, more serious about the job. There may be differing opinions on this, but I think most career professionals would agree on this one. What do you think?
Jeff Altman
I want to be clear these days I don’t believe in ties anymore. So, for the men, you can skip the tie. If you’re going to wear a sports jacket, do that and try to make sure it’s not rumpled because of how you’re seated. I know the back behind your neck can get pulled up in a jacket. So just make sure you do what talk show hosts do is they pull the jacket underneath them, and they actually sit on it to avoid that sort of weird look. I have a friend who’s a talk show host for many years. So he taught me that little trick for when you’re on cameras. Sit on your jacket. Now for women, are you saying they should wear a blouse with a collar? What would you say women should do for the purposes of the answer?
Thea Kelley
Yeah, for business casual, a blouse with a collar is probably very good. But it’s also alright if it’s some kind of a shell or sweater as long as it’s dressy looking and accessorize it with a little bit of low key jewelry so that it looks a little more dressy. So again, you know, a suit jacket, maybe maybe not,. You know, there’s different views on that. But if it’s for an executive role or something, I tend to think so.
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Jeff Altman
Because you’re women, you’re going to be more likely to do this than the men. Just be aware of any bracelet that you might wear and what it’s noise might be like, if it hit the table that you’re doing the interview from, you might want to skip the bracelets for this to avoid those unnecessary sounds. But I think Thea is spot on. Dress well. Look world class. Men need to hear that more than women do. Women know what to do. Men are lazy about their appearance generally. I wish it were different but it’s what I habitually see.
Thea Kelley
Might be. Might be. And oh, by the way, Zoom has a feature called touch up my appearance, I love it, you access it by clicking the little arrow next to stop video in the bottom toolbar. And once you turn it on, it’s on for all of your interviews even if you shut down the computer. And it’s great. It just sort of evens out your skin tone a little bit. This is both for men and women improves your coloring just a little bit. So that’s a great thing to do. We could go on and on about interview appearance, but maybe we shouldn’t get into too much detail about that. But if you get my book, there’s more detail quite a bit more about interview appearance.
Jeff Altman
Thank you. Number six.
Thea Kelley
Okay. Number six is that it’s a good idea to use the virtual backgrounds on zoom that are really cool. Like the the Northern Lights or the earth as seen from outer space or something like that. And again, there may be differences of opinion on this. It may, the interviewer may think it’s really cool, but I find it kind of distracting to use any kind of gimmicky virtual background. And another thing about virtual backgrounds is that as you move around, sometimes parts of you will sort of disappear or there’ll be blackout lines around you. And again, that’s distracting. If you really need to use a virtual background to blur out some some clutter in your background, the best are the ones that simply blur the background. In my opinion, those are nice and simple and won’t distract anybody.
Jeff Altman
I agree. For a moment, I thought you said use a virtual background. And I was kind of surprised by that. I don’t believe in them. And I do believe blurring is much much better than most people’s virtual backgrounds. because invariably what happens is, you said it moved your head and there’s this white jagged thing that shows up next to the head and people go on virtual background. And they get distracted by the distortion.
Thea Kelley
So I would say Jeff, the background that you have behind you is very nice. It’s not virtual. It’s clearly your your office or your study. And it is simple and tasteful and neat. So that works. And I think right behind me I have some bookcases and that looks like an office and, and so that kind of background works. You just you don’t want a bed or maybe not a kitchen. You don’t want anything messy.
Jeff Altman
I agree. And for those of you who are outside the US where space is at a premium. And I know you have your setup in your bedroom, because I’ve seen any number of these over the years, you do the best you can.
Thea Kelley
Yeah, you use the blurr or a folding screen can be super handy. Right
Jeff Altman
And it’s okay to show the diplomas.
Thea Kelley
Yeah, yeah, right. Why not? I did that intentionally, obviously.
Jeff Altman
Of course. Yes. And this is number 7. Am. I right about that.
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Thea Kelley
That’s right. So seven and the last of our video interviewing myths is about automated video interviews. In other words, the ones that are one way where you are recording your answers and nobody’s listening to you yet. And the misunderstanding some people have is that you’ll know if an artificial intelligence software program is, is evaluating you. Because in some of these one way interviews, the software is actually checking you out and evaluating you according to what kinds of words you use, your tone of voice, your gestures, your facial expressions. And I know this can make you feel real paranoid to think that a robot is looking at you, so to speak in evaluating these things. The thing is, you won’t even be told if that’s happening. So you just don’t know. And sometimes the robot evaluator just gives advice, so to speak, to the live human who views it later and says, . . . you know, I don’t know actually what it would say, but it it gives its interpretations. Other times, and this is probably not very common yet here in 2022, the robot software would actually be deciding whether you go past that screening to the next interview. So what do we do about that? Since unlike unknownst, to most people, you don’t know if that’s happening, I think it’s best to go ahead and just assume that you’re talking to a person. Pretend you’re talking to a person, speaking in a natural way, I just read an article from Harvard Business Review in which they were saying that these AI assisted interviews are sometimes causing people to feel that they need to talk in a monotone or some other weird way so that the AI can understand them. No, that’s not necessary. And it may actually cause the AI to rate you worse as being inauthentic. And it’s certainly not going to work too well, when a live human looks at that later as is often are mostly happening. So speak naturally, whether there’s a robot there or not. And pretend somebody is listening, because chances are, somebody will be a little bit later. You have anything to add to that?
Jeff Altman
Yeah, oh, yes. Years ago, I interviewed one of the founders of HireVue on my other podcast, and this is coming back five, six years, at least. He was telling me the number one, they were looking at micro expressions on a person’s face. Number two is different than the standard interview,
Thea Kelley
can you go back in a moment and say what a microexpression is,
Jeff Altman
Thank you. That’s such a good interviewer. It’s the small expressions on your face, that are tells to assist them. And they come in all sorts of forms. So it could be the small smile, or the big smile, the twinkle in your eyes or its absence, it will measure your tone of voice to get a sense of whether you’re being dynamic, enthusiastic, or monotone. A whole bunch of things. There’s several 100 of them that exist around the face. And the system is designed to evaluate and assess based upon these small new expressions. Again, going back six years or more, and I may have interviewed in in 2014, but certainly no later than 2016. Then, from there, your actual answers were being compared to answers given by people within the organization. So it wasn’t necessarily the right answer that they were looking for. They were looking for the answer that the person in that role might have given in that particular team that you’d be interviewing for, and how similar or dissimilar, the answer was. It was just really very interested in talking to him because, again, circa six, eight years ago, very different technical climate. And again, HireVue, I’m sure has done a much better job than the tech from years ago. But it’s harder to BS those systems on these dynamics. So frankly, the goal for you folks should be be your best self. Don’t try and impress a computer. Because it’s it can’t be impressed. It doesn’t care. What it does, is evaluate based upon certain dynamics. And from your standpoint, folks, you always want to be your best self in any interview. And if you’re not hired because you had a different kind of smile, or didn’t smile, in the course of the interview. . . Huh? And it can happen. It’s really interesting.
Thea Kelley
Yeah. And some employers have actually backed down from having AI’s evaluate these automated interviews because of things like having it turn out that the AI does discriminate against certain types of people. Maybe it couldn’t read expressions on dark skinned people, or it somehow didn’t understand women’s ways of expressing themselves. So, so they’re not all using them. But some are. But like Jeff said, the key is your best self, speak naturally as though you’re speaking to a human being, and let the chips fall where they may.
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Jeff Altman
So if I were to summarize the positives by looking at some of the opposites, you dress like an all star. You make eye contact with the interviewer. You make sure your background looks well or you blur it out. You connect with people. What? Give me some more give me some of the positive statements from the negatives that offered.
Thea Kelley
Yeah, let me go back with Jeff. And with Yeah, use a laptop or a desktop. And then realize it’s here to stay and embrace, embrace video interviewing. Don’t try to like hold your breath and hope for it to be over. Or don’t try to expect them to, to cut you some slack in some way.
Jeff Altman
Because no one cuts slack. No one cuts any slack.
Thea Kelley
You certainly can’t count on it.
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ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter is a coach who worked as a recruiter for what seems like one hundred years. His work involves career coaching, as well as executive job search coaching, job coaching, and interview coaching. He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with over 2300 episodes.
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