Prerecorded interviews are really hard. Much tougher than face to face or virtual face to face interviews.
You have usually 2 minutes to respond to a question, get no response from an interviewer, no visual cues about whether to expand or wrap up your answer and you are interacting with a video camera not a person.
Having provided feedback to over 120 recorded interviews on behalf of a higher education institution in Ireland I have distilled some top tips & pet peeves to help you or people you know who might have one of these coming up.
Do:
Tell stories – when detailing your strengths / skills / experience tell stories of when you have used or demonstrated these in the past. Through your discussion you are showing the recruiter you know what you are talking about and it gives credibility to your claims
Put yourself in the shoes of the recruiter – what are they looking to hear? How do you think they are interpreting what you are saying?
Tone & tempo – if you are talking about something you enjoy the recruiter will expect to see your tone and tempo of speech matching the enthusiasm you claim to have.
Structure – structure your responses. Don’t circle back and repeat yourself and jump all over the place in your response. If you need to, ask for a moment to gather your thoughts and then proceed.
Don’t:
Say something is interesting and not provide any further justification / explanation for why
Use subjective and over the top language (e.g. “I am excellent at..”)
Don’t read your answers – it is very obvious, and you usually end up using stilted language and read too quickly and without inflection which makes it really hard to digest