Edited

[pereira]

Edited

[pereira]

[FinnGuyHelsinki]

Does anyone has any idea what is usually nature of interview?

Getting an idea what you'd be like as a worker and what kind of skills do you really have, so you can expect questions of technical nature based on what it says on your CV (which hopefully is accurate and objective). Honesty is valued, so a high-flying marketing speech is often viewed negatively, it's better to say that you don't know than to give a BS answer. The lay-out process is somewhat difficult for the employer, therefore they want to vet the candidates properly.

[DMC]

you can expect questions of technical nature based on what it says on your CV

Being a telephone interview does rather restrict the range of questions though. Difficult to ask a candidate to write or review or debug code, for example, and diagram-based problems are also out. So it is important to be able to give a clear verbal answer to technical questions without the support of visual aids or documentation. Or maybe the questions are more likely to probe for details of previous experience & responsibilities rather than concentrating on low-level techy issues. The only phone interview I have had in Finland ws not overly technical in nature, but it was for an IT management role rather than a hands-on coding job. I don't remember exactly but that interview probably lasted 30 minutes or so.

[CH]

As previously mentioned, some technical questions are to be expected, but it probably isn't a technical interview per se unless they have specified it as such in advance. Phone interviews are getting more common for IT jobs, especially when a company is looking for a person with a very specific profile. No use calling a lot of people in for an interview and reserving time from several of your own people for many days, if most of the candidates aren't really what you are looking for.

What they will ask depends on the company & position and what type of person is going to interview you (recruter, HR person, manager, somebody from the project you would be working for...), so of course it's hard to say what exactly. But I would assume it's more or less the same as they would ask in the first round of face-to-face interview if they didn't do phone interviews. Read the text for the job opening, that should give you some ideas about what they might ask. What are the requirements, what is on their "wish list"? I would assume they want to know what your experience and future interests are in those areas. I would also expect for them to tell you about the company and the position, so that you also can check if you really are interested in them and the position they are offering. Do for instance read their web pages to get to know the company a bit and prepare in advance a couple of questions. I would guess most employers would appreciate that the candidate shows an interest in the company and the position.

So, take it as the first round in a vetting process to shorten "the long list" into a "very short list" of people they actually would be interested in hiring and to call in for a face-to-face interview.

Edit: Found the blog post that I had in mind... it's a bit old, but I don't think it's dated in any way. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ ... creen.html
It's one person's description of why he does phone interviews and what he is looking for. Note, this of course doesn't mean that your phone interview would go even in the slightest this way, but in my experience more or less all (IT) job interviews have followed more or less the three part model he describes ("Tell us about yourself and your experience", "Let us ask a couple of questions", "Do you have any questions about us or the job position?").