Telephone Interview Invitation

"We are pleased to inform you that we have reviewed your application and numerical test results and would like to invite you to a telephone interview"

After a month of gruelling wait, I finally received a phone interview invitation from an international bank. The position that I applied for is a Graduate Program at the Corporate and Investment Banking department. I shall not reveal the bank's name to avoid unnecessary attention and any possible repercussion. 

Just to sidetrack for a moment, my previous post 'Wedding Cost in Singapore' had stirred much attention at TR EMERITUS aka 'Temasek Review' and I was rather amused to see such critical and judgmental comments about my post. However, there were some sincere comments that were really helpful and I truly appreciate it. I was simply trying to come up with a rough estimate of my wedding cost and it generated more than 50 fiery naysay comments in Temasek Review. To my delight, it generated more than 3500 page views on that day which translated into $3.21 of Google Adsense earnings. Contrary to what many other bloggers claimed, my Nuffnang ads did not generate as much earnings for me.

Back to the main topic, an interviewer from UK will be calling me to conduct the phone interview. If I were the bank, I would have saved some cost by appointing the HR from Singapore to conduct the phone interview instead. Assuming a phone interview takes 20 minutes and there are 100 phone interviews to be conducted, a total of 2000 minutes of costly international calls would be made. An alternative is a 'skype' interview, which is less costly and more effective as you can examine the expression and body language of the interviewee. Anyway, this is just my opinion and there might be other reasons for them to conduct the phone interview in this manner.

From what I have been told, there are a few rounds of interview in the selection process. If I meet their requirements for the phone interview, I will be invited to their office for a group interview before finally meeting the HR/Manager for a face to face interview.

The phone interview is scheduled on this coming Wednesday. In the meantime, I will read up about the bank and prepare for the interview as much as I can.  I shall update the outcome of my interview by the end of next week.