Skype interview and presentation

Hi,

I’m having a Skype interview next week for an internship position. I’ll be expected to present my portfolio and I’m trying to figure out what the best way to do this is. I read that Skype screen sharing doesn’t offer great resolution and you can’t share the webcam feed at the same time. But there are other presentation sharing options out there. It would be great to hear what kind of setup you’ve found to work best.

My main concerns are being able to present my content in the best way (good resolution, big screen size, no distractions) and also sharing webcam feed so that they can get a sense of me as a person, which I believe is an important aspect of the interview.

Any recommendations would be much appreciated.

www.gotomeeting.com is a good option, there’s also join.me. My team and I do lots of conference call presentations and we use both. Join.me has a free offering that is quick and easy in a pinch, but I don’t know if the free offering supports video conferencing.

Good luck!

Thanks, I’ll give it a go next time. I ended up just using Skype, which wasn’t too bad, but not ideal either.

Typically when I have done Skype interviews in the past I have requested that the candidate send a PDF of their presentation in advance so I can review it. Then I can have it up on screen and typically I’m asking them questions about work vs walking me through the entire presentation.

I like that. I did the presenting in my interview but it was difficult to know hot much detail I should go into, what aspects of the projects they were interested in, and how closely they had studied my portfolio beforehand. Would’ve much preferred questions from them.

When I am the one being interviewed I often ask a few questions up front to qualify the situation. It give me a little info to tailor my talking points as well as immediately transforming it from an interview into a conversation.

A few questions I’ll typically lead with:

  1. have you had time to review my work before hand?
  2. are there any projects you are particularly interested in getting the full back story on?
  3. what about my work interested you?
  4. what are you looking to augment or enhance with this open position?

A couple of those get the ball rolling. Making the session about finding a solution to their problem, which is needing to fill an open head count. Filling an open head count is a lot of work on the hiring side. First the person has likely done battle with those who control the budget to secure the funds to hire someone. That might have taken months. Then they had to work with HR to get a job req and job description approved and posted on a bunch of sites that HR probably did;t want to pay for. Then they had to sort through a couple hundred resumes, 90% of which had little to no relevance, get consensus on the final 3-5 they they were going to interview, and do all that while doing their actual job… and now here they are in a room (or on Skype) with you. :slight_smile:

Asking them what they want can be a nice way to acknowledge how much work they have put in to getting to meet you in that moment.