[monster]

Dear Monster,

Thank you for your interest in ...... We were extremely impressed with your qualifications and experience and would like to invite you to interview by phone. I will be conducting the screening phone interviews. The interview should take about 20 minutes.


This was about an hour ago and I'm still shaking. I was literally hitting rock bottom when the email came in. I have never done a phone interview before. I've barely done a job interview before.

The last job interview I did (for the place that just went bankrupt) had a make-or-break question "what are you passionate about?" I learned later that it was company policy not to hire you if you couldn't answer that seemingly innocent and out-of-the-blue question fairly quickly.

So, I'm going to reread my cover letter and application, write down some words of pith in case I go completely blank (I hate talking on the phone at the best of times) and was wondering if you guys knew of any "surprise" questions/topics today's HR people like to ask? I looked up the interviewer, they are the HR person for this department.

Please be gentle with me, it's been pretty rough and I'm pretty fragile right now