This Zoom trick could help you nail a job interview
Even though we’re no longer in lockdown, for better or worse, online job interviews are still very much a thing.
You might be a fan, and enjoy being able to secretly stick notes around the screen. Or maybe they’re your personal nightmare, ready to trip you up with technical issues, delays and general awkwardness.
Well whatever your thoughts, it turns out there’s one very simple trick to help you score that job.
Researchers from Hiroshima University in Japan have discovered it’s very important where you look during an online interview, and it’s all to do with eye contact.
In the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers set up a situation to see where the best place to look on screen for an online job interview would be.
They recruited 12 students who played the role of interviewee and had to do a presentation, some looking directly at the web camera and the rest looking at the screen – which most of us probably do.
The interviews were recorded and evaluated by 38 full time workers, who were presented with both those looking at the screen and looking at the camera, and also a third group, which was audio only.
The evaluator had six criteria to consider when determining the scores of the interview: intimacy, social desirability, general job abilities, decisiveness, cooperativeness and overall hireability.
The researchers discovered that the candidates were more positively evaluated when their gaze was directed at the camera, compared to when the candidates looked at the screen.
In fact, researchers revealed that when an interviewee had their eyes gazing downwards towards the screen, it was more negatively evaluated than having a voice-only interview.
The researchers note that although it is hard to maintain ‘genuine’ eye contact online to establish a meaningful visual connection with another person, gazing into the camera helps accomplish that similar feeling.
Interestingly, the researchers found a gender bias, where female evaluators judged those with skewed downward gazes more harshly than male evaluators, which the researchers said could have real life applications.
Co-author Dr Masahiro Shinya said: ‘The key takeaway from our study is the negative impact of skewed gaze on evaluation in the context of online job interviewing: do NOT keep your eyes on the screen.’
The results suggest that by starting the interview looking directly at the camera, you’re already off to a good start, as a ‘mutual gaze’ can establish a level of trustworthiness and credibility with the evaluator.
Dr Noriko Yamane, researcher and co-first author of the study, said: ‘The ultimate goal is to develop guidelines and tools that enhance understanding and management of visual attention in video conferencing, thereby improving interaction quality and evaluation fairness in remote settings.’
It should be noted that this isn’t a sure fire way to get the job, and other factors will come into play, but for now – eyes on the camera.