How does a phone screening work?

The four checks, and the numbers you keep in front of you

A phone screening is not a small interview. It is a filter, placed at the start of the process, run almost always by HR or an agency, with one purpose: to cut a shortlist of twenty down to five without anyone booking a meeting room. You are not there to convince; you are there not to be excluded. Long expert answers do not help, because the person on the other end frequently cannot judge them and is not being asked to.

The first check is the dullest one. Do your facts hold? Employment dates, workload percentage, place of residence, permit status, notice period. Have the advert and your own CV open in front of you. It sounds trivial, but the most common stumble on these calls is someone unable to state their own earliest leaving date, because the application went out six weeks and a dozen adverts ago.

The second check is availability, and it needs a date rather than a feeling. Article 335c of the Code of Obligations sets the statutory notice period at one month during the first year of service, two months from the second to the ninth year inclusive, and three months thereafter, in each case to the end of a month. Those periods may be varied in writing; they may be cut below one month only by collective employment contract and only in the first year. Work out your earliest possible start date once, before the call, and write it on the sheet next to the phone.

The third check is money. On the phone the salary question comes early and casually, because it is the cheapest disqualifier in the entire process. Fix a figure or a narrow range beforehand, gross per year, and say whether a thirteenth month is included in it. «I would rather discuss that later» is a legitimate answer, but in a screening round it loses the slot more often than it buys you room. The fourth check is language, and it deserves its own section.

The language part you cannot prepare around

Just under three quarters of the adverts live in our index name a language explicitly. Among those that ask for German, 88.9 per cent want professional level, 8.2 per cent accept conversational, 2.5 per cent ask for a native speaker and 0.4 per cent settle for basic. English is barely gentler at 86.2 per cent professional. If your CV claims a level you only ever read and wrote in, the call is where that becomes visible, usually in the third minute.

The Latin languages are the forgiving ones. Of the adverts asking for French, 73.1 per cent want professional level, 16.8 per cent accept conversational and 4.5 per cent accept basic. For Italian it is 59.8 per cent professional, 19.7 per cent conversational and 12.9 per cent basic — making Italian the one national language where an incomplete level is regularly, explicitly sufficient. If your Italian is rough but real, raise it on the call rather than steering around it.

In practice that means three things. Say which language you would prefer when the slot is proposed, or at least ask which one will be used. Prepare three spoken sentences in each required language — what you do now, what you did before, why this advert — because what is being tested is not vocabulary but whether you stall. And state your level honestly: a correction made on the phone costs you a small deduction, while an exaggeration exposed in the room ends the process.

Dialect is the special case for anyone screening into German-speaking Switzerland. Swiss German almost never appears as a stated requirement in the language data we record; what adverts ask for is standard German. You may still be greeted in dialect. Asking politely to continue in standard German is a normal move in a recruitment process and is rarely held against a candidate — guessing at half-understood dialect and getting it wrong costs you the opening minutes instead.

Who is calling, and why it changes what you can ask

Roughly twelve per cent of the adverts live in our index run under the name of an agency, a personnel consultancy or a recruitment platform rather than the name of the workplace itself. In that part of the market the call is not one stage of a process, it is the beginning of everything: an intermediary has a client brief and has to establish that you match it before passing you on at all.

That changes what is worth asking. An intermediary can tell you reliably how many rounds there are, who decides, by when a decision falls and roughly what salary band the client set. They usually cannot tell you how the team works, what the onboarding looks like or why the post is open, because they have never been there. Those questions are not wasted, they simply belong to the next round. It is equally legitimate to ask on the call which company the role is with, although you may not get an answer.

When the employer's own HR department calls, the conversation tends to be tighter and closer to the advert. Keep your answers to sixty or ninety seconds there. Talking for five minutes straight in a screening does not read as thorough, it reads as hard to assess — and the person on the other end has six more numbers on the list that afternoon.

In both cases, write down the caller's name and number before the conversation gets going. It is the single piece of information you will certainly need afterwards and are least able to reconstruct.

What may be written down, and what may be recorded

For an existing employment relationship Article 328b of the Code of Obligations draws the line plainly: the employer may handle data concerning the employee only to the extent that it concerns their suitability for the job or is necessary for the performance of the employment contract; in all other respects the Data Protection Act of 25 September 2020 applies. «suitability for the job» is therefore the useful yardstick for a screening call too. Anything with no bearing on the work has no business in the notes.

Recording is clearer still. Article 179ter of the Criminal Code makes it an offence for a participant in a private conversation to record it on a recording device without the permission of the other participants; the penalty, on complaint, is a custodial sentence of up to one year or a monetary penalty. Someone listening in or recording from outside the conversation falls under Article 179bis, which carries up to three years. In practice: a company that wants to record or auto-transcribe a screening call has to ask you — and you equally may not tape it quietly, not even «just for yourself».

If a recording is announced, your consent is a decision rather than a formality. You may ask how long the recording is kept and who listens to it, and you may say no. Handwritten notes by the caller are a different matter: those are always allowed, subject only to the data protection limit above.

If a question comes up that plainly has nothing to do with suitability for the role, the most effective polite answer on a call is a question back: «how does that bear on the role?» It costs nobody face, it is easier to ask on the phone than across a table, and in most cases it closes that line of questioning.

The federal checklist has no phone in it

arbeit.swiss, the platform of the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, publishes a checklist for the job interview: about you, about the employer, about the employer's questions, plus the salary negotiation. For the employer block it names exactly what to look up — industry, products or services, market position, company objectives, organisation and headcount. The call is not in it. We checked the German, French and Italian versions of that page: none of the three mentions the telephone, a first phone conversation or being reachable.

That is not a criticism of the page, but it explains why so many applicants meet this round unprepared. The official preparation describes a room, while the first assessment happens on a handset. The substitute is one sheet of paper next to the phone that you write yourself.

On it: the advert with your three markings, your CV with exact dates, your earliest possible start date, your salary figure, two questions you intend to ask, and an empty field for the caller's name and number. Then the conditions that sound banal but explain half of all bad screening calls: a quiet room, headphones rather than speakerphone, a charged device, and not taking the call on a train.

And if the call comes at the wrong moment, asking for a callback is normal and acceptable — as long as you name a concrete window. «from four o'clock today» beats «later». A screening you take in an open-plan office between two meetings is worthless as an application, however well prepared you were.

After the call

A phone screening almost never ends with a decision. It ends with a process. So ask two things at the close: what is the next step, and by when will you hear? Noting both matters more than any write-up, because it is the only thing you can later refer back to factually without appearing to push.

If something was promised during the call — a reference letter, a work sample, a diploma — send it the same day with three lines of covering text. The attachment is the point; the three lines are only the wrapping. Nobody needs a page-long summary of the conversation.

If the date they named passes in silence, a short follow-up is appropriate and rarely resented, because it refers to what was agreed on the call rather than to your application in general. And if it goes no further: a rejection after a screening says almost nothing about your professional fit. It says something about four data points that were compared, and most often the one that decided it was availability or the salary band.