Interview Questions – ‘Is it acceptable to take personal calls or use social media at work?’
For Service-leavers who haven’t got recent interview experience, the prospect can seem daunting. Here, we dissect another of the more common but no less difficult interview questions so that you can show your best side to interviewers and land your next post-Services role.
‘Is it acceptable to take personal calls or use social media at work?’
Temptation
There are likely to be so many brief moments when you could just take or make a quick call, check the football results, fire off a text or catch up on a Facebook update – but none of this is likely to get you an employee of the month badge.
Emergency
There are always sensible exceptions. This is one of them – as is an urgent message from your child’s school, etc.
Costs
Personal messages don’t cost the company any money from their phone bills etc, – but they do cost time and productivity.
Work or to play?
The real question is whether you’re at work to get on with your job or to organise your social life?
How old is the interviewer?
Senior or older employers can have prejudices against younger people based on nothing more than a suspicion that they don’t do things the way they did when they were young – and that they expect them to be lazy and without motivation and not interested in anything but TV and texting! You’ll need to keep their suspicions in mind and avoid challenging them head-on, at least until you know them better.
Where’s the harm in a few minutes here and there?
Your boss might remind you that that’s not the point.
Employers don’t want to know that everyone does it occasionally. They already know that. There is then, little point in aiming to see things from both sides of the argument, since the boss is likely to think that there actually is no argument. This is what they want you to confirm, or they wouldn’t bother to ask you.
You are paid for X, Y and Z, not for anything else.
Good luck with finding a successful employer who thinks differently!
Back in the real world (rather than the world as described in job interviews)…
Of course, people use personal phones and so on while they’re at work and a certain amount of ‘blind eye’ or flexibility is exercised. Here are a few tips to keep you on the right side of the line…
Any personal call should be taken out of the office and kept as short as possible. Sneaking off for 15 minutes will get you more (negative) attention than you think.
Company policy may oblige you to wait until breaks to send and receive messages. Consider that sending a message will usually solicit a reply, rather than shut the conversation down.
Clearly colleagues and customers deserve 100% of your attention.
Particularly with phone calls, your privacy cannot be guaranteed. Do you really want your conversation repeated as gossip?
