English in the interview - how to prepare?

Despite the fact that we have had conversations with people who have never worked in an international company before and their English does not allow free communication, however, the vast majority of IT specialists know English.At least that’s what they think. In our daily work, only a few of us have the opportunity to work with people for whom English is their mother tongue. The others – including myself – mainly talk to people who know English at the „communicative” level. Most often, this means more or less that the next step after constructing a sentence is to change the words from those from their mother tongue to those from English. Changing the pattern of a sentence is often overlooked. Using language in this way, we necessarily learn bad habits, simple sentences, or far from correct grammatical forms. In principle, this does not bother anyone until the moment when this sentence falls:

Can you answer a few questions in English?

And at this point often the stairs begin 😉

What does the recruiter ask?

Unfortunately, I cannot give a single, specific question that recruitment specialists ask in such a situation. Most often these are questions about hobbies or interests, duties in a previous job, motivations. Sometimes a recruiter may ask you to describe how you plan to work or the initiatives you participated in. In fact, we can expect everything here. I myself in the recruitment process i was asked about interests, about which people I like to work with. There were also questions about what I was responsible for at my previous employer and what the projects I worked in looked like.

What does the recruiter rate?

Not only the fluidity and correctness of the speech, but also its content – truthfulness. It shall also verify that English is in fact at the declared level; the communicative level should be able to communicate. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. However, the main task of the recruiter will be to assess whether the candidate will be able to get along with the client. You don’t need to be a native speaker, but the better your English, the better for your recruitment process.

How do I improve my English?

1. Don’t shy away from the answer. – The worst thing you can do at this point is to ask if you can answer in Polish. It really happens. There is always something you can say. Take a deep breath and describe it in simple language, one with which you will not have a problem. Remember that the most important thing in an appointment with a client is not to use beautiful words for it, but to do it effectively.
2. Don’t tell fairy tales even when talking about your interests – and I’ll find out that the recruiter has a similar exotic hobby and will want to talk about it longer and ask for more details.
3. Practice the pronunciation of popular words – make sure you pronounce them well. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t pay much attention to pronunciation, and that’s a mistake.
4. Try to spend at least an hour or two a week learning something new. The popular service with funny videos of cats is also full of training materials from English.
5. Read a series of articles about the most common English language errors heard in interviews and in your daily work. This series will appear successively on this blog.

I hope that these few tips will help you get better at the interview 🙂
I also encourage you to read the next article in this series.