Job interviews in English

By Jason Lim

Being a longtime columnist for The Korea Times, I am used to receiving emails with comments (mostly negative) about my opinions. However, I occasionally get emails from desperate students or job seekers who are looking for some secret to quickly improve their English speaking skills, mostly because many of them are facing a job interview in English.

Apparently, more and more companies in Korea finally realized that TOEIC and TOEFL that scores do not accurately predict English performance in real situations.The urgency over the situation has become so dire that industry CEO's have been publicly pressing for English education reforms so that college graduates become ''hirable" in today's global environment.

A few years ago, they even demanded a new testing system that would accurately reflect the English skills of a potential hire. This is understandable since it costs money to hire someone only to find out that they are not ready to do the job and have to be further trained. But if TOEIC and TOEFL do not accurately measure a candidate's English proficiency, then what are the options for companies?

Then several years ago, someone came up with a brilliant idea that brought about an audible groan from all the college campuses in Korea: what about job interviews in English? So, now some Korean companies have apparently been conducting job interviews in English to see if the candidate can actually perform work-related tasks in English when inserted into a global-business environment. Therefore, in addition to TOEIC and TOEFL, Korean students are now burdened with the necessity to study conversational English in order to get a job in a respectable company.

Some are so desperate that strangers have even reached out and asked me to help them prepare for upcoming job interviews in English, looking for some magical English job interview template that they can study to ace an exam. I don't have a magical template, but here are some common sense recommendations.

What is a job interview? Job interview is not a test of your English proficiency. It's also not just any conversation. Just because you are fluent in English doesn't mean that you will have a successful job interview that will lead to an offer. In essence, job interview is about persuasion. Speaking English well enough to function in a global business environment is just the minimum criteria – selling yourself in English as someone who can contribute positively to their bottom-line is the real key to getting a job offer.

It's about persuading companies to hire you because you have convinced them that you are better qualified and more enthusiastic than other candidates. It's about persuading companies that you will be a leader in the future, whether leading them out of a global recession or leading them toward greater market share in the world. Leadership is what they want, and leadership is about persuasion and engagement.

First and foremost, this means that you need to know who you are speaking to. In a job interview situation, this means that you have to know something about the company that you are applying to. If it's a public company, you have to be familiar with its latest revenue and cost figures, main initiatives, future direction, and more that you can find out that will allow you to talk intelligently about how your skills and experiences will help the company. The more you know, the more you can speak positively about the state and future of the company, and the more the interviewer will be impressed by your preparedness and commitment to the company.

You also have to know something about the person interviewing you. Since you can't do a background check on the person beforehand, make sure you get his business card before you begin so that you have an idea who you are speaking with. Offer your own business card as a way of getting his. Make sure that you have professional business cards made for yourself, even if you are student or temporarily unemployed. Based on the information in the business card, ask him directly what his position is, what he does, and how many people does he manage? Always know that interview is not a one-way process. It's a conversation, albeit a conversation with a specific purpose.

By asking these questions, you are reinforcing his Confirmatory Bias about the importance of his own role in the company. You make him feel good about himself. And you are also taking him out of his outer shell and engaging him as a person. This is important because, by personalizing the interviewer to yourself, you become personalized to the interviewer as well. You escape the impersonal interviewer–interviewee paradigm and redefine the relationship based on personal knowledge of one another.

In short, you have taken your own share of leadership in the dialogue, instead of becoming a passive follower to whatever direction the interviewer sets.

Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006. He can be reached at jasonlim@msn.com, facebook. com/jasonlimkoreatimes and @jasonlim2012.