Job Discussion Forums

[gt37]

I have a student who is preparing for a job interview in English at a Japanese company in 2 months.

This is a first for me(teaching), so besides doing a mock interview with the standard interview questions ie Why do you want to join our company?", does anybody have some suggestions?

[Glenski]

Do the interview with 3 people at one table facing your student at another empty one. Do not allow any notes or other stuff with him.

Questions to ask.
Why do you want to come to Japan?
Do you like Japanese women?
Can you speak Japanese?
Can you eat Japanese food?
What kind of problems do you think you will have here?
Have you ever lived abroad?
What are you going to do if you get homesick?

[Mike L.]

Even if the job is for something like nuclear plant technician be sure to prepare an especially aimless talk about the weather. :wink:

[gt37]

Sorry! I guess my message was unclear. My student is Japanese and living in Japan. She will have an interview at a Japanese company, but it'll be in English as the job will require some English communication skills.

Any more suggestions?

[Glenski]

Would you describe yourself as a team player?
Can you work alone?
How will you handle situations where you don't understand English? (whatever specific ones there are to this job)
What are your weak points?
What are your strong points?
How are you going to improve your English?
Where do you see yourself in 5 years? 10 years?

[hivans]

Funnily enough I have just finished doing exactly the same with a Japanese student preparing for an interview in English for a Japanese company. We had several lessons to cover this ground.

Many of the questions were exactly as the other posters mentioned, but because we had a few lessons we were able to plan an approach together.

Firstly, the student did some research in Japanese on the company she was applying to. Our first session began with brainstorming potential questions (I think as well as the ones that have already been mentioned in this thread we had some like "What is your experience"? "Why do you want to leave your current job?" "Why do you want to work for our company?" "How would you deal with a difficult customer?" "How would your co-workers describe you?" "How do you feel about working overtime?" and a few more.

Then over the next few lessons we would do a dummy interview (or some of the questions in dummy interview format). I didn't correct any English in the "interviews" but after 10 minutes or so we would have a correction slot and then repeat the same questions under interview conditions. As well as correcting specific errors I tried to work on grammar areas that the student had some difficulty with - in our case we did some practice on "If I had a difficult customer, I would...." and "If I had a problem with a co-worker, I would ...." and in "In my last job, I used to...." - so we did some grammar exercises on those points as well.

It was quite tough for the student, and I think at times she got a bit stressed through working so hard at it. So in our last two sessions I tried to break the pattern by just throwing in different questions to practice answering unexpected questions, and to lighten the mood a little. We did this by asking alternate serious and comic questions (I think I did "Should Japan change article 9 of the constitution?" "What do you think of the Matsuken Samba?" "How should Japan deal with the declining birth rate?" "What is the best thing about being married to a Kyushu danji?" and so on.

At the same time I was going through the process of preparing for my own job interview for a Japanese company. I have to say that I found a lot of repitive practice was very useful, but also a couple of little joke questioins proved to be useful in trying to get me to feel relaxed and not too tense about the situation.

The irony is that the day my student went to the interview the English speaking guy was ill, so they did her interview in Japanese! I hope (and think) that she got something out of our lessons though (she certainly deserved to, she worked so hard).

[gt37]

Thanks hivans! Your messgae helped me a lot and gave me some great ideas to work with.