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Hello Everybody! And welcome to Business 10. My name is Steve and you have come to Private English portal.com. This week, I am doing a continuation of job interview preparation. Well first of all, I would like to thank all my online English learners for your wonderful feedback for all of my business English videos.
It is comments like those that allow me to have more inspiration and motivation to continue to make my YouTube videos. My question this week comes from my business English student Pedro from Barcelona.
And Pedro’s preparing for a job interview for the next month and he would like some more pointers on how he can do a successful job interview in English, and Pedro might first very important piece of information is trying to use vocabulary which is within your grasp.
It is very common in job interviews for us to get nervous or under a lot of pressure, a lot of stress and we want to impress the person who is interviewing us. So, what I can advice you to do is instead of having an impossible word which is on the tip of your tongue, to try and put things in to layman’s terms, saying basically the same thing.
My second piece of information to you Pedro is please be aware of using false cognates when you are doing your job interview in English. A case in point is my student from France. We were doing some job interview practice and when the word came up about you know tell me about your education, as he went along, he fell back into his mother tongue and told me in English about his “formacion”. And he really wanted to say education.
Now education as a false cognate in French, education in Spanish, Educacion in Italian, educazione in Portuguese, educason all those mean manners and that of course is totally different from education in English.
So, you really want to be careful not to use the false cognate. My second example of a false cognate is actually in English means in fact but in many of the Latin languages and the Slavic languages it means something totally different it means something which is current. So, actually in French, actuelmo in Spanish, actuelmente in Italian, attualmente in Portuguese, atulamenchi in Polish, aktualny in Russian, actual, all of those have a similar meaning in those languages has being something current, but in English when you see “actually” it means “in fact.” So be very, very careful of your use of false cognates.
And here is my last piece of information it is very important for you to focus on the positive. It is very easy for us when we are asked why did you leave your last company to start to feel those negative emotions which often come up when we were leaving a job. We want to use euphemisms so that we can take a negative situation and turn it into a positive situation and turn the situation to your advantage.
So, I will give you an example. I was preparing a business executive who was doing a job interview and when I asked him why are you leaving you present job? He said the companies going down. Everybody is leaving. It is not a good situation and I was able to give him a good euphemism for my companies going down. You do not want to say your companies going down like the titanic? You want to say that your companies going through down sizing.
See how nice that sounds in that is the kind of language you want to use when you have to give an answer about things which are necessarily the most positive, okay.
So Pedro, I hope that answers your question and I hope for all of my online English students that will help you in preparing for a confident and successful job interview in English.
Have a great week and we will see you on Business 11.
Bye-bye.
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