This was a first for me. I just had a telephone interview, in Japanese, with a Japanese company, for an engineering job.
I never actually had a regular job interview in Japan, although I did have a couple little part time jobs when I was an exchange student. So that part was new.
The telephone interview? Also a first. I was on speakerphone, so I had a hard time differentiating between when they were muttering amongst themselves and asking me questions.
It's been a while since I spoke Japanese for any length of time. I did better than I expected, although the polite dialect pretty much fell by the wayside right away as if I were a little kid (for which I apologized in—all cringe together now—casual dialect).
I interview about as well in Japanese as I do in English, so that's not saying much. Whenever I finish a job interview, I realize that I'm a complete idiot because afterwards I can think of much better ways to say everything that I said. I'm finding that I talk (or, let's be honest, blither) in pretty much the way that I write. The way I write a rough draft. Unless it's something that I obsessed over in advance, in which case I do pretty well. Because the way I write? I write a bunch and then cross out all the dumb stuff. What's left sounds pretty good, for the most part.
243 words | April 27, 2005 09:25 PM | Lost in translationOnce you get old enough, you will have told all your good stories enough times that the bugs will be worked out, and when one appears to be an appropriate answer in an interview, you can just whip into the rehearsed spiel and blow them away. That's one of the secrets to being a successful *old fart*.
Posted by: Derek at May 1, 2005 04:18 AMI'm already old. I just haven't had a real job interview since 1991, so I'm out of practice. They ask me to give an example of how I used my leadership skills or how I dealt with some adversity and my answers are not very polished. Yet. I'm getting better. I didn't get the Japanese job though, because they didn't think I was fluent enough (true). But after I heard about how they expected me to work 14 hour days, I didn't really want it.
Posted by: Nee-chama at May 1, 2005 08:46 PM