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Your Everyday English Programme #7 - College Students' Job Interview Mistakes (Listening B2) |
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| One Common Job Interview Question |
Many students studying in an English-speaking country want to apply and prepare to interview for a job. In this post, we're focusing on common mistakes that college students make when interviewing for a new job, and some English expressions that are frequently used during a job interview.
Let's begin :)
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Think Before You Listen |
Speak to an English-speaking friend or share your experiences with us in the comments:
1) Have you ever applied for a job and been rejected at the interview stage? What do you think possibly went wrong in the interview?
2) What measures can you take to make sure you successfully pass an interview and land the job?
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Watch and Listen |
Liz Wessel, a former Google employee, mentions two of the biggest mistakes college students make in a job interview: What do you think the mistakes are?
Listen and take a note of the mistakes: 1) 2)
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Time to Practice |
Listen again to Liz Wessel (without looking at the video script) and write the missing words1 below on a piece of paper (notice that each blank is one word):
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One very big mistake that I’ve seen a lot of young people make:
Actually, I was with a Google HR person recently and she was telling me that this is one of the more common ones that __________ ___________ make:
Most people don’t realize that they should follow up as soon as possible.
So I have this acronym I like to tell people, especially college students: REAF > It’s Research, have Enthusiasm, ______ ___________, and Follow up.
Very commonly an interviewer is going to write a scorecard. They’re going to write their _________ about the interview, pretty soon after the interview is done. And so, you should follow up as soon after, like that day, if possible, as soon as you can. And I would say: don’t just wait till the next day because you’re _________ about seeming too desperate.
You should be following up and saying, “Dear [blank], Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. Here are __ _____ _________ I learned.” or “It was really interesting talking to you about X. Here’s a book I suggest based on that.”
Whatever it might be, but I can’t say enough: follow up as soon after the interview as you can.
Not asking questions: that’s another really big one. So commonly, college students will do either a lot of __________ and maybe they do no research or maybe they’re just nervous and they don’t think that they need to ______ __________. But some companies will even reject you if you just don’t ask questions, which I know sounds insane and brutal, but it’s actually true.
I have many friends whose companies just will flat-out __________ you. So why you should ask questions?
First of all, it just shows that you actually are ___________ and that you want to learn. But it’s also going to be good for you because you’re going to learn more about whatever you want to learn about.
So, I’m saying ask questions at the end, but not questions that are _________ to, “So, when do I start?” or “What’s the salary?” I’m talking about questions like, “What makes a rock star a rock star at your company?”
I like when people ask me things like, “How do you spend your _____ ___ _____?”
There’s tons of questions that you can really extract a lot of great information about; so, I can’t __________ it enough: ask questions because not enough college students do.
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Over to You |
Would you like to find out if you would pass an interview in English and get the job that you want? Click these links for the most common English job interview Q & A's: ONE - TWO - THREE
Thank you for joining us on another Engramme post. We hope this will be useful to your future job interviews. Click HERE for a full transcript of the video + highlighted words from the exercises above.
You are a teacher and would like to use this in your class? Click HERE to download a pdf copy.
1 Why this exercise? This kind of 'listening gap-fill' activity is designed so that you can improve your ability to listen for 'specific key words or expressions' that are known to cause difficulty for many learners of English. These tasks are also a regular part of some international English language tests such as IELTS.↩
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