My roommate has a phone interview today for an SA position with a well known French bank. In the position description it says they prefer candidates that are fluent in another language. He only knows a small amount of Spanish from high school.
Anyone have suggestions on how he can spin this to a positive if they ask in the interview?
He wants to be up front with them about it which I don't agree with.
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He should be as upfront as they ask him to be during the interview? As in if they ask do you speak Spanish-then yes. If they ask how well then be honest
My favourite: Guy says he's fluent in Madarin. Nailed the first round, second round interviews; walks in, sits down, interviewer addresses him in Mandarin, guy replies shakily, interviewer continues to ask question in Mandarin, guy is stumped. Third or fourth question from the interviewer is to the effect of "you don't speak Mandarin do you, I guess we're done here". Dinged.
My response in interview was that my Spanish is worse than my French, and my French is currently pretty weak from a lack of use, but should recover as I use it more frequently. Managed passible French in interview and carried on.
Since he learned this in high school my guess is he doesn't know Spanish. The question is what is on his resume? If he put fluent, then, yeah, you screwed.
There's nothing on his resume about him knowing any type of language besides English
Don't mention anything about languages upfront unless it gets brought up. If it does get brought up, be honest. Maybe mention an interest in taking Spanish courses later in college to advance your knowledge of the langauge if that seems like something the interviewer would like to hear.
He should definitely not lie about his language level - I have that I speak Arabic at an intermediate level on my resume, and I had a superday interviewer who was Palestinian who came in early before one of my superday interviews started and started speaking Arabic. They will test you, especially if it says they want you to be fluent in another language.
So? Did he agree that you were intermediate?
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