Are language skills tested during OCI interviews? Forum

[Anonymous User]

just learned this on MPRE, regarding advertising and other public communication about legal services, lawyer's foreign language ability "gotta be fluent" said by the lecturer. Guess if you are not fluent in that foreign language they can't really advertise it, then putting an intermediate level language on your resume is not gonna help them eventually.

[gnomgnomuch]

no way, keep it off unless you're fluent

That seems a bit excessive. I've been offered jobs because I have conversational mastery in Russian. However, my written is nonexistent and my reading is maybe that of an 8th grader. I put advanced intermediate on my resume and when I was asked about it, I explained them what it meant. I was then tested on it (they wanted me to hold a conversation about the job in Russian). It happened twice - two different jobs - and both times the interviewer was more than ok with my level.

The one time it got tricky was when I was given some documents in Russian to translate into English - by a lady who didn't interview me, so she didn't know that I wasn't the person to do that - I explained it to her and she apologized and said don't worry about it.

I think you just have to be explicit about what your level actually is. If you list yourself as fluent or whatever, be prepared to prove that you actually possess the language skills.

(this is not for law school or law related jobs btw.)

Semantics

I think you're reading into that too much.

Colloquial meaning of the word "fluent" + the context of this makes it seem more likely that by "fluent," he meant "able to hold a conversation." I think the point was, "if you can't speak in an interview setting, don't bother putting it on there." Not "if you can't perfectly speak, read, and write on a technical level, don't put it on your resume."

Maybe, but if I'm interviewing someone for a position and their resume says "fluent" i'm assuming full proficiency, including reading and writing.

I mean, are you gonna pull out an agreement written in Cyrillic for them to read during the interview?

Depending on the job, I wouldn't think it's totally out of line. At the very least I'd want to have a technical conversation about the job and its duties. To be sure, that would be on the extreme side, but my job involves community outreach and a lot of interaction with Russians and some handling of bank statements/SSN/passports/birth certificates and documents of that nature. I've often had to translate English documents into Russian for them. We don't serve only Russians, but a lot of them, and having Russian is a HUGE plus for when we're looking to hire. If you put "Russian" on your resume, then at a minimum we'd expect you to be able to do that type of work.