Interviewing in your second language

In Tunisia, English increasingly decides interviews: offshore centres serving the UK and the US, software companies, startups with foreign investors, and remote roles for companies outside the country.

And the candidate who fails is almost never the one whose English is weak. It is the one who knows their field in French and is being asked about it in English.

That is good news, because that particular problem can be fixed in a few hours.

The real problem is not your level

You can greet someone, talk about your studies, describe your background. The block comes later: explaining why you chose an architecture, what a join is, how you handled an unhappy customer.

You learned those things in French or Arabic. The English word was never needed. And it goes missing at exactly the point where the interview gets interesting.

Make the list. Take the ten technical terms you would inevitably use to describe your project or your job, and look them up in English. Ten words. It is the highest-return preparation on this page.

What the interviewer is actually assessing

They are not marking your grammar. They are answering an operational question: can this person hold a meeting, write an email to a client, follow an instruction over the phone?

So what they watch is:

Do you understand first time? More important than production. A candidate who needs things repeated three times worries them more than one with limited vocabulary.

Do you stay understandable under pressure? Simple, correct sentences beat complex, wobbly ones every time.

Can you unblock yourself? Working around a word you do not have is a genuine professional skill, and it shows.

Your accent, on the other hand, does not count. Nobody expects a British accent in a service centre in Tunis. They expect to be understood.

The phrases that rescue the interview

Learn these by heart, until they come out without thinking. They all buy you three seconds without making you look lost.

Asking for a repeat, without apologising:

"Sorry, could you say that again?" · "Could you rephrase that?"

Buying time:

"That's a good question — let me think for a second." · "Let me give you an example."

Working around a missing word:

"I don't know the exact word in English, but it's the part that..." · "It's similar to..."

Checking you understood:

"Just to make sure I understood — you're asking about...?"

That last one is the most useful of all. It turns the risk of answering the wrong question into evidence that you listen.

Preparing, concretely

Rehearse your opening out loud, in English, five times. The first ninety seconds set the impression, and it is the only part of the interview you know in advance. It should be fluent.

Rehearse describing your project or your current role. That is where the technical vocabulary runs out.

Listen to English spoken at real speed in the days before — podcasts, videos from your sector. The ear tunes quickly and drifts quickly.

Do not script your answers word for word. A memorised text is audible, and it collapses at the first question that deviates. Prepare points, not sentences — except for the phrases above.

During the interview

Slow down. The instinct under stress is to speed up, and that is what makes people hard to follow.

Keep sentences short. One point per sentence.

If you lose yourself mid-sentence, stop and restart: "Sorry, let me start that again." Native speakers do it constantly.

And if the interview opens in French and switches to English halfway through — common here, and a deliberate test — take a second before answering. That second costs you less than three hesitant sentences.

The only practice that counts

Reading about it will not get you through an interview in English. You have to have answered out loud, in English, to questions you did not choose.

That is what Talk2Hire is for: you pick the language of the interview, and the questions, your answers and the report are all in it. Do one in French, then the same subject in English — the gap between the two is exactly the work you have left.

Read next: the first ninety seconds and internship and final-year project interviews.