Interviewing in a second language, and why nobody is scoring your accent

The person across the table already knows this is not your first language: it was audible in ten seconds. That is not what they are trying to find out. What they need to know fits into four checks, and all four are about your work.

What is not being measured, and this is where the anxiety goes: the accent does not score. Neither does the perfect tense. You can get it wrong twenty times and still be the strongest application at the table.

What does damage is answering a different question from the one you were asked. That does not read as a language problem, it reads as not listening, and it is what the sentences below fix.

Language courses prepare you for the airport. That does not come up in an interview: what comes up are the thirty or forty words of your own trade, four times an hour. Preparing them is one evening.

You do not have to invent the list: it is in the job ad. An ad is a glossary the company wrote. Underline the nouns that repeat and write them with the term the sector uses, not the dictionary's.

There is a one-minute test: say out loud, in the other language and with nothing written down, what you did at work last week. Underline wherever you stop.

The real fear is not the accent, it is the blank: you miss the question and ten seconds go by. That is fixed with material, not with level. Five sentences learned by heart, in the language of the interview, as single blocks.

None of this counts against you, and it is the hardest part to believe: asking for a question to be repeated reads as care, not as a lack of level. Whoever checks before answering checks before shipping an order.

What does show is the frequency. Twice in an hour is not remembered; eight times is another conversation, and past that the honest move is to name it.

The most expensive mistake of the preparation is this: writing the answer in your language, running it through a translator and learning it. What comes out is a text, and a text is audible. And it collapses at the follow-up: you memorised an essay, not a story.

Here is how it comes out, said by someone who ran a warehouse: «I was in charge of the stock in a warehouse with forty delivery points. We were losing product every week. I started counting the fridge every Monday and writing down what was missing. In one year the waste went from six per cent to five.»

Four sentences, not one subordinate clause, and three nouns doing all the work: stock, waste, delivery points. Not one adjective about herself. The number lands at the end and lands bare, which is how it survives.

The rule is one line long and has no comfortable exceptions: the language of the application is the language of the ad. Whoever does the first pass is rarely the hiring manager, and a document in another language makes them do extra work.

That check is the first thing BeSuix does when you paste an ad: a cheap model detects which language it is written in. If it does not match the language you write your applications in, the form stops and asks which one you want the documents in. The choice is saved on that application and carried into everything that comes out of it: CV, cover letter, script, interview prep, questions and emails.

Two details matter. The analysis you read is written in your own language even when the documents come out in another, and the ad's keywords stay literal, as they were. What does not exist, and it should be said: no spoken practice, no audio and no pronunciation correction.

The CV says B2 and the interview says something else, both ways: some write fluent and cannot hold five minutes, some write intermediate after three years working in that language daily. Both do damage.

Then the hard case, when the language is the requirement and not a nuance. An ad asking for fluent Dutch in a role whose documentation is in Dutch is not asking for a nice-to-have: it is a wall, one of the four things that genuinely rule you out, with location, the right to work and a mandatory qualification.

There the only thing that works is saying where you are. «I have been here five years and I work in a Dutch-speaking environment, I understand a lot and I get by, but I am not fluent» is an answer, not an excuse. If they call you, they call you knowing.

The reverse is worth as much. When the working language is English and the local one is only desirable, that blocks nothing. «I am eight months into an intensive course and I would not put it on a CV yet as a working language» is exact, and it rules nobody out.