How do I prepare for a job interview in English when it's not my first language?

1. Pick the likely questions

• Common questions: Tell me about yourself, Why this company?, Why are you leaving your current job?, strengths and weaknesses
• Behavioral questions starting with "Tell me about a time you…": conflict, failure, priorities, leadership
• Role questions: one for each requirement in the job posting
• Paste the job posting into an AI like ChatGPT and ask for likely questions to get started fast.

2. Write up your experience in English

Instead of a script for every question, write short English notes on about five projects from your resume, as situation, action and result. Most behavioral questions can be answered by rotating through those five.

Numbers and names are where people stall in a second language, so write them down and read them out loud.

3. Do mock interviews out loud

• Practice over video with a friend or a study group. On your own, have ChatGPT's voice mode play the interviewer.
• Record yourself and listen back to find where you hesitate and which filler words you repeat.
• Answer the same question three times, shorter each time.

4. Phrases for when you didn't catch it

Asking again doesn't cost you points. Mishearing the question and giving a long answer to something else does.

• Could you repeat the question, please?
• Just to make sure I understand, are you asking about …?
• That's a good question. Let me think for a moment.

Practicing with SpeechShield

Set the interview language to English and do a mock interview: SpeechShield transcribes the interviewer and shows English talking points from your resume. Turn on answer translation to add a translation in your language under each answer (Pro and Max), and conversation translation to add one under what the interviewer says. Afterwards, go over the questions and answers in your history and fix the weak ones.