When a role spans more than one country, some of its interviews won’t run in English. A sales hire for a team in Madrid might take the recruiter screen in Spanish and a case interview in English with a manager in London. If the interview language isn’t set in advance, each call settles it in the first minute, and the candidate can end up answering in their weaker language.

Answering in a weaker language, a candidate can come across as less capable than they are, and the interviewer can end up marking down their grammar instead of their answer.

A second problem comes at the debrief. If each interviewer writes up the interview in the language it ran in, the panel has to compare scorecards written in different languages, and not everyone on it can read them all.

If you’re the recruiter or hiring manager planning these interviews, I’d make the interview language part of the interview plan. Decide it for each interview before the invite goes out, as you decide who interviews and what they assess. I’d also score language skill separately from job skill, so a language the job needs is assessed in one interview and kept out of the scores for the rest.

Below are the decisions to make before each interview is booked, and how to write each one up so the whole panel can read it. After them come four checks to run on interviews you’ve already held.

Set the interview language before you book it.

Start with the interview plan for the role. Two questions set the language of each interview, and the language they settle goes into the invite.

The first question is which languages the job uses, and what for. Ask the hiring manager which languages the person will use at work, such as handling customer calls in Spanish or writing reports in German, and write the answer into the interview plan.

The second question is which language the candidate and the available interviewers both speak most comfortably. Check which languages your available interviewers speak, then ask the candidate which of those they’d prefer to interview in when you book the recruiter screen.

Use that shared language for every interview that isn’t assessing a language. A skills interview is there to find out what the candidate can do, and a weaker language gets in the way of showing it.

Here’s how the two answers set the language for each kind of interview:

In each invite, name the interview language, so the candidate knows what to expect. A candidate who knows the case interview is in English can prepare for it, and the call doesn’t open with a discussion about which language to use.

Our separate guide on “recruiting outreach in another language” covers how to settle the job’s languages with the hiring manager at intake, before any outreach goes to candidates.

Test a language only where the job uses it.

Here you decide which interview, if any, assesses language skill, and how it’s scored, so a candidate is judged on their language only where the job uses it.

If the role needs a language at work, add a separate language requirement to the scorecard, with criteria taken from the work. For a support role in Portuguese, that might be explaining a delayed refund to an upset customer, and writing a short reply to a complaint.

Give that requirement to one interview and one fluent interviewer. I’d run it as a short role-play inside an interview the candidate already has, so the language assessment doesn’t add a round to the process.

Score whether the candidate can follow what’s said and make themselves understood, at the level the job needs. An accent, or a spoken slip that doesn’t change the meaning, tells you nothing about whether they can do the work.

If the criteria include a written task, such as the reply to a complaint, the slips you’d let pass in speech can count in the writing, to the standard the job needs.

Everywhere else, keep language out of the score. Language tends to creep back in through a communication requirement, so define that requirement by what the job needs, such as explaining a technical decision to a manager outside engineering. Interviewers then score what the candidate said, and the language assessment covers how they said it.

Whether to assess a language comes up earlier too, on the screening call. That stage has its own guide on “screening candidates in more than one language.”

Put a fluent interviewer in every interview.

With each interview’s language set, staff the panel for it, and plan ahead for any language where you have no fluent interviewer.

Every interviewer needs to follow a fast answer in the interview’s language and ask a follow-up question in it. I’d expect an interviewer working in a language they’re less sure of to split their attention between the language and the answer, and their notes to show it.

When the hiring team has no fluent speaker of a language, and no colleague from another team can step in, you have two options. You can move the interview into a language the candidate shares with an available interviewer, and tell the candidate why. Or you can keep the candidate’s stronger language and bring in an interpreter.

An interpreter slows the conversation and puts their own words between you and the candidate. Brief the interpreter beforehand on what each question is assessing, and ask them to interpret each answer in full, since a summary drops the detail you’re scoring. Tell the candidate in the invite that an interpreter will join.

I wouldn’t ask a bilingual interviewer to interpret for a colleague and assess the candidate in the same interview. Doing both at once means one of the two gets done badly, and I’d expect the notes to suffer first.

Write scorecards the whole panel can read.

The interviews only help the decision if the panel can compare them, so write each one up with the debrief in mind.

Use the same requirements and the same rating scale for every interview for the role, in every language. The debrief then compares like with like, and the language requirement shows up once, on its own line.

If you need a scorecard to start from, we have a separate guide on an “interview scorecard template” you can adapt.

Write the scorecard in the language the hiring team will decide in, and note at the top which language the interview ran in. If an interpreter joined, note that too.

Quote the candidate’s key answers in the language they gave them, with your translation beside each one. A translation on its own loses detail, and a panel member who speaks the language can check it against the original.

In the debrief, ask each interviewer to walk the panel through that evidence before anyone argues for a decision. The panel members who don’t speak the language can then ask about an answer while the person who heard it is in the room.

Where Metaview fits.

Catching a candidate’s exact words, in the language they answered in, asks a lot of an interviewer who is also running the interview. Our Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Shahriar Tajbakhsh, has written about what a good interview takes out of the person running it:

That’s why I’d free the interviewer from note-taking. Metaview, the Agentic Recruiting Platform, does that through our Notetaker. On a video call, our Notetaker joins the interview as a visible participant. It records and transcribes what’s said, then turns the conversation into structured notes.

Recording happens only if consent is given, and the consent process is your team’s to set under your own policy and local law.

Our Notetaker supports more than 50 languages. The full list is in our “Metaview now supports 50+ languages” post.

In a language it supports, our Notetaker captures every spoken word, so the interviewer can write the scorecard afterward from what the candidate said.

For a recorded interview, the interviewer can take each quote from the transcript and add a translation beside it, so the panel reads the candidate’s own words.

Our 32-second video below shows the Notetaker taking interview notes, so the interviewer can stay with the conversation.

Check your last ten interviews held in a language other than English.

To see where your process stands, pull the scorecards from your last ten interviews held in a language other than English. If your scorecards don’t record the language, find those interviews through the invites or through the roles that span countries. Then run four checks on each:

• Does each scorecard say which language the interview ran in? If not, add that line to your scorecard template.
• Was the language named in the invite? If any interview’s language was settled on the call, add the language to the interview plan for each role.
• For a role that needs a language, was it scored once, as its own requirement, by a fluent interviewer? If it was folded into communication, split it out.
• Are the key answers quoted in the language the candidate used, with a translation beside them? If they’re translated only, ask interviewers to quote first and translate second.

Once every scorecard records its language, count how many interviews run in each language each quarter, and set that count beside the number of fluent interviewers you have for each one. That shows where you need more fluent interviewers.

The same count helps if you’re choosing a notetaker or transcription tool: check that every language you interview in is on the tool’s supported list.

If your scorecards fail more than one check, start with the language field. It’s one line on the scorecard template. Once it’s there, you can find every interview by its language. Then check for each role whether every interview ran and was scored the way you planned.