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The job interview when your experience comes from another country

Ubuntu Canarias · 7 min read

A man who spent fifteen years working in the electrical trade walks into an interview for a maintenance position at a hotel in Maspalomas. His CV is well prepared, he knows what he's done. And yet he leaves feeling he hasn't managed to explain anything.

This isn't a real case with a name attached, but it's a pattern that comes up so often in job-orientation sessions that it could almost be called problem number one: it's not that experience is missing, it's that this experience hasn't been translated into a language the interviewer can understand and value.

There are several layers to this, and it's worth separating them, because they tend to get mixed up.

The layer of technical vocabulary

If someone has worked as an electrician in Senegal, Colombia or Morocco, the names of the tools, the regulations, even the name of the trade itself, may not match exactly what's used here. That doesn't mean the training doesn't count. It means there's preparation work to do beforehand, almost like translating: being able to say "what I used to call X there, here is called Y, and this is exactly what I did." In practice, that work is almost never done before the interview, because nobody warns that it's needed.

The cultural layer

In Spain, and particularly in the Canary Islands, job interviews — especially in sectors like hospitality, retail or services, which do most of the hiring here — tend to be fairly informal conversations. There's no panel sitting across a table, and often there aren't even written questions prepared in advance. For someone used to more formal selection processes, with written tests or several rounds, that relaxed tone can read as the company not taking things seriously, and it can create a wariness that sometimes shows in body language, in short answers, in not elaborating. And the opposite of what's needed happens: the shorter and more guarded the answer, the less the interviewer has to go on.

Language as a filter for trust, not competence

There are people whose Spanish or English is more than good enough for the job, who still hold back in the interview out of fear of making a grammar mistake. The problem is that this silence is almost always read as insecurity about the job itself, not about the language. The interviewer can't read minds, and can't tell "I don't fully master Spanish" apart from "I'm not sure I know how to do this." It all blurs together.

What can actually be prepared before an interview

There's no formula, and any generic list of tips ends up sounding like a motivational course. But there are concrete things that do change the outcome.

Preparing out loud, not just mentally, the answers to the questions that almost always come up: "tell me about yourself," "why do you want to work here," "what experience do you have," "what's your availability." Practising them out loud — even alone, at home — helps far more than going over them mentally, because the body gets used to forming the whole sentence, not just the idea.

Turning experience into concrete numbers and tasks, not categories. "I have experience in administration" says very little. "I handled billing for a twelve-person company, managed orders and followed up on payments" says a lot more, and it also opens the door to questions the candidate can answer confidently, because it's about something they actually did.

Anticipating the question about qualification recognition or degree homologation, if it applies, and having a short, calm answer ready. There's no need to justify or apologise if the process is still underway; it's enough to explain where things stand without giving it more weight than it has.

It's fine to ask for a question to be repeated, or to say "give me a second to think about that in Spanish." That doesn't take away from professionalism. What takes away from professionalism is not understanding the question and answering something unrelated.

What doesn't depend on preparation

Some interviews just won't go well, and not always because of something the candidate did or didn't do. Some companies are looking for very specific profiles, some processes already have someone lined up internally, and some days the interviewer is simply having a bad day, which colours everything and has nothing to do with the person sitting across from them. Recognising this isn't giving up — it's what stops every failed interview from being read as a personal failure, because it usually isn't.

Job hunting in a new country has a learning curve that almost nobody explains in advance. It's learned interview by interview, and some of the best adjustments — how to tell your experience, when to bring up the language, how to handle silences — happen after several, not before the first one.