How to Assess a Candidate’s French When You Don’t Speak French

A bilingual hire that goes wrong often follows the same script. The candidate interviews well in English, lists “bilingual” on the résumé, and then struggles the first time a client calls in French. The candidate was rarely lying. The problem is that nobody on the hiring side could test the one skill the role depended on.

Why “fluent” on a résumé is not enough

“Fluent,” “bilingual” and “conversational” are self-assessments, and people grade themselves very differently. Someone who took French through high school may write “bilingual” out of optimism. Someone who grew up in a French-speaking home may write “conversational” out of modesty. The word on the page does not tell you how the person will perform on the job.

French is also four separate skills, and a candidate can be strong in some and weak in others:

• Verbal comprehension: following a client or colleague speaking at natural speed, with regional accents and usage.
• Verbal expression: answering clearly and professionally, without long pauses.
• Written comprehension: reading an email, a form or a document and catching the detail.
• Written expression: producing French that a client or regulator will see, with correct grammar and register.

Someone can hold a relaxed conversation and still write French that embarrasses the company. The reverse happens too. Treating “French” as a single yes or no is where hiring errors start, and it is one reason qualified bilingual candidates are hard to find even when applications are plentiful.

Candidates who have worked in the federal public service may cite a Second Language Evaluation result such as “BBB” or “CBC”. Ask when it was taken and treat it as one input, not a verdict: those results describe reading, writing and oral interaction at the time of the test, in a government context, and they expire.

Match the test to the role

Decide what the job actually demands before you test anything. “Bilingual” means something different for a call-centre agent than for a legal assistant. Test what the job uses, not everything.

Four ways to screen without speaking French

1. Run part of the interview in French with a French-speaking evaluator in the room. A trusted bilingual colleague or an outside assessor can hold a short exchange and give you an honest read. You do not need to follow the words to notice hesitation, confidence and the evaluator’s reaction.
2. Set a short writing task. Ask for a written reply to a realistic scenario, such as a customer email, done live or timed in a supervised setting, and have a qualified French speaker review it for grammar, tone and professionalism.
3. Reference-check the language specifically. Ask former managers whether the candidate dealt with French-speaking clients directly and independently, not whether they were “bilingual” in general.
4. Treat recordings and apps as first filters only. Self-recorded clips and language apps can screen out obvious mismatches, but they do not reproduce a live, unscripted professional conversation and they rarely test job-specific vocabulary.

Whatever route you take, at some point a qualified French speaker has to evaluate the candidate directly. There is no reliable shortcut.

Where employers usually go wrong

• Testing the wrong competency: a casual phone chat for a role that is mostly written French, or the reverse.
• Taking the candidate’s self-rating as evidence rather than a starting point.
• Skipping the specialized vocabulary the job actually uses.
• Testing too late. Finding the gap after an offer, or on the first French client call, is the expensive version of this mistake, and it is worth weighing against what a bilingual recruitment agency costs.

How Beyond Bilingual assesses French

A qualified and experienced assessor conducts every oral French assessment we do, using behavioural interview questions in French and scoring how effectively the candidate communicates in a professional setting. For candidates presented for bilingual roles, we also use written language tests for written proficiency, with materials reviewed and approved by qualified and experienced individuals, and we assess English proficiency as the role requires. A candidate must meet our internal proficiency standards on that verbal assessment before we represent them for a bilingual opportunity.

To be precise about that standard: it is Beyond Bilingual’s internal screening threshold, our own bar for putting someone forward on a bilingual search. It is not a public or standardized certification and it is not a CEFR level. The CEFR is the Council of Europe’s six-level framework (A1 to C2) for describing language ability; ours is a separate internal standard applied to the candidates we present.

In practice the threshold takes the French verification off your desk. Candidates below the threshold are not put forward for bilingual roles, so the shortlist you see has already been assessed on the one competency you cannot judge yourself. Of the competitor employer pages we reviewed on 23 October 2026 (Bilingual Source, BilingualOne and Nevian), none published a comparable French-assessment threshold.

When a specialist is worth it

Keeping the assessment in-house is reasonable when you have a trusted, qualified French speaker on staff, the role’s language demands are modest and you hire occasionally. A specialist earns its place when the opposite is true: you hire bilingual roles regularly, the role carries real language risk (client-facing, regulated or document-heavy), or nobody internally can evaluate French with confidence. In those cases, outsourcing the assessment puts a qualified judgment where you do not have one.