How Tabby unified English and Arabic hiring and screened 34,919 candidates to one standard

Tabby is the buy-now-pay-later leader of the Middle East, valued above $4.5 billion, hiring customer-facing staff across the UAE, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia as it wins new lending licenses and scales. A large share of those candidates work in Arabic. Its previous tool, TestGorilla, had thin English content and could not test Arabic at all, so Arabic-speaking candidates, half the pipeline, were effectively judged on instinct while hiring volume climbed across markets.

Rather than settle for off-the-shelf content, Tabby built its own assessments: a custom Tabby English Test and a custom Tabby Arabic Test, each held to a bar Tabby designed. Those two have carried the program, used 23,078 and 21,618 times. Because these are talking roles, screening is spoken-first. Of roughly 890,000 question attempts across eight formats, 354,549 were recorded audio answers, so recruiters hear how a candidate handles a live conversation in the language they will work in, not how they click through a quiz. Everything runs inside Tabby's Pinpoint ATS, so candidates are auto-invited as they move through hiring stages and recruiters never leave their workflow. When Arabic threw up edge cases, right-to-left typing display and CEFR scoring, Testlify shipped fixes so the Arabic bar stayed as reliable as the English one.

In its ramp cycle Tabby invited 34,919 candidates and completed 21,725 of them, 62 percent, to the same standard in both languages. Recruiters now get a full, comparable read across English and Arabic instead of a strong English screen and an Arabic blind spot. What began on a 20-seat rollout now runs across a talent-acquisition team of more than 60 users, and Tabby expanded the program twice inside its first year to cover its Saudi Arabia hiring push. The bilingual standard is now the default way Tabby screens for customer-facing roles across the region.