Help! The Job Center has scheduled a phone call in German to discuss my situation

If you’ve recently applied for ALGII, you’re probably getting lots of letters from the JobCenter. Under normal circumstances, they’d invite you to an in-person interview to discuss your work situation, and it would be compulsory to attend. But these are not normal times.

If you get a letter from the JobCenter scheduling a telephone interview, you can book Life Admin and have an interpreter on the line with you while you talk to them. Here’s how it works:

1. You’ll get the letter about 10-14 days in advance of the scheduled phone call. Book Life Admin and let us know the date and time of your telephone interview with the Agentur für Arbeit or JobCenter. Give us at least a few business days’ notice so we can make sure someone is free.
2. We schedule a Life Admin interpreter to join you online (Skype, Google Meets or Zoom – your choice)
3. 5 minutes before your call is scheduled to take place, we’ll jump online and do a quick sound check with you.
4. There’s a chance your caseworker won’t call at exactly the allotted time. They might tell you to be available within a 60-minute window. So, we will leave the video call with you running but we’ll turn our video off and mute our sound while we wait. When your caseworker calls your phone, we’ll hear it straight away and unmute the audio.
5. You only use the time at which we were scheduled to meet (5 minutes before your call is scheduled) until the time the call is finished. If that doesn’t take a full hour, you can keep the rest of your Life Admin time in credit for later. If it turns out that your caseworker speaks fluent English and doesn’t need our presence, we’ll leave you to it and stop charging you. Generally, these calls take around 20-30 minutes.

I can’t take phone calls

If you don’t have a reliable phone connection (or you aren’t in Germany!), book Life Admin and then use this template to send an e-mail to your caseworker asking him/her to call the Red Tape Translation landline instead. Your Life Admin assistant will be standing by.

Sehr geehrter Herr/Frau (your job search agent’s last name here – you’ll find it on the letter they sent you scheduling the call),

How much does Life Admin cost?