How to assess the English, Spanish, and German language skills of your next recruit

Pipplet • 10 novembre 2021

Europe continues to be the largest single economy in the world, with 500 million consumers. For businesses that want to reach this potentially massive audience for their goods or services, communicating with customers and commercial partners in their own language is critical to their long term profitability.


English, Spanish, and German are some of the most spoken languages in Europe: Around 46 million people speak Spanish, 79 million speak German, and 212 million speak English across Europe and it is considered the unofficial de facto second language. For businesses, considering the regions and geography of their customer bases is vital to ensure they can reach these audiences in their own languages.


Businesses looking towards their post-pandemic future need to pay close attention to how they will communicate. Having a multilingual workforce is no longer an aspiration but a commercial necessity. Brand loyalty and, critically, brand advocacy are closely linked to language and the experiences consumers have when they buy from brands.

Language matters

The way businesses are organizing their workforce is leading to a new approach to recruitment. Figures from Thomas International are stark, with 99% of respondents to their survey stating they needed to improve the quality of their recruitment processes. 80% also believe technology will play a key role in how their businesses evolve, how they find, and how they recruit future employees.


As business is now transacted globally, your enterprise may have or is planning to expand with new overseas offices. Having a workforce that can staff these regional offices with the right language proficiency level should be a prerequisite. 


Also, employees with customer-facing roles must have the language skills they need. As we have seen, there is an advantage to communicating with your customers in their own language.


Research from Mastercard has shown that one of the pandemic's impacts on businesses was to drive them to expand into international markets. Nearly three-quarters of the small businesses that responded stated that transacting abroad was a lifeline, with 66% increasing sales to overseas customers. A vital component of this success and the continued profitability of international trading will always be communications and, vitally, communications in a customer's own language.

Proficiency equals more business

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A workforce that has language proficiency is an invaluable resource a business can use to communicate with customers and commercial partners. Also, with English, German and Spanish being some of the most popular second languages to learn, enterprises need to be sure that the people they hire have a sufficient level of proficiency in the languages they claim to speak. This will ensure your company doesn't waste time and resources on a worker that can't fulfill their tasks. Services like Pipplet offer a one-stop-shop to deliver language proficiency testing at every stage of your recruitment process.


According to research from the US Department of Labor, the cost of hiring the wrong person can be as high as 30% of their first year’s salary. CareerBuilder also put the cost at $14,900, with 74% admitting to hiring the wrong person for their vacancy. With these high figures, it's critical that when your vacancies have a language proficiency component, the people who apply can have their language proficiency tested.


As HR increasingly embraces more digital tools, automating language proficiency testing is now possible. Also, as recruitment has had to take place at a distance and looks set to remain like this for some time, using a language testing solution built for remote assessments and that is efficient to send could save your business time and money by avoiding a bad hire.


The power of the Pipplet approach to language proficiency testing is the versatility of the system. If your business receives a high number of applicants for a vacancy, automating the language testing component will be pivotal. 


Oral and written communication skills can be tested in a wide range of languages, including English, Spanish and German – all with an allocated CEFR score to ensure each assessment is structured and comparable.


Ensuring your business has language proficiency with English, Spanish, and German is critical. With collectively nearly half a billion people speaking these languages alone, your business must ensure key workforce members have proficiency in these languages. 


And if you have ambitions to expand your organization into Europe, new recruits must be tested for their language proficiency. So today and in your post-pandemic future, language support is now a key component of your business’s success, but are you confident you are properly testing for language proficiency?

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