DWB : "It was necessary to guarantee a quick result and a flexibility for the candidates" 

Image credit: Doctors Without Borders

The NGO, Doctors Without Borders, recruits Volunteers to intervene in international contexts. Fluency in foreign languages ​​is an everyday necessity. For several months, the association has selected its candidates through Pipplet.

Marc Ferrier, Head of Recruitment Service of Doctors Without Borders in Paris, answered our questions.

Mastery of languages ​​at DWB is a work element, which conditions team life and can have an impact on team safety.
MSF operates in many countries where people live in crisis situations. In many of our missions, the language of work and life is English. It is essential for our response to crises and emergency situations that our pools consist of people with a certain mastery of the languages ​​used (French and English).
In addition, our teams are international and from around the world. Community life and day-to-day work are therefore very often carried out in the English language.
(repetitive) Furthermore, DWB intervenes in many contexts of war where the evolution of the situation must be understood by everyone. Each person in the field is partially responsible for the management of security, and it is then essential to understand, without difficulty, the information exchanged formally or informally in the situation. Mastering the language of the mission then becomes part of team security.
Not mastering the language of the mission for an expat can lead to a situation of isolation from the rest of the team and the experience of participating in a humanitarian mission, which must be a very rewarding human and professional experience, can turn into a real nightmare.

Our recruiting team consists of 5 people who each assess candidates' English levels. Two teams are also located in Africa and the Middle East to recruit in these two regions.
Even if we had a common understanding of what the new expatriate's level of English should be, the assessment, which was only oral, remained dependent on everyone and could thus be questioned. In addition, the ability to write remained unrated.
We therefore needed an evaluation system that also took into account the written level of the candidates and guarantees us a real homogenization between the candidates by using the European framework.
This evaluation had to meet our time constraint: our recruitment process should not be negatively affected by its duration. It was therefore necessary to guarantee a quick result and a flexibility for the candidates to pass the test without constraint.
Pipplet allowed us to adapt some questions to the particular context of DWB and our recruitment, which was a plus.
We also sometimes need to evaluate the levels of other languages: French, Arabic, Italian, ... as part of our operations.

The implementation of Pipplet tests allowed us to have a real approach to the assessment of language levels beyond our initial intentions.
In fact, DWB is made up of 25 sections around the world, each of which recruits volunteers to participate in our interventions.
Harmonization is therefore now on the broader scope of our sections, and our offices in New York, Tokyo and Dubai have already joined us.ur partners in Switzerland and in Germany are also thinking about acquiring this method.
Today, the Pipplet evaluation allows us to examine our requirements more precisely, and the flexibility given by Pipplet allows us to consider more refined evaluations according to our specific needs in the near future.

The most valuable of Pipplet’s evaluation from the beginning were the following:

• The flexibility left to the candidate to take his assessment with great freedom, without appointment, at any time.
• The speed of the results: under 24h
• The possibility of organizing our platform according to our internal organization
• The possibility of having more detailed results, if necessary, in certain cases (to define the training, for example)
• The wide range of languages ​​that can be evaluated
• The responsiveness and availability of Pipplet's technical support
• Adaptability to our international context

[EDIT]: originally published in 2018, this article was updated on October 31, 2021