Recruiters: 4 Reasons Not to Assess Your Candidates’ Language Skills Yourself

1. You could jeopardize equality

Recruiters wish to hire the very best candidates. However, the decisions they make at various points in the hiring process are frequently influenced by personal perceptions or unintentional biases, rather than based on objective evaluations.

Across your recruitment teams, if you leave the assessment of language skills to the discretion of individual recruiters' preferences, you may be confronted with profound differences of appreciation due to each recruiter's biases and prejudices. Especially if you have more than one recruiter in charge. In order to be able to rank your candidates and select the best, you need to assess them all on equal terms.

Recruiters can minimize such risks by utilizing data-driven language assessment solutions. They can seek the assistance of specialists who know how to address the elements that could jeopardize equality among candidates.

By doing so, recruiters will be able to identify potential candidates more accurately and make their recruitment process more effective. This will also ensure that their hiring process is fair and consistent. Taking steps to avoid intuition-based judgments and minimize inconsistencies will strengthen your employer branding and hiring process.

2. You might not assess all relevant skills

Often, oral proficiency is the only skill measured during a job interview. As a matter of fact, if the language assessment is left to the interviewer alone, it is possible for some skills (for example, writing) to be overlooked. Even so, both oral and written communication skills are often required in a variety of job roles, especially in customer service.

According to the authors of Performance-based assessment of expertise: How to decide if someone is an expert or not, experts are capable of perceiving and responding to subtle differences which a non-expert might overlook. In looking at language skills, non linguists can hardly distinguish between a good candidate and a great candidate.

Linguists are also more adept at evaluating all four areas of language proficiency using a professional standard: the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and identifying a level for each candidate faster than those with minimal experience.

The use of expert third-party language assessment solutions, especially those developed by linguistic experts, is a great way to ensure you do not overlook a step in the assessment process. An analysis of a candidate's written and verbal proficiency is made according to the CEFR, taking into account context, topics, tasks, as well as scaled descriptions of the communication competencies used here. Candidates are evaluated uniformly, ensuring consistency, by using a common framework.

3. You cannot ensure that all candidate are assessed

In the event that a prospective employer conducts a language assessment during the interview, it is possible that the candidate will not receive any meaningful language assessment.

As a result, alternative approaches must be adopted that strive to mitigate any inconsistencies as much as possible.

By adding a systematic step to the hiring process for language assessment, we ensure that all candidates have been subjected to the same procedure, which ensures an even procedure and that no candidate is overlooked during the selection process.

By keeping this in mind, you will be able to add more qualified candidates to your talent pipeline with greater objectivity.

4. You're probably wasting time

If fluency in another language is a requirement for a particular position, candidates should be assessed before an interview so that you can be certain they satisfy this requirement.

In the absence of assessment, you may find yourself wasting time interviewing candidates who do not meet the requirements of the position. Consequently, valuable time is lost that could have been resolved earlier in the application process.

Therefore, it is important to refrain from assessing language skills too late in the process.

Implementing an assessment strategy that automates a large number of the prerequisite elements of your recruitment process can help you achieve better accuracy without sacrificing time, and improve your HR process. Establishing objective methods of assessing language proficiency is one such strategy.

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Rather than relying on intuition, use objectivity and method. For this reason, Pipplet was founded. 

Using a solution created by linguistic specialists, you can assess the language skills of your candidates:

• Without wasting any time
• Systematically
• Applying the 4 dimensions of language proficiency
• Uniformly across all candidates

Ultimately, you will be able to dedicate your time more effectively to developing proactive talent pipelines, implementing lean recruiting strategies, and getting started on that project that has been in your backlog for some time.