Multilingual Recruitment: How Shopify Was Able to Expand its International Operations Thanks to Pipplet

In the post-COVID-19 business landscape, providing multilingual support is no longer just a plus – it is a must for every business. Now more than ever, companies need to be able to communicate with every single customer in their own language. But, how can a company ensure that they can provide quality support in several languages without having a staff that speaks all the required languages? This is a challenge that Shopify has sought to tackle by using Pipplet. 

Shopify is an all-in-one commerce platform that allows users to quickly launch businesses and sell products to customers both online and offline. In 2018, Shopify started using Pipplet, making it possible for their English-based recruitment team to hire employees for roles in languages that they could not speak, understand, or otherwise assess on their own. 

Key Figures:

• created in 2006
• employees: over 7,000
• customers: millions of merchants
• turnover: 2.9 billion U.S. dollars (2020)
• nearly 800 candidates assessed with Pipplet in 13 languages (2021) 

Melissa Hurley, a recruitment manager at Shopify, talks about her experience with Pipplet and how the tool has greatly improved Shopify’s recruitment process for multilingual support-related roles. 

Serving the new challenges of a fast-growing digital business 

Right from the start, Shopify has been seen as a promising company. But the growth, which was already strong in its early days became meteoric with the explosion of e-commerce after 2010.

Before the shift towards scaling multilingual support for merchants, support in languages outside of English was offered by support staff hired for English roles who also happened to be multilingual. 

“While this was a suitable solution on a small scale, as Shopify has continued to grow there's been an ever-increasing desire and need to support merchants outside of English-only support,” Melissa remembers.

For this reason, the recruitment team sought out a functional means to enable easy communication with their merchants around the globe. The challenge was to find strong support staff who could not just read fluently, but also communicate and write fluently in the language hired to support. “We started with English support. Then, it moved to French and Spanish support. In 2018, as a response to the ever-growing demand from our merchants for support in additional languages, the next step was to begin building out multilingual teams up to offer the same high level of support that Shopify's been known for. We took the step to make the team official to support our more merchants worldwide,” explains Melissa. 

“The problem we were trying to solve was how to ensure that we are hiring someone who can adequately represent the company and support the merchants properly in the language they are hired for.” It was against this backdrop, in 2018, that Shopify first heard about Pipplet. 

A solution that supports Shopify’s scalability 

As an e-commerce platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, Shopify has to communicate with business owners from around the world. 

“In 2018, we made a promise to our new international merchants that we're going to give them top-notch quality level support that we already offer in English. It was a big challenge. Pipplet helped us build that trust.”

“Now the customer support team is located in almost all parts around the globe, including Ireland, Canada, and New Zealand.”

• Assess candidates in 10+ languages 

Melissa remembers the constant improvements of the tool since they started using it back in 2018: “You guys have been really great at expanding your language selection. I do remember that, at the beginning, there were some language gaps. But, you guys heard that loud and clear, and the language base that we can choose from has continued to expand and meets our needs adequately.”

“Today we test candidates with Pipplet in 13 languages including French, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Brazil Portuguese, Dutch, German, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Danish, Swedish, and occasionally Turkish.”

“Our multilingual teams have been a very quickly growing team over the last few years…. This year, we have sent a large increase from last year. If you go from 2018, when we signed up [to Pipplet] to now, the usage has gone up dramatically.”

• Making recruiter’s life easier, including decision-making

Pipplet’s seamless design makes it easy to assess hundreds of candidates without a hitch. “In 2018 we used another tool to fill in the language gaps until Pipplet but, Pipplet is by far a top competitor. It's seamless, a very low lift for the recruiters, and a very hands-off process,” she says. 

According to Melissa, one of the biggest benefits of the tool is that it allows her to have a consistent measure of success that would serve as an evaluation standard for all candidates.

“It [Pipplet] is very consistent and one of the biggest benefits is, we have a very specific tool that we can go back and say, ‘here's a consistent measure of success that we're gonna hold all of our candidates to in terms of a standard of evaluation. And it allows for consistency in that – consistent, informed decision-making.”

As a recruitment manager in a fast-growing company, Melissa also enthuses over one particular detail: “Your support. It's been so good! I've dealt with a lot of different tools and you guys have been top-notch in terms of how those relationships can go.” 

An assessment tool that serves the candidates’ experience

Melissa Hurley reveals that curating a state-of-the-art experience for candidates ensures that the company gets hands-on experts to meet merchants' language needs. According to her, the candidate experience offered by Pipplet blends well with Shopify and the reflection that they want to have on the world. 

“We're very human-centered and human-focused. We never want to have additional friction for our candidates. We want to make sure that we can highlight what to expect from them very clearly, that we can make things smooth for them. They're applying to us for a role, but we're also applying to them as a company. And so, we want that to be reflected in how we curate their experiences,” she says.

Shopify particularly appreciates Pipplet's approach to making the experience on the digital platform as seamless as possible. 

“All the feedback I get from candidates mention that the test is well-designed and pleasant. Which is an added value to the experience we want to offer to all our candidates throughout the hiring process at Shopify.” 

Pipplet’s take on Shopify's challenges

Ensuring a seamless customer experience can be a real challenge for digital services expanding globally. That’s why the mission of recruitment teams is pivotal. Thanks to solutions like Pipplet, HR specialists and recruiters in fast-growing companies can enjoy faster validation on candidates' oral and written fluency, even in languages they don’t speak, and thus make better hiring decisions. 

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If you would like to enjoy all of the above benefits, visit our website and get in touch with us today and let’s discuss how we can integrate effective language skills testing into your recruitment process.

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