Why Full Cycle Recruitment Should Include Language Proficiency

The talent gap has been widening for several years. The language proficiency gap is widening even faster. As business accelerates and broadens its geographical reach, language proficiency testing becomes even more critical to build into your enterprise's onboarding process.

For instance, after English, the Sino-Tibetan languages (which have nearly a billion speakers) account for 14% of the world's population. Hindi is the fifth most spoken language in the world. Is your business communicating effectively with this massive potential customer base?

The former director of global initiatives at Starbucks, Herman Uscategui, made the bold statement: "Advanced language skills provide the foundation to trusted relationships with customers, communities, and partners. With those skills, we are able to enhance and maintain our connection with current markets and develop new ones fully aware of local customer needs and requirements.”

Locating the right people with the correct language skills is a commercial imperative. The issue facing many businesses, though, is how to assess the claimed language skills of applicants.

How global trade is changing also has a language component. As trade shifts increasingly to China, for instance, language skills become a major asset. The challenge facing business leaders is to not only locate potential employees but to test their language abilities. Indeed, the Making Languages Our Business report concludes, only about a third (37%) of the businesses they contacted that need multiple language support actually assess the language skills of applicants.

Kordilia Foxstone, Founder of Language Academia, also points out that recruiters need the services of a professional language proficiency tester to identify candidates who may seem to have the language skills required, but in reality do not as they have simply passed a language test before making their application. “From personal experience, I can say that the only way to be confident in the language skills of a candidate is to test the person themselves. My school has a dedicated course that targets passing tests. I promise you those students can pass any test with the highest score, but they do not know the language even to talk about the weather.”

There is a clear correlation between the language skills a business has available and its ability to trade profitably. Focusing on the US, The Making Languages Our Business report concludes that about one-quarter of all respondents say their organization could not pursue or has lost business in the past three years due to a lack of foreign language skills (23%). That figure more than doubles (50%) for employers that report a foreign language skills gap within their organization.

Says Matthew Davies, author of The Trust Triangle: How to Manage Humans at Work: “The number one challenge is to first accept that recruiters are not linguists. Their analysis of the candidate’s proficiency can vary greatly.  They are in a pressured role which means they may allow someone into the process who ordinarily would not be proficient enough, just to increase the pool of candidates.”

Davies concluded: “As a former HR Director, that can waste a lot of time. The application process usually asks the applicant to judge their own proficiency and that can be wildly off the mark. But once again, if not challenged by the recruiter, that will be distrust with the process itself. Pipplet is an independent test which means bias is overcome and more expertise is brought to bear on the process.”

What is abundantly clear is that all businesses must raise their language proficiency testing to the next level. Language proficiency testing services are now available that HRs can easily integrate into their recruiting systems.