Your Business should Develop an Effective Multilingual Assessment Process

From an HR perspective, the pandemic has had a marked impact. According to research from Sage, over half (60%) of HR professionals have seen their strategic and administrative workloads increase over the last year. Also, 67% of HR leaders want to invest more in HR tech in the future, but 36% see a lack of investment in HR from the company as a barrier. A third (31%) of HR leaders say a lack of HR tech in their organization is holding them back from entering into the new world of work.

How businesses acquire new talent is changing. Josh Bersin, a leading HR technology analyst, said: "Before the pandemic, most companies had multi-year programmes to drive HR tech, culture, careers, or other initiatives. Now, we have to react in hours or days. We need to build organisations that are fast, adaptive and easy to change.”

Businesses are also changing how they organize their workforces. Of course, full-time employees will always be necessary, but there is a clear shift to more flexible and contingent workers. In addition, businesses are looking to make their workforces agile and responsive to the markets they trade within. And, of course, the massive change to remote working has also, perhaps, changed the nature of work forever.

Craig Fisher, founder of TalentNet Media and former head of Global Marketing, Allegis Global Solutions, commented: "Today, we are working with employers who are thinking creatively to take the guesswork and the bottlenecks out of the talent equation. Thanks to technologies that bring the workforce together across geographies, worker types, and capabilities, employers can escape fixed strategies of the past. They can attack every piece of work with the right people and the right approach to deliver results as planned.”

Ensuring your business has the right mix of language skills is vitally important. The report from the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) is telling, as it concludes: “Nearly one in four (US) employers surveyed overall acknowledges losing or being unable to pursue a business opportunity over the singular lack of foreign language skills—a finding that is consistent with other research on language skills’ impact on a company’s bottom line. That figure increases to 50% for those that say they have a foreign language skills gap.”

Assessing the language skills your business needs immediately and in the future is an imperative that must be addressed. The fact that for the majority of the world’s population, English is not their native language, having a multilingual workforce is critical for your enterprise’s marketing and especially your company’s customer services channels.

As the function of HR has expanded, this inevitably has meant becoming more of a strategic component of a business. This is even more important within enterprises that trade internationally. The value of a workforce that is multi-talented and multilingual will be even more critical today than it has ever been. The trading landscape has changed as COVID-19 impacts every facet of the business. Language skills are now a clear advantage HRs are being tasked to support.

And technology is increasingly being embraced by HRs. The Sage report concluded that 75% of HR leaders say they are already using some form of HR tech. Also, of those HR leaders who have already invested in HR tech, 67% are planning to invest in more – a real testament to the value HR tech is already bringing. A vital component of the HR technology that is being increasingly embraced is language testing and proficiency evaluation. And language proficiency testing can be easily added to an HRs toolset: Pipplet’s API is an efficient and effective way to enhance any recruitment applications or services, as language testing can be instantly available when it’s needed. 

Businesses understand that to thrive post-COVID, they must be more agile and able to meet the changing demands of their customers and commercial partners. Agility is also being embraced by HR to see how AI, for example, can help them streamline their processes. 

Focusing on their workforces, enterprises also want to adopt agile recruitment to give them a fast and efficient hiring procedure measured in weeks and not months. And when a language skill is required, proficiency testing services that can be easily used as a component of agile HR is attracting increasing interest from all business sectors and industries.