Recruiting multilingual employees requires the right resources and strategies. Detailed job descriptions and strategic job postings can help your hiring team find eligible candidates, while ACTFL® language assessments help the team select candidates with the best bilingual skills.
Understanding how to recruit bilingual employees results in a more efficient, productive, and inclusive workspace. When you build a team of individuals with high language proficiency, your company can reach more global customers and build stronger relationships with international associates.
What Are the Challenges of Hiring and Recruiting Bilingual Candidates?
Recruiting multilingual professionals for global operations teams requires your company to overcome the following challenges:
Finding the Right Talent in a Competitive Market
Bilingual job positions naturally attract fewer total applicants due to the limited number of multilingual candidates. Your hiring team must compete with other companies looking for multilingual employees, so you may need to compare your salary and benefits to what the competitors offer. You can attract more bilingual talent when you match or exceed competitors’ perks.
Evaluating Proficiency
Candidates may overstate their proficiency if they haven’t officially tested their skills or want to impress hiring teams. Determining an applicant’s full language capabilities is challenging and often inaccurate without the right testing. Having a formal testing framework in place is vital for assessing how well a candidate can speak, listen, read, and write in their target language.
Comprehension of Cultural Nuances and Job Responsibilities
Finding bilingual candidates is only part of the recruitment process. Your team must find candidates who understand the cultural nuances of the international clients or partners your company works with. It’s also necessary to find applicants who meet specific job requirements, such as a specific education level, sales experience, or Excel skills. Clear job descriptions and expectations are essential elements of the recruitment process.
How to Recruit Bilingual Employees
Overcoming recruitment challenges is easier with the right strategies and resources. Here are some tips for recruiting and hiring bilingual employees who contribute to your company’s goals:
Determine Needs and Expectations
Determine your company’s multilingual needs by answering the following questions:
- Which languages do your clients, customers, or partners speak?
- What are the specific tasks you need your multilingual employees to perform?
- Which skills, such as listening, speaking, reading, and writing, do your multilingual employees need in order to complete their assigned tasks?
- What percentage of work do you need employees to conduct in a target language?
Once you define roles, responsibilities, and the specific skills necessary to complete the job, you have a clear understanding of the ideal candidate to look for.
Clearly Describe Job Descriptions and Requirements
The more specific your company’s job postings are, the more efficiently you can narrow your search to the right candidates. Specify the exact language skills candidates need, and include the minimum proficiency level necessary for each role. Language Testing International® (LTI), with a group of Industrial and Organizational psychologists, developed the LTI Task Analysis process to assist companies in establishing minimum proficiency levels for bilingual positions.
Plan to Assess Language Skills During the Recruitment Process
Assessing candidates’ language skills during the recruitment process helps you select the ideal individuals for each role. Partner with a reputable language assessment provider, such as Language Testing International, to select the right assessments for your company’s assessment and reporting needs. LTI is the exclusive licensee of ACTFL tests, which provide objective, highly accurate proof of a candidate’s skills and reveal precise proficiency levels.
LTI can also develop language assessment plans for your business based on criteria such as the job tasks and subject matter related to your industry.
Advertise for Bilingual Employees
Your job postings are one of the most important parts of looking for bilingual employees. Each job description should include the languages of interest and keywords, such as “bilingual,” “multilingual,” or “language skills,” to attract ideal candidates. You can post your company’s open positions to platforms and job boards such as the following:
Importance of Language Testing in Job Recruitment
Language testing is essential when hiring bilingual employees because it offers the following advantages:
- Reduced risk: Verifying language proficiency helps ensure employees can clearly communicate in emergencies or sensitive fields, such as healthcare and law. If your company is in a field requiring precise interpretation, you should hire candidates who meet the highest proficiency levels.
- Stronger relationships with international partners and clients: Testing candidates’ language capabilities helps you hire employees who use a second language well enough to build strong relationships with your international partners and clients. Language users with higher proficiency levels may have a better understanding of the cultural nuances of a language, allowing them to communicate clearly and respectfully.
- Fair practices: Language assessments allow you to evaluate all candidates with the same standard, which helps maintain fair hiring practices.
- Efficiency: Hiring employees with high language proficiency also boosts efficiency. When you test language skills before hiring, you can build a team of bilingual employees who can interpret documents and communicate in their target languages faster than they would if they scored at a lower proficiency level.
How ACTFL Assessments Enhance the Multilingual Hiring Process
ACTFL assessments are heavily researched and professionally developed to measure language skills accurately. These comprehensive assessments rate candidates’ skills against the globally recognized ILR scale to ensure reliable, standardized results. LTI delivers the following types of assessments to evaluate various language skills:
- Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI/OPIc): OPI and OPIc interviews take place live or via a computer avatar. These tests assess a candidate’s ability to speak spontaneously and authentically. Questions adapt to the test-taker’s responses, and ACTFL-certified testers expertly rate the user’s answers.
- Writing Proficiency Test (WPT): The WPT is an internet-delivered test that presents open-ended prompts on practical and professional topics, requiring candidates to provide written responses. ACTFL-certified raters then evaluate responses.
- Listening Proficiency Test (LPT): The LPT assesses a test taker’s comprehension of spoken language. During this test, language users listen to passages and answer multiple-choice questions. This efficient, machine-scored test determines listening proficiency across various contexts. The test system scores the users’ answers immediately following the test.
- Reading Proficiency Test (RPT): The RPT measures reading comprehension by having candidates read passages and select answers to multiple-choice questions. Results are auto-graded, providing immediate insights into reading ability.
Remove the Guesswork of Hiring With Language Testing International
Finding eligible applicants is just the beginning of building a skilled team. The most important part of recruiting bilingual talent is assessing language proficiency so you can select the right candidates for each role. LTI removes the guesswork of hiring with official ACTFL assessments that test language proficiency in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Contact us to learn more about ACTFL assessments.
