June 4, 2016

3 Advantages of Hiring a Bilingual Candidate

Caroline Dowd-Higgins Career Wisdom, Featured bilingual candidates, international job search, Neuvoo

I’m pleased to share this guest blog from Vanessa Fardi, Team Leader US/CA/LATAM at NEUVOO.

Having bilingual employees in the workforce can only bring benefits to the company. Studies have shown that bilingual people are good at multitasking and have excellent communication skills. Any company looking to expand or to have global reach should consider bilingual employees on their payroll. The most common language combination nowadays is English/Spanish. However, Chinese, German and French are languages also being sought after by recruiters. So if you are a job seeker, start looking for the best language school in your neighborhood, and if you are a recruiter or a company owner and you are not yet convinced bilinguals will eventually rule the job market, here is a small list of the advantages of hiring bilingual candidates:

International reach. Bilingual employees know how to speak the language and, in most cases, they also have knowledge about other country’s culture, which is always an advantage when dealing with international clients.
Translation made easy. Having a bilingual employee makes using localization services a breeze. The staff member could be in charge of proof reading the translation of the content of the website and can assess the localization process. He or she can also adapt the information for what is more suitable in the different regions.
Multitasking. A recent study showed that bilinguals can switch between tasks a lot quicker than people who know only one language. Researchers found that people who spoke several languages could process information faster and more efficiently than monolinguals.

What are you waiting for? It’s time to hire bilingual employees! Make sure to use a bilingual recruiter who can test their language proficiency and that will be able to make a decision based on the candidate’s skills and experiences. Languages are the future, and you have a lot to gain by hiring those with multi language expertise.