Latest / Hiring & Firing with Fexingo: Recruitment, Performance, and Workforce Decisions / Why Multilingual Candidates Get Hired First
Transcript
- Lucas: You apply for two identical account manager roles. Your resume says 'English only.' The other candidate's says 'English and Spanish — professional proficiency.' Who gets the call first? Spoiler: it's not you. Luna: Yeah, I think most of us assume that's true, but do we have actual data on how much of an edge it really is? Lucas: We do. LinkedIn released a hiring analysis last fall — 2025 — covering about 2.5 million job placements across the US. The headline number: multilingual candidates were hired 38 percent faster than monolingual ones. Luna: 38 percent faster — that's not a small margin. Was that across all industries or concentrated in certain ones? Lucas: Concentrated. The biggest gap was in customer-facing roles: account management, sales, customer support. In those categories, multilingual candidates received interview requests 27 percent more often and offers 19 percent more often. But the gap showed up in engineering too — about 15 percent faster hiring. Luna: I can believe that. A friend of mine works at a mid-size logistics firm based in Miami. They were trying to break into the Brazilian market for two years, struggling. Finally they hired a bilingual account executive — native English, fluent Portuguese. She closed their first São Paulo contract within three months. Lucas: That's exactly the kind of story that drives hiring managers to weight language skills more heavily. And the data backs it up: the starting salary premium for bilingual candidates in that same LinkedIn study averaged about 12 percent across all roles. Luna: Twelve percent — that's real money. But I wonder, does it matter which languages? Is Spanish the big one, or are employers looking for something rarer? Lucas: Spanish is the most in-demand, by a wide margin, simply because of the US domestic market and Latin American trade. But Mandarin, Portuguese, and German consistently show higher salary premiums — because supply is lower relative to demand. A bilingual German-English speaker in manufacturing or engineering can see premiums closer to 18 percent. Luna: So if you're a job seeker with a second language, you have a real advantage. But how should you present that on a resume? I've seen people list 'fluent in Spanish' when they mean they took three years in high school. Lucas: That's the problem. Self-reported fluency is notoriously unreliable. More companies are moving to verified proficiency tests — the Interagency Language Roundtable scale or the ACTFL scale — and asking candidates to include their level. If you can say 'ILR Level 2 — limited working proficiency' or 'ACTFL Advanced Low,' that's much more credible than just writing 'fluent.' Luna: And in interviews, do you think it's worth switching languages mid-conversation to prove it? Lucas: Only if it's natural. I've seen candidates overplay it and come across as performative. Better to mention specific contexts: 'I negotiated vendor contracts in Spanish at my last job' or 'I led weekly meetings with our Tokyo office in Japanese.' That's more convincing than just speaking Spanish for thirty seconds. Luna: Let's flip it to the employer side. How should a company figure out whether a language skill is truly needed for a role — or just a nice to have? Lucas: That's a crucial distinction. If the role requires direct communication with non-English-speaking clients or partners, it's a must-have. But many companies list it as preferred without testing whether it actually affects performance. A 2023 study by the Society for Human Resource Management found that only 23 percent of job postings that listed bilingual as preferred actually required it on the job. Luna: So you filter out some candidates for no reason. That's a real cost. Lucas: Exactly. The better approach is to specify the context: 'This role requires Spanish fluency for weekly client calls. Testing will be conducted.' That way, you attract candidates who genuinely have the skill and you deter those who don't. And you avoid wasting time interviewing people who can't actually do the job. Luna: What about the argument that AI translation tools are getting so good that language skills will matter less in five years? I've heard some hiring managers say they're deprioritizing language requirements because of tools like real-time translation. Lucas: I think that's premature. AI translation works well for written communication and for straightforward verbal exchanges. But nuanced negotiation, building rapport, reading cultural subtext — that's still very human. And clients often prefer someone who speaks their language natively. So while the premium might shrink at the margins, I don't see it disappearing. Luna: It seems like for now, if you have the skill, it's a huge advantage. And if you're an employer, you should be thoughtful about how you evaluate it. Lucas: If this conversation has been useful for thinking about your own hiring or job search — whether you're a candidate or a manager — I'll just say that the reason we can keep doing these episodes ad-free is listener support. If it's been valuable, you can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure at all, but it helps us keep the conversation going. Luna: Yeah, absolutely. We love digging into these topics, and knowing that people find them helpful is what motivates us. Lucas: So back to the data — one other finding I thought was interesting. LinkedIn also tracked internal mobility rates for multilingual employees. They were promoted 22 percent faster than monolingual peers within the same company. Luna: That makes sense. If you can talk to clients in their language, you're more valuable to the company, and they want to keep you. Lucas: Right. And that promotion premium held even when controlling for education level and years of experience. So language skill seems to be an independent signal of something — maybe cultural adaptability, maybe cognitive flexibility. Luna: There's actually research showing that bilinguals have better executive function — switching between languages exercises the brain. That could translate to better problem-solving at work. Lucas: Exactly. So if you're a job seeker and you have a second language, even if it's rusty, consider investing in bringing it back up to professional level. The ROI is clear. And if you're an employer, think about whether you're underweighting language skills in your screening process. Luna: And if you're neither, maybe it's time to start learning a new language. Lucas: Maybe so. That's all for today on Hiring & Firing with Fexingo. We'll be back with another episode soon.