The difficulties in being able to attract and hire native speakers will be all too familiar for recruiters across Europe. While Europeans are the most travelled people in the world, this does not always extend to relocating for work. Therefore in many cases, specific candidates for language roles can be difficult to find. 
Here at Europe Language Jobs, we understand the needs of our clients - which is why we have created a summary to help you best use our website to attract native speakers, and how to improve your results. 

How to best use Europe Language Jobs to attract native speakers 

Follow User Habits

When trying to attract native speakers it is essential to understand and follow the different habits of job seekers for each country. Each nation’s culture is distinct – and this remains true when searching for a job - so timing matters when posting job offers. This is especially the case when encountering lots of competition. According to a study done by Indeed, a job indexing website, job seekers are most active at the start of the week, particularly Monday and Tuesday: the peak for the entire week happens on a Monday between 11am and 2pm. The highest traffic on the Europe Language Jobs website occurs between 12-4pm, so it is a good time to post your job offers at this time to maximise your visibility.

Job searches tend to dwindle towards the end of the week, especially at the weekends, although they pick up a little on Sunday evenings when the cold, hard reality of Monday hits. 

The German stereotype of always being early is not false – they are really early birds when it comes job searching, starting to look for jobs earlier in the day than any other European country. Therefore, to improve the visibility of an offer for German speakers it would be important to consider posting at the start of the week earlier in the morning to reach more German users. On the Europe Language Jobs website, the most recent job post appears at the top of the page, giving an offer more visibility – an important feature to take advantage of. 

According to Indeed, after studying the Germans, Dutch, Brits, French and Irish they found that weekday evenings are the most popular times for particularly the British and Dutch, while the Belgians and the French like to search for jobs during their lunch breaks. 
As you can see, taking into account the different habits and behaviour for each user is highly important in a successful recruitment strategy. Posting a job offer at the right time can see a huge increase in visibility, and ultimately applicants. 

Optimising Job Titles

An important part of being able to attract native speakers is optimising your job titles to make them more attractive.  
It is very common for companies to include a benefits package within the offer when looking to hire candidates to relocate to another country. This can include things like free flights, accommodation etc. For many potential candidates, especially those who speak harder to source languages, a good benefits package can be the difference between them applying or scrolling past a job offer without a second thought – therefore it is key to include this in the title of the offer, such as ‘relocation package’ in order to make it stand out. 

For some companies their excellent location is one of the biggest plus points about their job offer. For many people moving abroad to work, moving to a great location – for reasons such as the weather, a nearby beach etc. is a very important factor in their decision making. For example, many candidates from the UK will often move to locations with better weather and a different culture even though their actual job prospects may be better at home. Therefore if your location can be a key edge over your competition it would be a great idea to mention it in the title of an offer, or at least draw on it more in the description. 

In addition, making the actual job title keyword, such as ‘Account Manager’ more appealing can also make your chances of being able to attract native speakers increase. Including things like ‘International Account Manager’ or ‘Account Manager for Spanish Market’ can see a change in results. 
 

Improve Your Description

A tempting description is always essential when writing a good job offer to attract native speakers. Short, ambiguous and often incomplete descriptions are a big put off for prospective applicants and will see poor quality results. It is therefore important to include a well-written description including: 

•    The job description in detail, including tasks. Make sure this includes the department, key responsibilities etc.
•    Requirements e.g. specific language level. 
•    Important skills needed. This will help offers appear in the ‘My Job Matches’ section of candidates profiles.

•    Adding keywords will help offers to position better in searches.

•    Education and work experience required. 
•    Location. Drawing more on an appealing location can help to attract more candidates. 
•    Benefits offered e.g. accommodation, paid flights.
•    Salary range.

Having a well-written offer can not only increase your ranking in the internal searches on the ELJ site, but also improve the offer’s ranking through Google – this can help to bring further candidates from outside of Europe Language Jobs. 
It is also essential to write the offer in English, as this is the language of our website. Offers written in other languages may mean that candidates have difficulty finding them. 

Make Use of Language Settings

At Europe Language Jobs, language job offers  are our main focus, making it essential to take advantage of our language settings. 
For each offer you can set the level of language proficiency that you require, e.g. fluent German. If you choose to select them as mandatory, this means that only candidates with those language settings are able to apply. However, if you are looking for two different languages (for two of the same role) then it is advisable to not publish both as mandatory, and to publish two separate job offers instead – one for each language. 

Invest in Visibility Features

Sometimes even after following candidate trends and writing a great offer it can still be hard to attract native speakers, particularly when your competition is active. At ELJ, we have developed exclusive visibility features to help you find those hard to find candidates. 

One of the most effective ways to increase visibility within the ELJ site is via our highlighted features. We offer different levels of promotion depending on your requirements, with some options appearing within the top of the main jobs list, targeted jobs list, or both. Our Refresh option is another form of visibility – it automatically refreshes your offer back to the top of the list every seven days. 

Options such as a Mailshot are also a great way of reaching specific candidates by language proficiency, specific skills, locations and more in our database. 

Another feature is the Social Media Broadcast. This will mean that your offer is shared on ELJ’s social media platforms, which have a huge engagement with job seekers from across Europe. This is a great way of reaching more candidates, especially those outside of our site. In addition, we also offer a dedicated blog post – we can prepare an article on suggested themes with links to your website and offers. 

Our CV search feature can also help to find those extra difficult candidates to search. This will enable you to search our database for CVs matching your preferences, such as languages and skills. 

Talk to your Account Manager

Our account managers are specialised in their country's market and are experts in multilingual recruitment. We are dedicated to finding you the best results so we are always here to help you. Finding the right candidates for you takes both time and effort, so it is vital to keep checking your dashboard in our website for new applications and how results are going. Keeping in contact with us helps to improve our services to you, and importantly meet your multilingual recruitment needs. We take our feedback very seriously and we are always looking for ways to improve. 

To Sum Up...

The multilingual recruitment process can be extremely challenging for many companies. Therefore it is essential that you produce a well written description including all of the necessary requirements and a title that can appeal more to candidates. Following user habits is also key when trying to improve the visibility of your offer and therefore its results.  Our list of exclusive visibility features can give your results a huge boost and give you an edge over your competitors.