Whether you’re trying to go international with your business or simply improve internal diversity, the benefits of hiring bilingual employees can’t be ignored. If learning another language opens doors for people, then what can it do for the organizations they work for?
The ability to master a second language isn’t just a testament to someone’s intelligence and dedication. It also has plenty of practical applications as well, even if it’s not strictly necessary for a given job description.
Let’s look at how hiring staff with additional language skills can be a boon for your organization.
Bilingualism at home and in the workplace
Bilingualism means being fluent in two languages. Basically, a few words of half-remembered French won’t cut it.
Of course, between the proliferation of language learning apps and internet access to foreign language media, we’ve never had more ways to expand our linguistic skills.
Hiring bilingual employees can benefit roles that rely on communication, which is basically all of them. Being bilingual is beneficial to marketers who are refining foreign language lead generation techniques and doctors who are providing non-English-speaking tourists with diagnosis and treatment advice in a language that they understand.
Rates of bilingualism
People start learning new languages at various points in life and for various reasons. Maybe you became fluent in Spanish because you took it in high school or maybe that new year’s resolution to learn conversational Japanese actually stuck.
Regardless of how they learned a language, employees who can speak additional languages are high-value assets for businesses in many industries.
According to Preply’s Bilingualism in 2025 survey, roughly 3.3 billion people are bilingual worldwide. This equates to 43% of the population.
The study also cites stats from the US Census Bureau, which reports that 21.6% of people use a language other than English at home. This, however, doesn’t account for people using second languages outside of the home.
Of course, stats are one thing, but for anyone wondering what advantages they offer, let’s look at several ways hiring bilingual employees can benefit your business.
The benefits of hiring bilingual employees
The great thing about bilingualism and multilingualism is that employees don’t even need a language degree for their skills to be useful, but getting them certified can show that your business takes overcoming language gaps seriously.
As long as employees can demonstrate proficiency, it doesn’t matter if they learned academically or on Duolingo.
In other words, you shouldn’t hesitate when it comes to hiring bilingual workers and investing in bilingual skills training. If you’re not convinced, here are the main advantages of multilingualism and language training at work:
1. Diverse workplaces with unique perspectives
While many bilingual workers are English speakers fluent in foreign languages, others come from different cultural backgrounds where English is their second language. Hiring bilingual employees can bring in a mix of talent from all walks of life, which is how it helps support diversity in hiring.
A lack of diversity at work can lead to your organization’s ideas and decision-making becoming stale and rigid. Diverse workforces bring an array of perspectives with their own insights, which means there’s more potential for innovation.
Diversity in marketing, for example, helps businesses to respectfully engage with various cultures as a way to attract new demographics to your brand.
Let’s say you’re choosing a name for your new company mascot. You’ve just about made your selection when a bilingual employee chimes in that the name is actually an offensive slang term in their first language. Simply by being present, they’ve prevented you from unknowingly investing in a mascot that could potentially alienate a foreign market.
2. Increase global reach by hiring bilingual employees
There’s a reason employees can expand their career options with multilingual skills. That’s because hiring bilingual employees makes it much easier to succeed internationally and achieve business growth.
Bilingual employees are essential for overcoming international language barriers. The marketing insights we’ve touched on above are only the beginning.
Multilingual employees and language skills training are essential for any business that deals with customers internationally. After all, despite the prevalence of English as a second language, you can’t always count on people abroad to be fluent.
Having bilingual team members for sales, customer support, and social media engagement ensures you can provide everyone with the best service and a clear understanding of what they’re getting from you. That’s why you should always check language skills when evaluating prospective employees.
Of course, winning over customers is only part of going global. There are also other people and businesses to consider, such as partners, investors, vendors, distributors, and potential competitors.
Bilingual employees are a natural choice to be company ambassadors as they can observe cultural intricacies more easily than someone depending on a translator (be it an app or a person).
Let’s say a US hedge fund company has a Japanese branch. Fluent bilingual speakers will understand the correct usage of things like honorifics and other elements in the Japanese language.
That means they’ll be more able to communicate professionally and avoid causing offense, whether they’re crafting an introductory email to a possible local partner or meeting them in person to negotiate.
3. Personalize the customer experience
Personalization has become a huge part of modern sales, marketing, and customer service. It encompasses personalized email marketing, streaming service recommendations, discounts, birthday messages and so on.
Besides bridging the essential gap of communication, hiring bilingual employees also makes the customer experience more pleasant for those whose mother tongue isn’t English.
Even fluent bilingual speakers have to undergo the mental effort of translating what they want to say into their second language. Hiring bilingual employees lets you take the burden off the shoulders of customers, which helps to make their customer journey less stressful.
Let’s say your company is a B2B organization that provides a software-based sales prospecting tool. Customer support for tech can get a bit complicated, which is compounded by having to get assistance in another language.
The ability to get tech support in one’s own language makes it easier to engage with advice and makes it more likely that customers will have a favorable view of your brand.
Even if your business isn’t international, immigrants, expats, and people with multicultural heritages may appreciate the option for the level of personal comfort it provides.
4. Foster a culturally sensitive brand image
Learning languages makes it easier to immerse yourself in their respective cultures. We touched on this idea in our section on global reach.
More cultural diversity in the workplace means a greater combined understanding of foreign markets. Incorporating multilingualism into your customer experience also makes it more inclusive and welcoming to a wider range of people.
Cultural sensitivity is about showing that different international communities matter equally to your brand. Hiring bilingual employees goes beyond performative measures by making your service’s customer experience more accessible in a meaningful way.
Associating cultural sensitivity with your brand is an important step in building up broad consumer goodwill. It means that consumers who care about making ethical purchases are more likely to embrace your products and services.
5. More cost-effective communication
A multilingual workforce stands to save you money by removing the need to invest in translation tools and services. Instead, all you need is an effective policy for connecting customers to team members with the right language skills.
In an inbound call center, for example, it’s simple for team members to transfer customers to each other as needed.
This can even save money for outbound calling services as long as you can filter leads by language preferences. Hiring bilingual employees means you can put your best foot forward when reaching out.
Investing in linguistic skills training for employees may seem like yet another expense. But by reducing your dependency on translation software, you can save money in the long run.
Additionally, when you cut out the middleman of translation, customer and stakeholder conversations go much more smoothly and quickly.
This also stands to save you money as your team will be able to achieve a faster turnaround on closing sales, winning over clients and establishing new partnerships for your brand.
6. Raise your brand’s online presence
The current online landscape of social media and content platforms has become a huge social melting pot. While a person’s feed does vary by their location and preferences, people in countries across the world can still see and react to a lot of the same posts.
That means the same piece of industry content could reach people all the way from the US to South Africa in one go. Hiring bilingual employees as brand representatives and social media admins helps raise your online presence by enabling organic interactions.
Code switching is the practice of using a different language and mannerisms depending on who you’re with. One example most people have experience with is how we act around friends versus how we act with our family.
For example, you might be more polite and restrained around parents or your own kids than your buddies.
Just speaking a foreign language is a form of code switching, and it’s something that non-native English speakers deal with every day.
As mentioned earlier, when your people can take that burden from the consumer, it makes it much easier for them to engage with your brand.
7. Be more aware of how people view your brand
Hiring bilingual employees isn’t just about promoting your brand to other people. It’s also a way to gain a deeper understanding of how people already think and feel about your business. If you only speak English, you’re going to be naturally predisposed to focus on what people say in your language.
A multilingual social media admin team, for example, is much better prepared to study all of the online discourse about your brand. And it’s not all about bias, either. Bilingual staff give you the kinds of insights you’d only reliably get from a dedicated human translator.
The thing about language is that it’s constantly evolving. Certain terms or modes of speech might be deemed offensive by one generation only to be embraced by the next. Not to mention the ever-changing laundry list of slang terms people use. If you think it’s hard to keep up with English-speaking speech trends, imagine doing that with a language you don’t even know.
Hiring bilingual employees helps you to stay aware of these things, which is important for taking a considered approach in how your brand communicates online. For businesses trying to go international, it’s imperative you understand the nuances of what people may already be saying about your company.
Boost your brand by hiring bilingual employees
Whether you’re hiring talent with multiple languages or delivering language learning courses to your existing team, it’s definitely worth the cost of investment. Multilingual businesses are able to be more responsive and can deliver personalized customer service for a diverse customer base far more effectively.
It’s not just about overcoming communication barriers for those who don’t speak your language. Even for non-native speakers, the ability to conduct their customer journey in their native language is a major comfort option that emphasizes equity and cultural sensitivity in your organization.
From diversity, equity, and inclusion to basic business success and growth potential, hiring bilingual employees is absolutely the right choice due to their inherent job market value. If you aren’t sure where to start, try looking at what additional languages your people already know.
These skills are useful even outside of exclusively bilingual positions. So, start drafting training courses and recruitment profiles right away to find multilingual talent and help current employees improve their level of fluency.
