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Language mismatch when searching for jobs on LinkedIn
Have you ever come across amazing open positions on LinkedIn that made you scan the description with growing enthusiasm, only to find out, towards the end, that the language requirements were a total mismatch with your skills? If not, lucky you—because for me, it happens most of the time.
Now, some recruiting teams are smart enough to display the language requirements in the title. It’s pretty simple if you think about it—just add (EN, ES, IT, DE…) in parentheses. Done. Pretty intuitive, right?
For some reason, recruiters seem to overlook that language skills are probably the most important requirement they should communicate alongside the role. But I get it—maybe they want to keep the title clean, free from potentially confusing abbreviations, or they want to respect the information hierarchy of the overall description. Well, in that case, they could make sure the requirements block is the first thing covered in the job description, and that the first bullet point is related to language skills—it’ll be the first thing everybody sees. Not only would this make it easier for applicants to sift through the thousands of jobs out there, but recruiters would save a lot of time scanning through mismatched applications (which they’d probably stop receiving) from people who didn’t get to the bottom of their long job description.
But even if a few proactive recruiters work around this LinkedIn limitation, until this practice becomes widespread (which may never happen), it’s still a problem.
Hoping for a LinkedIn language filter
About a year ago, I sent feedback to LinkedIn pointing out this issue. I even created a quick mockup on Figma to show them what I had in mind—totally unnecessary, I know, but I had fun pretending to be a product designer at LinkedIn. They sent me a nice response, and that was the end of the story.
I don’t have the audacity to expect my email to be taken seriously when they likely have a huge number of things to fix, and since they manage a complex database with literally billions of users, I guess any new feature release can take months or even years.
Nevertheless, I want to leave this reflection here as a testimony to the hard times job seekers and recruiters endure due to language skill misunderstandings! And irony aside, let’s shout out loud that a kickass language filter in the LinkedIn app would be a mega game changer and speed up hiring processes all over the world.
