Team Europe Ltd

TEAM Europe is a marketing agency based in Plymouth specialising in international marketing. To carry out their international campaigns, the company often needs to recruit mature people with either language skills or native speakers who live locally. The company prefers employing native language speakers as they have found that they can assist with the cultural aspect of a marketing campaign.

TEAM Europe approached the RLN Devon & Cornwall hub stand at a local business exhibition to discuss their difficulties recruiting people with language skills. The Devon & Cornwall team are aware that such skills are readily available in the area and offered to assist filling their next vacancies.

A few months later, the company contacted the D&C hub in urgent need of four European language speakers for temporary work who could speak French, German, Spanish and Italian and who were confident conversing with contacts at senior level within these European countries.

Being based at the University of Plymouth Business School, RLN D&C hub was able to advertise the vacancy to many of their mature international students and students studying languages at the University. In this case, mature students were seen as the most appropriate candidates because of the short term, temporary nature of the job. The vacancy was also advertised for free on the BLIS website. Within a few days, the company had four times more applications than needed and after a selection process, were able to recruit four language speakers. Furthermore, by keeping the contact details of all the applicants they were even able to create a database of candidates for future vacancies!

This example shows the importance of the BLIS website, and of publicising it more widely. It is a serious wasted opportunity for the SW economy, if language-skilled people and employers are having problems finding each other!

As with many previous campaigns, TEAM Europe’s contact centre uses language speakers to ensure that campaigns are verbally translated correctly. Lindsay Kirk, Senior Account Manager says, “Using the correct country language not only aids the success rate of our campaigns, but also encourages positive responses from other European countries. Additionally, by communicating in the language of the country there is a mutual understanding of the local business culture and also allows our language speakers to encourage further dialogue, thus leading to greater interest in our campaign. We would definitely recommend working with RLN Devon & Cornwall as an alternative route to recruiting staff with language skills”.

Visit the Team Europe website at www.teameuropeuk.com

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