How an energy management leader staffed support in six languages in two months

The Mandate

Our client's European shared services centre needed to stand up Level 1 support capability across six languages simultaneously: German, French, Dutch, Polish, Czech and Slovak.

The timeline was two months.

The Challenge: The Scarcest Languages on the Market

Multilingual recruitment in Romania is routinely described as difficult. In practice, difficulty varies enormously by language, and this mandate covered the hard end of the spectrum.

German and French are competitive. Both are well-established in the Romanian services market, with a real supply of speakers — and with every shared services centre in the country competing for them. Volume exists; exclusivity does not.

Dutch, Czech and Slovak are a different category entirely. These are genuinely scarce languages in Romania. The population of professional speakers is small, largely known, and courted by the handful of employers who need them. There is no meaningful passive candidate pool to advertise into. If you do not know where these communities are, you do not find them at all.

Polish sits in between — present, but thin, and contested.

And all six had to arrive at once. A staggered delivery would have been considerably easier; the client needed simultaneous coverage to launch its support model, which meant six parallel searches in the scarcest segments of the market, compressed into eight weeks.

Our Approach

Community sourcing, not advertising. For Dutch, Czech and Slovak, advertising is close to useless — the addressable population is too small for reach-based methods to work. We worked through language communities, expatriate and student networks, alumni of international programmes, and direct referral chains within those communities, where a single well-placed conversation opens several others.

Parallel pipelines from day one. All six language tracks were opened simultaneously. Sequencing would have guaranteed a missed deadline; the only way to compress the timeline was to run every search concurrently and manage them as one programme.

Language verification built into the process. Every candidate's level was validated against the standard the support role actually required. In a support function, an overstated language level does not surface in an interview — it surfaces in front of a customer, in the first week.

Assessment for support reality. Alongside language, we assessed suitability for support work: service orientation, structured problem-solving, tolerance for repetitive query volumes, and the composure that keeps quality consistent across a shift.

The Delivery

25 Level 1 support specialists closed in 2 months, across all six languages.

Simultaneous coverage, allowing the client to launch its multilingual support model as planned rather than in phases.

Full delivery in the scarce languages — Dutch, Czech and Slovak included, alongside the higher-volume German, French and Polish requirements.

The Long View

The client is one of the world's most recognised names in energy management and industrial automation, and its European shared services operation continues to be a significant employer in the Romanian business services market — a sector that today employs tens of thousands of professionals in Bucharest alone and which has grown precisely because of the multilingual capability this mandate depended on.

Key Takeaways

• Not all languages are equally difficult. Treating a six-language mandate as one requirement is how programmes miss deadlines. Dutch, Czech and Slovak require entirely different methods from German or French.
• Scarce languages are found through communities, not campaigns. Where the population is small, reach-based sourcing fails and relationships decide the outcome.
• Parallel beats sequential under compression. Two months for six languages is only achievable if every track runs from day one.
• Verify the level, always. In support functions, an overstated language claim becomes a customer-facing failure within days.