When I was 10 years old, I called the front desk of a hotel in Johannesburg and asked for breakfast. Five minutes later, a porter walked into our room, grabbed all our luggage, and drove us to the airport. We left without brushing our teeth. Or eating.

Years later I figured out what happened. I had asked for “breakafast.” The receptionist heard “be fast.” I spoke. I was heard. I was not understood.

That gap between speaking and communicating is the same one that shows up every day in corporate hiring.

“We need someone with B2 English.” The candidate passed the test. Six months later, he sits in international meetings and says nothing.

The problem is rarely the candidate.

In language assessments we conduct for hiring processes, a pattern appears consistently: candidates who perform well on passive skills, grammar, vocabulary and reading comprehension, show a significant gap in active skills, oral communication and writing. Based on our own data, that gap can reach 30 percentage points. The candidate understands, reads and interprets well, but cannot express himself with confidence when it matters.

There is a structural reason for this. Most Brazilian professionals learned English in group classes, where individual speaking time is limited. In a 60-minute lesson with 9 to 12 students, each student gets roughly 3 to 4 minutes of actual speaking practice. The result is an unbalanced linguistic profile: passive skills well above active ones. This is not a lack of effort. It is a direct consequence of how the language was learned.

In recent years, integrated recruitment platforms have begun including English as a module within the hiring process. The operational logic makes sense: fewer vendors, less management overhead. The gap in coverage is worth noting: a reading comprehension test measures one skill. In a globalized professional environment, four skills are in play.

If the assessment only measured comprehension, the gap never surfaced. The manager finds out later.

In multinationals, there is another layer. Language proficiency criteria are often set at headquarters and applied uniformly across all markets, without accounting for regional differences in how English is learned and used.

The criterion exists. The question is whether it measures what the role actually requires.

When English is an eliminating criterion in your hiring process, what is the test actually assessing? If you want to review that before your next hire, I can help.