Ask someone to apply for a competition or job in a language they only half understand. Then watch what happens to your completion rate.
Language is not a nice-to-have in recruitment. It is the difference between a candidate who feels the role was meant for them and one who quietly clicks away. In Ireland that matters more than most employers admit. The Irish language carries real weight, in the public sector especially, and a careers site that treats it as an afterthought sends a message long before anyone reads the competition description.
Here is the problem. Most employers who do offer an Irish-language option lean on a standard machine translation tool to provide it. On the surface it looks like the box is ticked. In practice it rarely is.
Google Translate and tools like it typically deliver around 60 to 70 percent accuracy for Irish. That sounds passable until you think about what the missing third actually does. It turns a confident, professional advert into something stilted, occasionally wrong and sometimes faintly comic to a native speaker. A candidate reading it does not conclude that the tool slipped up. They conclude that the employer did not care enough to get it right.
This is exactly the gap we set out to close. We recently worked with an Irish Translation Officer, alongside our partner Recite Me, to improve the Irish-language experience for candidates applying through Jobtrain. Rather than relying on the raw output of a general machine translation tool, Recite Me applies an enhanced layer on top, shaped by human expertise, to deliver a far more accurate Irish translation. The result is language that reads as though it was written for Irish speakers, because in effect it was. It is not bolted on afterwards and hoped for the best.
That distinction is small in technical terms and enormous in how a candidate feels.
Respect is the obvious part, and it matters. But the practical case is stronger than that.
Every candidate you lose at the language barrier is a candidate you paid to attract and then turned away at the door. In a market where good people are hard to find, that is an expensive way to shrink your own shortlist. When the Irish-language experience is accurate and natural, more people start the application, more people finish it and more of them are the right people for the role.
There is a fairness point too. A candidate who is more comfortable in Irish should not be quietly disadvantaged against one applying in English. When the translation is poor, that is exactly what happens. The English advert is polished and the Irish one is not, so the two candidates are not being asked the same question in the same way. Fixing the language fixes the fairness.
For public sector employers in Ireland there is also the wider context of language obligations and public expectation. Meeting those properly, rather than technically, protects your reputation. People notice when an organisation treats Irish as a first-class part of how it hires, and they notice when it does not.
No, and this is where a lot of employers get it wrong. The goal is not to translate only the handful of roles where Irish is a stated requirement. It is to make the whole hiring experience accessible to the people you want to reach, in the language they are most comfortable using. A process that works well for an Irish speaker tends to work well for a candidate using a screen reader, a candidate with dyslexia or a candidate reading on a small phone screen on a bad connection.
Getting language right is rarely a single fix. It is a signal of how seriously you take candidate experience overall.
Start by looking at your careers site the way a candidate would. Switch it into Irish and read it as a native speaker might. Does it read naturally, or does it read like a machine had a go? Check the application form itself, not just the adverts, because that is where candidates spend the real effort and where clumsy translation does the most damage.
Then look at your data. If applications in Irish start at a healthy rate but drop off partway through, the language or the form is getting in the way. That is not a candidate problem. It is a process problem, and it is fixable.
The employers who win here are not the ones who translate the most words. They are the ones who make every candidate feel the role was written for them. That starts with speaking their language, and meaning it.
Want to see how the enhanced Irish translation works in practice? Book a short conversation with us and we will walk you through what we built with Recite Me.
How accurate is Google Translate for Irish? Standard machine translation tools typically reach around 60 to 70 percent accuracy for Irish. That is often enough to get the gist across but not enough to read as natural, correct or professional to a native speaker, which is the standard a job advert needs to meet.
What does Recite Me add on top of machine translation? Recite Me applies an enhanced layer on top of standard machine translation, informed by human expertise, to deliver a far more accurate Irish translation. Working alongside an Irish Translation Officer, we used this approach to improve the Irish-language experience for candidates applying through Jobtrain.
Why does translation quality affect application rates? Poor translation makes an employer look careless and makes the process harder to complete. Candidates who are more comfortable in Irish may abandon an application that reads badly, so you lose people you have already paid to attract. Accurate, natural language keeps more of the right people in the process.
Is Irish-language support only needed for Irish-speaking roles? No. Strong language and accessibility support benefits every candidate, not only those applying for roles where Irish is required. Treating language access as part of overall candidate experience widens your pool and signals that you take fairness seriously.