What English level should you require from a candidate?

“Fluent English required.” “B2 minimum.” That line in your job spec was almost certainly copied from an earlier advert, which was itself copied from another one. Nobody has ever worked it out, and every year it turns away candidates you would have hired if you had known how far they really were from what you needed.

The short answer comes down to two things. First: companies that actually measure their candidates’ level, rather than reading it off a CV, do not set their bar at B2. They set it in the middle of B1. The second explains the first: the CEFR scale, with its six levels from A1 to C2, was never designed to settle a hiring decision. It is too coarse for that. Between a candidate who has only just reached B1 and one who is about to move up to B2 there are somewhere between 150 and 200 hours of tuition — and yet both write “B1” on their CV, and both come out of most tests as “B1”.

This article shows you how to read that gap, what each step up the scale genuinely costs depending on where the candidate sits, and how to set the bar on your next job spec on something other than habit.

Six CEFR levels aren’t enough to make a decision

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages describes six levels, A1 to C2. It is the only shared vocabulary the market has, and on that count it does an enormous service. But it was built to describe competence, not to rank applications.

The problem is how wide the bands are. Going by the study hours published by Cambridge English, it takes somewhere between 350 and 400 cumulative hours to reach B1, and 500 to 600 to reach B2. The “B1” band therefore covers a span of 150 to 200 hours on its own — a full year of evening classes. Two candidates sitting at either end of that band are not equally capable in a meeting, and your measuring tool doesn’t tell you which is which.

Everyone in the sector has run into this limit, and everyone has improvised around it. Some providers write B1+, others B1.1 and B1.2. None of these notations is standardised. B1+ means “a bit above B1” without saying how much, and one provider’s B1.1 doesn’t describe the same thing as another’s. So you cannot compare two candidates assessed by two different suppliers.

ELAO opted for a systematic split: four sub-levels within each level, written B1.00, B1.25, B1.50 and B1.75, applied identically across every level and every language. That is what “accurate to a quarter of a CEFR level” means in practice. A B1.75 candidate is three quarters of the way from B1 to B2; a B1.00 candidate has only just arrived.

Sometimes the need for precision goes further still. The Alliance Française of Atlanta has built a scale of 35 to 36 sub-levels, with up to eight steps inside a single level — B1.1, B1.2 and so on through to B1.8. An institution doesn’t build something like that out of a taste for complexity. It does it because six bands are not enough to form balanced groups or to make decisions about individuals.

Key takeaway: the CEFR gives you a shared vocabulary. It does not give you the precision to decide. The question isn’t whether a candidate is B1, but where they sit inside B1.

The threshold set by recruiters who actually measure

Once that precision is available, recruiters behave differently. Among the companies that use ELAO in their hiring process, the threshold chosen most often is B1.50 — the middle of B1. Not B2, even though B2 is what almost every job advert asks for.

The gap between those two figures is worth pausing on. It isn’t a lowering of standards; these companies are hiring for roles where language genuinely matters. It reflects something simpler: once you can see that a candidate is halfway through B1 rather than at the very start of it, you no longer make the same decision.

An internal observation covering roughly 350 candidates assessed in a hiring context points the same way: 20 to 25% of them sat in the upper half of B1, between B1.25 and B1.75. The sample doesn’t carry the weight of a statistical study, but the order of magnitude speaks for itself. One candidate in four is in the band immediately below B2 — and those are the people who could become your best hires after a short course.

What one step up the scale actually costs

Public frameworks work in whole levels, which makes them useless for choosing between two applications. Field data from our partner Accent Languages, the training provider behind ELAO, lets us look at this more concretely.

Over 32 hours of tutor-led training, excluding self-study, how far a learner progresses depends heavily on where they start.

• At A levels, those 32 hours usually deliver one quarter-level, and up to two for the most diligent learners. A candidate halfway through A2 can therefore reach B1 in a single cycle of training.
• At B levels, the same 32 hours usually deliver one quarter-level, and sometimes no measurable movement on the scale at all. A candidate in the middle of B1 needs at least two cycles to reach B2, with no guarantee of getting there.

Key takeaway: progress slows down precisely where recruiters put their bar. Asking for B2 when the role would be well served by mid-B1 doesn’t cost you one notch of ambition — it can cost several months of training and a slice of your budget.

There is a pedagogical reason for the slowdown. At A level, the learner is picking up basic structures and vocabulary, and every hour of teaching produces a visible gain. At B level, they are consolidating, adding nuance and gaining precision — and those gains settle in faster than they can be measured. It is also why a B-level learner feels stuck while still improving, on a scale too coarse to show it.

What your threshold is really costing you

Pull up your last advert for a role involving English and work through these questions, in this order.

• What will this person actually have to do in English? Following a meeting without contributing much is B1. Chairing that meeting and arguing a position is B2. Negotiating a complex contract is C1. Those three requirements do not carry the same price on the job market.
• How often? A skill used twice a month decays quickly and is easily rebuilt. A skill used daily justifies a higher bar, because the role itself will develop the person.
• How many candidates does your current threshold eliminate? If a quarter of your applicants sit in the upper half of B1, a bar set at the entrance to B2 halves your talent pool without your realising it — because you never see where the rejected candidates actually stood.
• Are you prepared to fund the gap? Two quarter-levels at B level represent roughly 64 hours of training. That is a figure you can put a price on, and set against the cost of leaving a role open for another three months.

That last question is the one that changes everything. A threshold only means something in relation to what it costs to cross it. Without a fine-grained measurement you can neither price it nor defend it internally. With one, turning a candidate down becomes an explicit trade-off between time-to-hire and a training budget. If you would like to see what this looks like on your own applications, you can get in touch for a free ELAO demonstration.

Why the decision is only as good as the measurement

None of the above holds unless the measurement is reliable. A quarter-level is a fine unit, and a fine unit measured badly is worth nothing.

Three things make it usable. The first is the depth of the test: an ELAO test runs to between 80 and 121 questions depending on the version used. That density is what allows the result to be narrowed to a quarter-level rather than returned as an approximate band.

The second is reproducibility. A study run with Le Forem — the public employment and vocational training service for the Walloon Region of Belgium — covering 18,000 assessments found that in 86.7% of cases the discrepancy was smaller than a quarter of a CEFR level. The unit your decision rests on is therefore stable, and two applications received months apart remain comparable.

The third is control over test conditions. ELAO proctoring confirms that the person sitting the test is the registered candidate, that they don’t switch windows, don’t use their phone during the assessment, and aren’t being helped by someone else. Without that assurance, a precise result only measures the quality of the online translator used during the test.

The format is then chosen according to where you are in the process. To sift a volume of applications before interviews, ELAO Screening measures grammar, professional vocabulary and listening in 15 minutes. To confirm a finalist for a role where speaking on the company’s behalf is part of the job, ELAO Select adds an assessment of spoken English, in 25 minutes.

What the score is worth after the hire

The result you get during recruitment is also the most reliable starting point you will have for managing that person’s training afterwards. If you hire a candidate at B1.50 into a role scoped at B2, you know the size of the gap and roughly what it represents in hours, and you can build it into their development plan from year one. At the end of the cycle, a second measurement tells you whether the target was met and which skill the progress came from.

That is a very different conversation from the one a standard end-of-course review allows, where provider and learner agree that progress has been made without anyone being able to put a number on it. It does require both measurements to be taken on the same scale, with the same test.

Frequently asked questions

Is the quarter-level an official CEFR standard?

No. The CEFR defines six levels, A1 to C2. The need for finer granularity is felt right across the sector, and everyone has answered it in their own way, with notations such as B1+ or B1.1 that aren’t comparable with one another. ELAO chose a systematic split into four sub-levels per band, applied identically across every level and every language, which keeps results comparable between candidates.

Should every requirement be dropped to mid-B1?

No. B1.50 is the threshold most often chosen by recruiters who measure, for roles where English is an everyday working tool. A role involving international negotiation or public representation justifies a higher bar. The point is to choose the threshold from the actual tasks of the job rather than copying it across.

Can a candidate close to B2 get there quickly?

A candidate at B1.75 is one step short, which is on the order of 32 tutor-led hours — bearing in mind that progress at B level is slower and sometimes not measurable within a single cycle. That is a gap you can fund and plan for, which a plain “B1” on a CV never lets you know.

Why is progress slower at B level than at A level?

Because the gains there are about consolidation and nuance rather than basic acquisition. At A level, 32 hours of training will often take a learner up one step, and sometimes two for the most diligent. At B level, two quarter-levels on the same volume are almost never seen.

How can I assess a candidate’s English without lengthening the process?

By placing the test before the first interview, across all shortlisted candidates. The test is taken online, with no session to schedule, which removes the waiting time that comes with external certifications and avoids interviews held with people who fall below the bar.

Conclusion

Your next job spec will ask you to pick a level. Before you copy across “B2 minimum”, ask yourself the two questions that matter: what will this person actually have to do in English, and how many hours of training are you prepared to fund to get them there? A candidate one step below your bar can be hired and trained within the year. A candidate four steps below cannot. On a six-level scale, both are called B1 — and you turn them down together.

ELAO is a language test designed by linguists, placing every candidate to a quarter of a CEFR level, with result stability documented across 18,000 assessments. You can get in touch for a free ELAO demonstration and find out where the candidates you turned down last year really stood.