English fluency is the wrong filter for a creative hire

Look at a typical remote creative job ad and you will find a line requiring fluent or excellent English. Nobody questions it. It has been in the template since the template was written, and it survives because it sounds reasonable.

Then look at what the job involves. Receive a brief. Read reference material. Make something in After Effects or Premiere. Send it for review. Read notes. Make changes. Send it again. In a normal week, the amount of unstructured English conversation involved is close to zero.

What the requirement actually filters out

A fluency requirement does not filter for people who can do the job. It filters for people who have had the opportunity to become fluent. In most of the markets worth hiring from, that correlates with money, schooling, and having already worked for Western clients.

Which means the requirement systematically removes the part of the pool you were trying to reach. The designer who has spent five years on regional advertising work in Almaty and never needed English is exactly the person nobody else has approached. Filter them out and you are bidding against everyone else for the same small group who already have three offers.

There is a version of this that shows up in the numbers. Post a role in English only across Kazakhstan and you will get applications, and they will skew heavily towards people who have already worked abroad and price themselves accordingly. Post the same role in Russian and the volume goes up, the average rate comes down, and the range of the work you see gets much wider. Same role, same money, different pool.

What has actually changed

Ten years ago the argument for requiring English was practical. Coordination cost real money, and the tooling was bad. Machine translation was good enough for the gist of a menu and not much else.

That is no longer the situation. A job description translated properly reads like it was written by a person. Briefs, feedback and notes translate well because they are functional writing rather than literature. Video calls have live captions and translation built in. The remaining friction is real but small, and it is mostly on your side rather than theirs.

There is a second change that gets less attention. Creative work is reviewed visually. When you are looking at a cut together with somebody, pointing at the timeline and saying too slow here does not require either of you to be articulate. The medium carries most of the meaning.

The objections, taken seriously

Three come up every time, and two of them are reasonable.

What about misunderstandings on the brief?

This is the fair one, and the answer is that it is a briefing problem rather than a language problem. Vague briefs produce wrong work in every language. If your brief is a paragraph in Slack and a hope, you will get bad results from a native speaker too. Reference material, a rough timing, and an example of what good looks like will do more for the outcome than fluency ever will.

What about client calls?

Also fair, and the answer depends on whether the person is on them. Most mid-level production roles are not. If the role genuinely involves presenting to your clients, then language is part of the job and you should assess it properly rather than pretending otherwise.

Will it slow the team down?

Some, at the start, in the same way any new person does. The cost is a few extra written messages a week and occasionally a call that takes ten minutes instead of five. Set against a materially larger pool of people who are not being contacted by anybody else, that is a trade most studios would take if it were put to them in those terms.

What to ask for instead

Dropping the fluency line does not mean pretending language is irrelevant. It means asking for the thing you actually need, which is narrower and easier to assess.

1. 01Enough English to follow a written brief. This is reading comprehension, not conversation, and it is a much lower bar. Most designers who have used tutorials or plugin documentation already clear it.
2. 02A willingness to ask when something is unclear. Far more valuable than fluency, and harder to find. Somebody who guesses silently will cost you a week; somebody who asks a clumsy question will cost you five minutes.
3. 03Overlap hours you have agreed explicitly. Central Asia is four to six hours ahead of London, so the shared window is the UK morning. Naming it removes most of the coordination problem before it starts.
4. 04One synchronous call before you hire. Not a language test. You are checking that a conversation is possible with captions and some patience, which is a different question from whether somebody is fluent.

What this looks like in practice

Write the job in English because that is the language you think in. Have it published in the language the candidate reads, so the listing reaches people who would otherwise scroll past. Ask for a portfolio and a showreel rather than a covering letter, because the covering letter is the part that measures English and nothing else.

Then judge the work. If the reel is good, the person can make good work. That was the question.

This is roughly how Elsewhere is built. Your description goes out translated into the local language automatically. Applicants arrive with their portfolios attached and scored against reference work you uploaded, so the first thing you compare is the thing you are buying.