How CCI Global built one language-proficiency standard across four African hubs and five languages

CCI Global is an African-based BPO that runs customer support, sales and back-office operations for brands in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and across Africa. Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Dubai, it employs more than 15,000 people across sites in South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Ghana and Egypt. The agents it hires spend their shifts speaking and writing to a client's customers, often in a second or third language, so the job depends on proficiency that can be proven rather than claimed.

Proving language skills for customer-facing global roles

CCI Global hires in more than one language, and to different levels for different accounts. One program needs French and English at C1, another needs Spanish, another Italian or German. Spread across four countries and dozens of recruiters, there was no shared, defensible way to check any of it. The bar for "good enough English" drifted from office to office, and a mis-hire only surfaced once an agent was already on a client's account.

One CEFR standard, built once and run in every hub

Rather than trust a generic language test, CCI Global built its own standard in Testlify. The team created 18 custom libraries mapped to the CEFR scale across five languages, English at B1, B2 and C1, plus French, Spanish, Italian and German, so every account can be screened to the exact level it demands. Because the roles are spoken and written jobs, proficiency is measured the way it is actually used: candidates logged 16,110 audio answers and 3,975 typing tests alongside written and multiple-choice questions, more than 103,000 attempts across seven formats in total.

The whole program runs white-label under CCI Global's brand, so candidates and the client brands they represent see one consistent experience across every country. Twelve published assessments now map directly to live client programs, from a CCI Kenya American Airlines English test to a French and English C1 assessment for an Instacart account, and recruiters reuse the same libraries to stand up a new program in hours instead of rebuilding a test per role.

A screening program that scaled faster than the business could add seats

In the last year CCI Global invited 1,951 candidates and 1,550 completed their assessments, a 79% completion rate, with candidate volume up 121.8% year over year. Nineteen of twenty recruiter seats are in active use across the four countries, and the program is running so hot that provisioned screening capacity is nearly exhausted, a rare problem that says the standard is being used, not shelved.

The bigger shift is that language proficiency is now measured the same way for every candidate, in every country, in the language each client account actually requires.