Slack Message Language
How Kit picks the language of a Slack message — one language your account chooses for shared channels, each person's own language for direct messages.
Why It Matters
The language of a Slack post used to depend on who set it off. A German admin advanced a candidate and the channel got German. A scheduled reminder fired overnight with nobody behind it and the same channel got English. Nobody chose either one — the channel simply inherited whoever happened to click, so a single thread could change language halfway down.
That is now settled by a setting instead of by circumstance. A channel is written in one language your account picks. A direct message is written in the language of the person reading it.
The Rule
| Where Kit posts | Language it uses |
|---|---|
| A shared Slack channel | Your account’s Channel language setting |
| A Slack direct message | The recipient’s own Preferred language, from their profile |
One setting decides every channel. Nothing decides a DM except the reader’s own profile — the channel language never reaches into someone’s direct messages.
What the Channel Language Controls
Everything Kit writes into a channel:
- Hiring notifications — new applicants, stage moves, offers, and the summaries pinned under a candidate’s post.
- Vulnerability report cards and their thread replies — the card itself, and every status change, SLA breach, bounty and disbursement reply hanging under it. See Slack Report Threads.
- Outreach alerts — campaign and prospect notifications.
- The day-7 stall escalation — the public nudge at the end of the anti-stall ladder.
- Link previews — the small cards Slack draws when a teammate pastes a Kit URL into a channel.
Important
A private per-candidate channel is still a channel. A candidate channel is private and often small, but it holds several teammates rather than one reader, so it follows the account’s channel language like any other. “Channel” here means shared, not public.
What It Doesn’t Control
| Not governed by this setting | What decides it instead |
|---|---|
| Personal Slack DMs | The recipient’s Preferred language — see Personal Slack Notifications |
| Kit emails to your team | Each person’s own profile language |
| Candidate and researcher emails | The job posting’s communication language, or the portal’s |
| Your career portal | Career portal languages |
| KitBot answers and AI-written summaries | The question it was asked, or the text it was summarising — a model writes its own prose |
| Anything a teammate types in the channel | Them |
Where to Find It
Go to Integrations → Slack and look for Channel language in the Features section:
Everything Kit posts to a shared Slack channel is written in one language, so a channel reads the same no matter who — or what — triggered the update.
Set Channel message language — English, Deutsch, Español, Français, Polski — and click Save. Any account admin can change it, and the next message Kit posts uses the new language.
The help text under the select is the part that catches people out:
Slack has its own language, separate from your account’s other language settings. Direct messages are unaffected — each member still gets theirs in their own language.
That separation is deliberate. Your career portal’s language is a choice about candidates; your Slack channel language is a choice about your own team. An account can run a Polish careers page and English internal channels, or the reverse.
The Default, and What Changes for You
The default is English, and no account was migrated to anything else. So from the moment this ships, every account’s channel messages are in English until an admin picks something else — including accounts whose team is entirely German or Polish and who were used to seeing their own language most of the time, because most of the clicks came from their own staff.
If that describes you, it is one dropdown: set Channel language to your team’s language and your channels read the way they used to. This time they stay that way, including for the scheduled posts that always came out English no matter what.
Note
Changing the setting never rewrites what is already in Slack. Kit does not re-post or re-render a message it has already sent. A card sitting in a thread keeps the language it was posted in, while the thread replies added afterwards use the new setting — so a long-lived thread can read in two languages across the switch. That is expected: the thread is a record of what was said at the time.
Picking a Language for a Mixed Channel
A channel gets one language, so choose for the room rather than for the majority:
- Pick what everyone in the channel can read, not what most of them prefer. A German channel with two English-speaking contractors is unreadable for two people; an English channel is second-best for everyone and locks nobody out.
- Count the guests. Slack Connect members and multi-channel guests from other companies see every card in a routed channel, and they often share no language with your staff.
- There is no per-channel override. One setting covers every channel your account routes to, so when two channels have genuinely different audiences, pick the language that works for the wider one.
- Nobody loses their own language entirely. Anyone who finds the channel language hard going still gets their action-required notifications as DMs in their own language — they just need Preferred language set on their profile.
Quick Checklist
- Set Channel language under Integrations → Slack — it is English until you do
- Pick the language everyone in the channel can read, guests included
- Tell teammates their DMs follow the Preferred language on their own profile
- Don’t expect messages already posted to change — only new posts use the new setting