The Eur-ACL project aims at investigating the effect of linguistic complexity on the communicative success of written texts in multilingual professional contexts. This effect will be determined by analysing different facets of linguistic complexity in a corpus of academic cover letters written in three languages (English, German and Italian), for a number of different disciplines and job positions, controlling for its potential dependency on discipline and author demographics. Particular attention will be given to the critical review of the methods with which linguistic complexity has been measured until now, eventually aiming at advancing them. This study will generate unique knowledge on the impact of language on professional success, which will eventually serve the creation of training materials for young professionals.