There is one problem I see with this approach.

Unless I'm missing something I think you meant

 open(EMPLOYEES,'test.txt') or die;

  while (my $line = <EMPLOYEES>) {
    #remove the carriage return
    chomp $line;

    #splits the line between tabs and get the different elements
    my ($name, $city, $language) = split /\t/, $line;

    next unless $language =~ /$search/;

    print "$name can speak " . ($search) .
      " and lives in " . ($city) . ".\n";
  }

  print "Sorry, your query produced no results.\n" if (eof(EMPLOYEES))
+;
[download]

But the bigger problem using the eof approach is that if the match is last line of the file - you'll get the match printed and the 'Sorry' message.