Panel discussion: Vendor management is now talent management!

Bryan Montpetit 00:00
With that being said, we have a great panel that's coming up, which is the vendor management is now talent management. And it's going to be run by Diego, the CEO and founder of creative words. So he's gonna be the moderator on this on this panel. You know, and I think it's actually really interesting. I'm quite curious about this panel, because vendor management, obviously, and is indeed I agree 100%, synonymous with talent management. And I would even say that talent management is not just about fulfilling a role for a job, but but actually, you know, it's an all encompassing trait I suppose we would need are looking for that we would look for, for the people that want to be part of our team. So with that, I believe we have Diego with us.

Diego Cresceri 00:43
Yep. Hi, there. Hello, I'm doing great by and thank you.

Bryan Montpetit 00:48
Excellent. So what I'll do is allow you to introduce your your panelists, and I will bow out and I'll come back and probably with about five minutes left to the at the end of the panel. All right. Yeah, sure. Like everyone. Enjoy. And I'm very much looking forward to hearing about it.

Diego Cresceri 01:03
Thank you, Brian. Thank you. So hi, everybody. I see my guests are already here. Hi, Jamie. How are you today? Thank you. So I wanted to first thank you, mica for inviting me for this to moderate this panel. vendor management is something that really, I really care about. I think it's really strategic for all LSPs. So it's good to have you here. I will start asking Kate if she can launch our poll so we can understand our audience is made. So that we can also adjust our cache questions and conversation on the composition of the audience. If it works.

Bryan Montpetit 01:49
Great. We'll try and get that done for you.

Diego Cresceri 01:51
Okay, thank you. Thank you, maybe why we wait. We can start and I would ask you to briefly present yourself and your company. So that we don't lose time. We have only worked out for an hour. So it's gonna be quick. If you want to start Jamie, what do you think? Absolutely.

Jayme DeSocio 02:13
I'd be happy to Hi, everybody. My name is Jamie SoCo, I'm the director of partner success at we localize we localize as a language services provider. So all manage of language services from translation, interpretation, DTP, other types of engineering, we're a company of about 1500 to 2000 employees, depending on how you're accounting. And we work with 10s of 1000s of partners all over the world. So this is a topic that is particularly important to me, as our director of partner success and working with our high velocity partners.

Diego Cresceri 02:51
Thank you very much, Nora.

Nora Zilahy 02:54
Hello. I'm Melissa, he, Business Partner Manager at the ISA translation localization. And I've been in this position for five years now. But I think it's important from my background, and I like to mention is that I'm a translator myself. I've been freelancing for eight years before switching to ispell. I had my own very small translation company for a while as well. And I find it important because I think my main role is to represent his best interest towards the freelancers. But it's equally important to represent the fetuses interests and points of view towards the company and within the company. And I think that this background, has helped me very much in doing that, as I have personally experienced in this battle, spell it as a reading Hungarian LSP. It's a premium language service provider, without primary for the international market and not on the Hungarian market. We've got a lot of clients from German speaking areas, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and we have enterprise clients, 85% of them are and clients. And they they are very major clients, meaning that they know a lot about the translation industry. So it's different kinds of cooperation with them.

Diego Cresceri 04:12
Thank you very much. Maybe you can talk about yourself, and then we can launch the poll. Yes, sure.

Ann Lawless 04:18
Hi, everyone. My name is Anne lavas, and vendor manager with CQ fluency. I've been with them about two years, but I've been in vendor management for more more than 10 years. Stop counting there. So you can see our a translation cultural adaptation company we're based in New Jersey, it's a growing LSP we mostly service healthcare, healthcare, insurance and life sciences markets, and our clients are major players in those in those fields. We, as I said, we're growing we recently made the Inc 5000 list for the seventh consecutive year and we're also on We've also met top places to work in New Jersey, three years running as well. I am based out of Austin, Texas, where I just recently moved hence the bare walls. And before that I was based in Galway, Ireland.

Diego Cresceri 05:18
Thank you very much. I wanted to thank you, Jamie, particularly for being here because she's on holiday. Thank you very much. My pleasure. Yeah, Kate, if you are ready, maybe you can start, you can launch the ball. Thank you very much. We just want to understand a little bit how the audience is made. We cannot vote, I would have voted today. Just freeze more questions. For you. I don't see replies coming, then I guess. We can wait some more seconds, and then we can see the results. I suppose we're going to have a mix of all of that. So freelancers, window managers, company owners, and many other roles, I guess, the most people in sizes. So okay, whenever you got some replies, we can just close them. Way. Thank you very much. Oh, yeah. So we have majority, freelancers. And so that was a full answers company on, on better management. Of course, individual businesses, I would say mid sized companies. And the majority is working in direct customers. So that's important, I guess, for us. So thank you very much. We'll close the window now. So we're curious to know how vendor management or talent management is structured the structure within your companies, you have all different names for your role. And this is already interesting. So maybe we go the other way around, start doing this time.

Ann Lawless 07:17
Yes. So we are, we have the traditional inventory management. And though I have to say I do love the image search Community Manager and partner Success Manager evoke. But yeah, we are, you know, we're a team that are set up to support the production, side of seeking fluency. So supporting project managers, we recruit and onboard freelancing was specialized companies and other other associated services like desktop publishing and engineering, for our production team, and you know, that those, that recruitment needs to be in line with our overall vendor management strategy, but also meeting the needs of each account. So, you know, which can be very different. So making sure that we meet the needs of the account in terms of capacity and the and, and budget as well.

Diego Cresceri 08:16
Okay, what about you, Nora,

Nora Zilahy 08:20
but it's part of the management team is a very small team of two people. But it's this team is very much integrated. And we are in daily cooperation with the production teams within the company. That is the pm teams and the industrial Slater teams. And this is a strategic role. And we are one of the five bigger teams in the company, besides the sales of pm translators, DDP engineers and finance team. And my official title is Global Business Partner Manager. So we tried to avoid the term vendors, as we don't really look at linguists and translators. Treat them as partners. Sometimes I say that my role as a as a vendor manager is like doing sales activity. Because, of course, we would like to work with the best people, the best of centers, the best lenders, the talents, and they won't just come to you and knock on your door that they would like to work with you. So you have to go after them. You have to find them, and you have to reach out for them. And you have to sell your company to them because we want to make them willing to work with you. And that's more important, willing to stay with you in the long term. So that's what we are working on. And it is not a one way relation. It's rather to variation that we very much depend on the input from our linguist and factors in our cooperation.

Diego Cresceri 09:57
Yeah, I totally agree with you. Absolutely. Jim. You know that we localize it's a more complex structure, then the manager will say something about that. Yeah,

Jayme DeSocio 10:07
absolutely. Because we are a bit bigger. Our setup is made to be able to support the bigger community that we, we have. So yeah, our community experience team includes all manner of talent managers. So this comes from our talent acquisition team, which is both corporate and Freelancer based, as well as community managers and the partner success team, which is there to make sure that everybody we work with feels like they are a part of we localize that we are one we localize that they have a person who sort of their agent here at we localize, so that would be anything from our platform development, to making sure that they have all of the information that they need, so that our freelancers can build projects, or know how to use our system or get a payment update. So we have a team available 24 hours a day, six days a week, we're able to hand off any inquiries that come to us no matter where we are. So we can make sure that we're having a lot of availability for our people. And we also have a lot of information that we like to publish, whether it's newsletters, we have in person meetups when the world was a different place. And we have a full service of self service information that's available. So that way, if you want to just quickly self service, how to do something we're available. So the community experience team of which I am running in a part of is making sure that we have all of that available. So you feel like you have every piece of information that is available, and we're talking with our internal teams. So that way, you're getting the most up to date information from all of the parties. So a little bit.

Diego Cresceri 11:52
Yes, yeah, it's about

Jayme DeSocio 11:54
a team of 50. Wow, across all of the roles from acquisition to being, you know, sort of your agents on the ground,

Diego Cresceri 12:02
that's quite big, I think shows how strategic the function can be.

Jayme DeSocio 12:06
It's also important we feel it is

Diego Cresceri 12:10
absolutely, you can, you will kind of answer to that already. But so you have all three companies, you have a mix of finances, and LSPs. Right. I can see you know, okay. Okay. And what's the you have different sizes, different industry, you work in different industry? What, what's the main challenge that you face? You know, let's start from again, from Jamie, if you want to or whoever wants to talk first.

Jayme DeSocio 12:40
I'm thinking about that.

Diego Cresceri 12:43
Okay. Okay. Okay, please. So I thought you needed time.

Jayme DeSocio 12:51
I did. I think that the main challenge we face is the ever changing landscape in, in localization on there's constantly development, coming from the client side and wanting the spoke quality programs or, you know, complete continuous localization programs, and wanting just sheer perfection in no time at all. So being able to develop platforms and being able to be a preferred work giver for all of our freelancers, like all of you out, there is our biggest struggle, because we want to be easy to work with. But we also have to make sure that the client gets what they want. So we purposely put ourselves in between those two parties. And it's a difficult place to be it's exactly where we want to be. But trying to find that balance is definitely really difficult. And we always want to make sure that we have our talents best interest at heart.

Diego Cresceri 13:47
Thank you very much. Nora, what about you?

Nora Zilahy 13:50
Okay, I can relate to what Jimmy has just said. But I brought some other problems that I daily issues for me. For example, portfolio management is a daily issue for me, it's deciding always on whatever you the one to use for a certain project namely to with the translators are to work with the old ones. So that's really very difficult, we always have to decide on it on a project by project basis. And something that is related is that how I can persuade RPMs to work with new people. So these are important problems for me. Time management is very important for me in the sense that I always have to decide when to recruiting people to the existing team. Because when it's the best time to recruit them, we don't we are not very willing to do that because we already have already have the people who can do the tasks at hand. So we are not very motivated, but this is the best time that you can onboard new people because you can put the state A status in place that you need for involving new people. And when there is a peak and we are in a rush, it is the best, it is the worst time. But this is when you really need them. So that's always a struggle. And, of course, there is the thing that you always have to adapt to the always changing market environment, which is becoming quicker all the time, there are new services requested from us, for example, multimedia services, continuous localization, post editing, they are always coming in more and more quickly. And a decision I have to make is whether I look for new people for this new kind of tasks, or whether I try to change the attitudes of the existing vendors, existing list. So this is a challenge.

Diego Cresceri 15:56
That's a big challenge. Very big one.

Ann Lawless 16:01
And, yes, I guess, you know, very similar to what, you know, what we've heard already. Very, very similar challenges. And I guess, you know, certainly for us, you know, one of the things we're trying to work on is no working with our production team, on on utilizing, you know, some of the really great new linguists and LSPs, that we onboard trying to build up that trust between our team and the teams that we onboard. So it's been that middleman and, you know, try to work with maybe some of the less risk adverse PMs in in trying to, you know, onboard successfully onboard people, because, you know, we want to use, we want to support people, when they initially started working with us so that they have the best experience as well, they feel supported, and that they want to work with us again. So I think it's a very typical challenge, as well as your management.

Jayme DeSocio 17:02
I think one thing that I just also say here is that this is a problem that's been in our industry for the entire time that I've been in the industry, I started as a PM 10 years ago. And as I moved from project management, to talent management, this was something that was really, really difficult always to as a PM, I wanted to use new people, but you always wanted to make sure that you were meeting your deadlines. So something, what we're doing at we localize, as I mentioned is using, we're starting to use technology so that way we're bringing those new people into into our work. So that way, it's a little bit less of a decision on the project manager, and more of a right fit for the right project kind of conversation. So this is something that we're testing out, and we're really excited about. And we're hoping that it solves this age old program, because utilization is definitely one of those problems that has been around for many years, probably as long as the industry has.

Diego Cresceri 17:56
Yeah, one of the conversations I'm having with my team is that you need to keep your freelances or your partners busy. Someone says 60% of the time. So my question would be for you, do you have like, one single vendor per language? Or bring the sweeper vertical? Or do you consolidate your vendors? Or do you want to work with more vendors? And maybe this also depends on the size, I guess. But how do you manage that

Jayme DeSocio 18:26
our strategy is mainly based upon the language pair, right? If you're looking at whatever your largest language pair is, you know, if it's like for us, one of our top five is Japanese, there's no possibility that any single supplier is able to work at the volume in which we have. So we have to have a diversified portfolio of suppliers who are constantly growing and they're, you know, getting bigger and smaller as the year goes on. But then if you think about a more long tail language like oh, like Oman, you know, finding one reliable partner for us is really important. And whether that's a group of freelancers, an LSP, somewhere in between, it doesn't matter. It's about the right fit for us in terms of quality, responsiveness, and all the other really important things that it takes to make a good partner.

Diego Cresceri 19:14
No matter what about you.

Nora Zilahy 19:16
But it's the right fit and the question of the right picture what you were asking previously, whether we work with freelancers, or SPS. We tried to have a lot the biggest pool of LSPs because we want to keep our freelancers busy. So we don't just fluctuate them by the hundreds, then to have a solid pool, and we want to keep them busy. And if you work on the strategy, you have to be scalable, of course. And that's also why we with LSPs and work with LSP is because you can have this problem with them. So whenever it's possible, we work with the freelancers and And we have LSPs as well, to ensure a bigger pool

Ann Lawless 20:08
on, yes, so it's, you know, no best fish, right fit and capacity, you know, are very important. On our end, it really depends on the account as well, we have very different requirements on, you know, say healthcare, healthcare insurance than we might have on life sciences. So, you know, you're not always going to have the same linguists working on on the content, of course. And then, you know, with each account, you have, you know, you have different requirements, you may have, you know, content coming from marketing department, and you've come to come in maybe from a technical department, so, so it's really not the best, best fit for the content. Yeah, that's, you know, on our end, we also have, you know, so you know, we work with with both freelancing was and LSPs. And then we have our internal QA team, who are monitoring what's coming and giving feedback and supporting those teams as well.

Diego Cresceri 21:13
Okay, we started getting questions from the audience. The first one would be is any of you is applying AI in your sourcing process? Something that is defined as smart sourcing?

Jayme DeSocio 21:26
Yes. So that's what we're developing right now. We would call it smart resourcing hasn't been deployed yet. So check back with me in about six months or so. about it more. Great. But it is based upon that right fit based upon size qualifications, what types of certifications you sort of certifications you have with we localize exactly what smart sourcing aims to do.

Diego Cresceri 21:51
Thank you, I suppose arms and nervous companies or smaller? Maybe are you thinking about that?

Ann Lawless 22:00
I think we're certainly watching what's going on in the industry and and looking at, you know, what the possibilities are for sure. Yeah. Yeah,

Nora Zilahy 22:14
we don't do that. Yes. And I'm not sure if they're going to think we are too small for that.

Diego Cresceri 22:21
Yeah, I understand. You, Jamie, you mentioned certifications and experience. One of the questions that I've been asked is, do you prefer to work with, like younger, but like less experts, or maybe more flexible freelancers? So maybe you look for something more senior? How much does education counts against experience.

Jayme DeSocio 22:49
So I think it's always about what type of work that you're working on. And you mentioned life sciences. And I immediately went to our regulated industry, I started as a project manager and patents. And when you're working on patents, you need somebody with at least a master's degree in whatever technical that they're translating. So it really depends on where you're working, and also what the deliverable is. There are many different quality levels out there of what the clients need. And it if it is being sold in that manner, then what you're delivering also matters to that. So for we localize again, it's about the right fit for the right client, and for the right project. Um, we're open to all of it. Because some people haven't had a formal education, but that doesn't make them any less of a translator, especially if they have all of those years of experience. And vice versa. Trent students right out of a translation program, have the latest technology, the latest tips and tricks, and that's definitely something you need in a a pool of talent that you're pulling from, because sometimes you need that flexibility, you need them to use this beta tested CAT tool that, you know, your client has decided to buy and be their first customer. It's all about finding that right balance. And I wouldn't discourage anybody no matter what their background and skill set is because there's always a right fit, because there's so many different types of projects out there.

Diego Cresceri 24:15
Thank you very much. What about the healthcare industry?

Ann Lawless 24:20
Yes, I mean, I think that, you know, what's important is, you know, the outputs and the deliverables and the quality of that. And I think that, you know, if somebody is consistently delivering great quality, you know, the, you know, obviously, there's certain things that we, you know, things that we look for when we're onboarding and recruiting and onboarding, but, you know, as we continue to work with, with people, what we're really looking at is performance and how how well they're doing and and how consistently they can deliver quality. And I think

Jayme DeSocio 24:58
the most important word you said there It was consistency, right? You know, just performing well on perhaps the test during the recruitment process is definitely getting over the first hurdle. But your biggest thing that you could do for a partner like us is consistency, because project managers recognize that from the amount of work it takes to rework yours to the consistent deliverables, meaning on time delivery to your communication, all of that consistency makes you sort of, you know, an ace to us. And that's, you know, where it's going to be most important. Yep.

Diego Cresceri 25:34
No, do you want to add something, you have a lot of questions.

Nora Zilahy 25:39
So we always have to find the right fit for the given project. And we can go to extremes with subject matter expertise, experts, experts, without formal education, or the new people right out from the university without any experience. So we can deal with Boss. And it always depends on the given project, who we work with. So it's the same, and what's important, what's most important is the service level. That should be very good. In both cases, even if you work with a translator, who just stimuli came out of the university or somebody who has been in the in the business for several years. It's really important. And it's primary important for project managers, because they want to work with you. If you are always late, if you don't answer teammates, or if you send them videos all the time and things like that. So as quality is really important.

Diego Cresceri 26:34
Oh, my God, I have so many questions. And so so it's gonna end in three minutes. It's crazy. Like tons of questions. Maybe we can try and answer like, offline, maybe it's a huge amount of questions. I would choose this one randomly. Picking about Diego just mentioned about linguists age, what would you say? Would you say for that for posterity thing? Age is important. So is a big factor. Like to say younger people are best at post editing?

Jayme DeSocio 27:11
I'll just answer really shortly. We don't look at age. In the US, you can't put that on a CV. So age is not a factor at all, it is the quality of your output.

Diego Cresceri 27:20
Okay.

Ann Lawless 27:22
Yeah, I agree. I mean, we have so many people working with us that and I have no idea, you know, when they were born, unless I see a profile picture and can get can give a guess. And it doesn't really factor into disciplines at all. It's really, again, it's about it's about performance and meeting quality standards. And, and a lot of the things that, you know, we talked about earlier as well, just that whole responsiveness and consistency, and, and all of that.

Diego Cresceri 27:56
Again, it's only two minutes to go, I got a couple of questions about metrics that you use to assess and evaluate the performance of your resources. Just mention a couple very quickly

Ann Lawless 28:08
on time delivery quality.

Diego Cresceri 28:11
Okay, consistency, I guess. I guess we all agree. Responsiveness, I think is very important to project. That's

Nora Zilahy 28:25
the inability also.

Diego Cresceri 28:29
Yeah, we have only one minute, but I wanted to share your details if you found them. If you can see my screen. Hopefully, these are the details to get in touch with we localize CQ fluency. And spell. Can you see that? We can? Yes. Okay, good. So, I've been asked to tell you tell the audience that you are invited, and you can get in touch with these companies. And this is very good on your site. Thank you very much for your availability. I'll stop sharing. Please take a screenshot if you want. And I guess, Brian is there so it's time to go? playing the music.

Bryan Montpetit 29:16
I'm here, unfortunately, but

Diego Cresceri 29:19
I was very short. It goes by quick.

Bryan Montpetit 29:23
It goes by quick. Thank you so much. That was great. Just by the number of questions that were coming in. Obviously, it's a topic close to people's hearts and they have a lot of interest in how to select the right resources, whatnot. So I want to thank everyone for their input, their openness, transparency, and as well posting the contact information so you can provide some opportunity to the people that are that are watching. So

Diego Cresceri 29:43
thank you to the show number three, maybe, hopefully. Thank you, Jamie. Thank you very much. Have a great day, everybody.

Bryan Montpetit 29:58
Thank you, Diego. I really agree Should