Vendor hiring trends for 2022

Diego Cresceri 00:05 Hello, everyone. Hi, everybody. Welcome to these on demand edition of look for more. Thank you, Kay for organizing this and we find your safe and sound. And we are eager to, to record this video today about hiring plans and specifically on vendor management and why we think vendor management is the new plan. So I'm glad to be here today with Jada, Jada Giotto. Giada is here because she strongly believes in healthy business relationship, respectful recruitment practices. And she's really strong about that. And I'm really proud of having her with very words. And she she's talking about building really strong relationship with our vendors. And, and this is why she, she loves talking about vendor management. She has linguistic studies, she's done it with the studies. And she's really a proactive Community Manager and with persuading, and she's enthusiastic about working with our finances, and you will probably have her the her at many events lately. So Giada, thank you for being here with us, you talk with you. Giada Gerotto 01:36 I'm also very happy to be here with Diego courgetti, who is the CEO of creative words. I'm sure you've seen him and you can recognize him for his daring glasses, which are his top one feature. He's here with us today, because he does believe in vendor management, he invests a lot on that. And he really believes in training and continuous development and not only for our freelancers, which is what you're fostering a lot with our community. But also, in general, like it's really into training, and that talk about bridging the gap with the Academy and the university training. So vendor management and hiring and specifically, hiring and developing people is really his cup of tea. We just wanted to show you his many pairs of glasses. That's what we have to see every day. Thank you Diego Cresceri 02:43 for doing that. Thank you very much. This was actually something that we would have done in the live event. It's seems weird in the in the recorded video. So let's see how it's gonna work. Giada Gerotto 02:58 Yeah, but I mean, it was too beautiful. Not to keep it there. Go Let's get serious now. Yep. So we are starting with an overview of events. So the discussion is vendor management and how this is evolving and how this is impacting hiring trends for freelancers. We thought okay, then vendor management is evolving. How is that evolving? And we notice there are two big trends in vendor management nowadays. And the first one is about events or, as Diego is the master of events, he's always there. I let him go with that. Diego Cresceri 03:43 Yeah, thank you, you had a great idea of analyzing how much vendor management is, you know, is spoken about at events. So let's start with last word. Thank you for doing this research in 2018 there was just one session at block where they were event talking about vendor management. And and this is growing 2021 There was two sessions and let's see what's gonna happen 2022 With with other local events, and it really starts showing a trend we'll go interested in the topic. If we think about Gala, for instance, in back in 2017. Just one webinar of garland they do a lot of webinars was about vendor management. And 2018 We're just one blog post and you see there's a go in turn again for webinars in 2019. Three webinars on one blog post implemented with the 2020 and again, two webinars in positive one and gala in 2022 is actually organizing what was the what was the color masterclass? Ketamine Academy, so it's a series of four webinars for meetings where Jada would actually conducting them. And it will be about random vendor management. And these, again shows that there is an increasing interest in this role in our industry, both on the LSP side and on the buyer side. Giada Gerotto 05:18 Yeah. And that's, that's also confirmed by the other thread that we've been analyzing, which is the amount of job offers available. Now, I've been seeing a lot of job offers lately on LinkedIn about vendor management. And that was like, Okay, let's check if it's my feeling, or if there's really a lot out there. And in fact, I ran a quick search on the day I was creating the deck. And I did find quite some job offers for random manage managers in our business. And that's actually something I want to point your attention on, specifically starting with the job titles. So not everyone is calling vendor management, vendor management. In fact, my role in creative work is community manager. So I'm not in the vendor manager. Job Title, trend anymore. And, and that makes it a bit difficult to actually understand how many people are in the business now. And in this position. Now, in our industry, we've been thinking about doing the research on that, but it's super difficult to identify who is doing that, and especially on the buyer side, but anyways, that's that's one thing. We have talent manager, Community Manager, vendor manager, globalization then their manager, recruiter, and then supply chain manager. So there are still quite some names out there for the role. We tried and see if there was a trend in terms of locations, but no, like everyone is hiring manager managers. Most of the jobs in the in the screenshot here are in Europe, but they're either hybrid or on site or remote. The one from Argus, for example, you can't see that in the in the ad, but it's for the US. And there's something in Brazil. So I'm in it's like everywhere. And another interesting thing is that it's in different businesses, so you can see it with different colors, purple are on the buyer side. There are big translation agencies, big LSPs transperfect keywords, RW s, and then smaller translation agencies, like we're getting more interested in vendor management and recruiting and their managers. So that's really spread. And it seems like everyone's looking for vendor managers at this time, which is, of course, very good, I'm biased, but it's making something happen. The what's going on, we shifting from this centralized vendor management, decentralized vendor management. So basically, that means that vendor management is not anymore a set of tasks that spread among different people in the company, usually project managers. And it's also not only procurement anymore. It's centralized with a specific department that's doing that kind of stuff, which is bringing some advantages. The first one that I think sometimes it's a bit undervalued is having the big picture. So I think the main value of a vendor manager at a company that they have the big picture of the Freelancers available, which has benefits in all sorts of things like the relationship first, you know who your people are, you can talk to them, you can be more honest in the recruitment, you can keep track of what's happening, you can keep track of their workload, you can keep track track of the money, the company's spending on freelancers. And you can carry out a comprehensive risk assessment of freelancers like risk. Vendor risk assessment is like kind of the key principles in vendor management. Now, most of the localization companies don't do that in a structured way. But still, it helps a lot to have somebody who's taking care of everything because they are able to assess stuff. And then this evolution in terms of relationships, which again is one of my strongest interests in the roles, so I wanted to have a separate bullet point for that. We're shifting from transactional relationships with Bender manner with sorry, freelancers, to stable partnerships. When you have someone who is dedicated to them, you're better able to identify the person, the people who would really fit your needs, and your pool of translators. And all the effort you would put on the transactional onboarding, like having recurrent job bans asking freelancers to join your company, or contacting people every now and then like, for for new jobs is shifting towards an effort in terms of retention. So what can I do to keep these people with me? Send them work? Yes, of course. That's key and something. Yes. And that something else is indeed what I think is the first evolution in terms of hiring trends for freelancers. So we are moving more towards other stuff we add? Diego Cresceri 11:02 Yeah, absolutely. I think we've seen that coming from our customers as well, there's been at least a couple of initiatives from our customers that just started to tweet us is really part of a community for them as well. So we've been doing for CC join us, I would say, but I see this is. And of course, it makes you feel good as a vendor as a supplier. I mean, you really feel part of something bigger this with this is very important. Giada Gerotto 11:31 Yes, yes, completely. And it shows with freelancers as well, they, like they know, they can contact you, they can ask you things. And it's it's a relationship. Diego Cresceri 11:44 Again, I just want to mention that when I started the company, what they would do is test like hundreds of people. And these are changed because of you, of course, you bought your own expertise and your vision for vendor management. Yeah. But that's, Giada Gerotto 11:58 that's, again, something you cannot do when you're wearing different hats. So how could you take care of vendor management, project management and invoicing and everything? Yeah, so that's, that's why a dedicated team helps. Yeah, Diego Cresceri 12:10 absolutely. Yeah, as the slide shows, now, vendor management is really part of business strategy. And the way natto in his book, that you're the general fuel translation company, or the way they identified it as a core function for MSPs. And I cannot agree with it. vendor management is all about who's pushing happiness of our vendors and their relationships with vendors as well. And you really need to rethink the purchase that you have towards your supply chain, which is actually a word and especially that I don't like I don't like the supply chain. There are better ways to express that I would say but yeah. Yeah, let's, as you already mentioned, it, I really believe in proactive vendor management or in reactive. So what is best, in my opinion, is we build a community of people that are there in your database. And that you build on the relationship you build on the, on having them with you, and being there to work with you, they need to trust you, of course, they need to believe you're therefore for them as well. So it's not really reacting to office or restaurant customers, it's really having a sustainable database, where you can even buffers for if it gets to get projects. So this is what we're trying to do. So we're not just trying, of course, that is that you need to react to because you get strange and weird requests to say that. Yeah, I mean, this happens every day and you decide to offer all Italian for instance, and you get all other languages happening all the time. But you know, it's really part of the business strategy. I mean, it's you need to decide where they want to go and adapt vendor manager that in a proactive way. Yeah. And that's I think, you specialize your suppliers, your vendors your freelances. Of course, the best for your customers at the end of the day, we're here to serve our customers as best as possible. Giada Gerotto 14:20 Yes, the idea is that, in fact, you're able to find the people for your project. So not just the ones who are reacting to your post or to your ad, but or the ones who are able to take it at that specific time of the day and for that specific deadline. The idea is that you build on that so they're more reliable, they are more tested, market tested. Hopefully, they are more specialized. They're more in line with your verticals. So that's that's a benefit everywhere. And Diego Cresceri 15:02 we haven't mentioned price too much, of course, cost as a role in that as well. But when as Alena upon is saying he or she's been the management professor at the Mises University, when assignments serve as labels, the project isn't specialized in that it's only based on the price. I mean, this is not gonna gonna work. I mean, it's it produces poor quality and you you basically lose a customer. This is why I think it's very strategic. It's not it's not. It's part of the business strategy and the business vision. Absolutely mean, wise, of course, as well. It's not to say that we don't care about pricing. This plays a role as well, of course, but it's part of the bigger picture that you should have with your vendor vendor management strategy. Giada Gerotto 15:53 Yes, completely. The the MES is the only Institute, the only university as far as we know, that's offering vendor management training. And when I talked to Elena, and she was indeed mentioning that it's super important to train vendor managers, because that's what's changing the hiring process. That's what's helping companies to have more reliable people aren't there? Diego Cresceri 16:23 Well, I if we're alive at this point of the soliciting a, some comments in the chat asking for people if they knew of any other university offering this kind of training, and we're not live, but still, if you know of any other, please let us know. Because I'm really interested to know, of course, when you talk about all these proactiveness so we're activity, the fact that you need to take care of your vendors, you talk about negotiation and everything, this the specific role that vendor management is luckily becoming, this is where you need formal training. You just can't be you know, study languages, infuse the translator, probably, you know, part of that, but there's still a big need for formal training, of course, Giada Gerotto 17:10 yes, that's what also in this professor of Kent University, they shared with us I, at some point, I had the feeling they might have something on vendor management, and he said they don't. Because change in Academy is painful is low. I'm quoting him again. I like this. But yeah, it's it's crucial it's becoming part of something that's something we're filling the need for. So that's, that's just great. And what are we doing for that we are trying to make up for the lack of formal training within formal training. So there are a lot of networking and and events organized for an N by vendor managers, or were vendor managers are taking part in. And together with Carmen Cisneros, who is the vendor manager at ultimate language solutions, I think it's called with built this group. I mean, actually, she's been the group I've joined it later. And it's a group where we're having regular meetups for vendor managers, and we are discussing trends in the industry. Right, the last meetup in February was about future trends of vendor management, what we foresee for the future of our role. So if there are vendor managers out there, you're more than welcome to join the group if you aren't there yet. Diego Cresceri 18:50 Yeah. There's somebody that you mentioned that we did. One of the biggest audience we had for our webinars was really the one with you about better management and, and their relationship with project managers. This is so important. Yeah, that it again, it shows either topic, the topic of vendor management, and relationship and so on. Yes. Giada Gerotto 19:15 It's something where it's hard to find training MSL, so I'm very interested in training. That's what I talk to Elena from, from the MES. I've been doing vendor management for like six years, seven years now. Still, I'm lacking formal training in that. So I'm doing it the way I think it's right. I don't know if it is in the end. So it would really be great to have for more formal training around. But yeah, so what is happening for vendor management is what is happening for freelancers and translation company is literally out there with training, Diego Cresceri 19:54 training opportunities arising. We put here our CW lobbyists It's been there for a couple of years now, but in Wheeling the last couple of months and see it, so at least a couple localized academies, one of them and our friends on the way with localization Academy. And these shows, really, the LSPs are starting to see a need for training for formal training, and are doing the part in filling that gap. Giada Gerotto 20:26 And that's actually what you were discussing back in what was that? 2019? The luck from home? So, so yeah, so that's happening. So that's, that's moving slowly, but moving. And with LSPs. And vendor managers, I think it's a bit the same, we are acting. I mean, some companies are more focused on that than others. And that's something we need to appreciate creative words has always had this super interested in, in training, Diego is shaping the company the way he is, and the way he thinks, of course, we all do believe in training. And we're offering a lot of training to our translators. We've organized workshops. We've organized a mentoring program, we have a training community that's dedicated to our freelancers where they need a voucher to access. So it's kind of a private cwp lab for our translators. And they're making good use of that. And that's of course, increasing the specialization of our translators with benefits for our customers in the end. So I'd like to point this as another trend in hiring these days that I am not so sure. It's key for companies to find people who are ready to handle everything that's becoming more and more difficult, especially as the business is really diversifying. So there are a lot of services that are there, and were in there like 10 years ago. And no translator cannot at all. Most of the market tested and you know, well established translators are potentially not doing I don't know, SEO, because it's more reason, for example, if they're not that much into continuous professional development, they might like expertise on that and training them is the way to help your company build a solid pool. So Diego Cresceri 22:40 training, I didn't think that no professional growth is is one of the most engaging parts of the relationship, the relationship with freelancers and with anybody. So this is what we are spending so much efforts in there that it's been of course, yeah. Giada Gerotto 22:59 Well, then I think we're at the end of our presentation. So Diego Cresceri 23:03 yeah, it seems we are Yeah, it was it was not used to do a recorded video. I think this is the first time I guess, I hope it was not too bad on my part. So you've been great, by the way. And yeah, this would be where we would collect questions from the audience. Unfortunately, this is not our it's going to be this time that we are available, I guess you would just as well get in touch with us via LinkedIn or on our website, you can find our references and contact details. So get in touch any question we we don't have the crystal ball. Probably we didn't talk about technology and how technology can improve vendor management. Maybe something's going to happen. Maybe not with now. Probably something's gonna happen. I would say we wanted really to focus on the, I guess, human part. We need that in these times. I guess. Giada Gerotto 23:58 Yeah. More than ever. Yeah. Well, it's been a super pleasure to talk with you. Diego Cresceri 24:07 Yeah, crazy. Yesterday. We were together in the same room now we are like, apart but yeah, thank you. Thank you for for this. Thank you, Kate. Again, thank you, everybody for watching the video them. Yeah. Giada Gerotto 24:22 Let's stay in touch. Yes, to get in touch with everything, questions and everything. And we're happy to welcome anyone who has food for thought for us. Thank you very much. Diego Cresceri 24:37 Thank you guys markup. Thank you, everybody. Ciao, ciao. Bye