This semester in Talent Management, we learned how to onboard a talent from start to end. In the process, we also set up our Talent Management Office on Process Street. Basically, our talent onboarding process can be divided into 4 stages: Initial Screening, Request for Information, Due Diligence Review, and Linguistic Evaluation.
Initial Screening
In this stage, we set up our profile screening & requirement checklist where we listed our requirements for the job candidate. We also developed the initial contact email template which we used to contact all the talents that met our requirements. For talent screening, we went to the ATA website, ProZ.com, and Translator’s Café to find the talents that we wanted. Our goal in this stage was to find as many talents that met our requirements as possible so that we could avoid missing any valuable talents.
Request for Information
In this stage, we would request some necessary information from the eligible talents we selected from stage 1. First, we developed an email template with files including New Talent Questionnaire and Independent Contractor Agreement. Then, we would send this email to all the candidates and ask them to fill out the necessary documents and send them back. After that, we would assess their responses to our request and score them according to a scorecard we developed. Candidates whose rates were too high or too low would be disqualified immediately. For candidates who were disqualified, we would send them a disqualification email to let them know why they were disqualified. We also developed a reference check email template which we used to contact the references candidates provided and ask them to fill out a reference request form so that we could check out the validity and strength of candidates’ references.
Due Diligence Review
In this stage, we would carry out a due diligence interview with the candidates we qualified in stage 2. During the interview, we would ask the candidates a series of questions about data security to make sure that we could work with them in a secure environment. After the interview, we would assess their responses according to another scorecard we developed. Same as stage 2, for candidates who were disqualified, we would send the disqualification email to them, telling them why they were disqualified; for candidates who were qualified, we would take them to the next stage.
Linguistic Evaluation
In this stage, we would first develop the test that the candidates were going to take. We had to take a lot of factors into consideration when choosing the source text. For example, the text couldn’t be too short because we wouldn’t be able to test the candidates’ skills without enough content, and it couldn’t be too long either because we shouldn’t expect candidates to do all that work for free. The total time candidates would need to complete the test shouldn’t exceed an hour. Also the domain of the text shouldn’t be too technical or informal and there should be both complex and simple sentence structures. Along with the source text, we also developed a style guide and a terminology list. This way, we could see if the candidates could deliver a professional product.
Then we would send them an email where we gave them 3 days to complete the test. After we received their deliverables, we would ask our test evaluators to evaluate their work based on the test evaluation scorecard we developed. In the scorecard, we indicated the abilities we were testing for, gave instructions for test evaluators on how to review the test, and designed a scorecard with error marking codes and weights for specific error types.
This was the last stage of the talent onboarding process. For candidates who didn’t pass the test, we would send them the disqualification email, and for candidates who passed the test, we would onboard them to our company.
