A day in the life of a Senior Vendor Manager

Ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes of a translation company?🌍

As the backbone of our translation company, Victoria, our Senior Vendor Manager, plays a crucial role in building and nurturing our network of talented linguists from around the globe.

Discover the magic that happens behind every word we translate. ✨

 

The idea and concept of Vendor Management evolved a lot starting from 2017, when I joined the company, till now. The focus of Vendor Management shifted on strategic recruitment & database management, which includes now:

  • Data driven recruitment

  • Focused vendor base (aligned with sales strategy and revenue)

  • Mondia wide cover (Vendor Management covers now both Travod & Wordminds under one team, there is no longer dedicated Vendor Managers for each company)

 
 
 

I’m not sure what our colleagues exactly think about the VM role, but it’s rather complex. It’s not only about recruiting linguists, but it also involves a lot of other activities. To name a few:

  • Sales and PMs Support (Potential Project Support; Ongoing Project Support; Tenders / RFIs / RFPs; Blind CVs)

  • Database Maintenance (Reviewing linguists’ applications; Database cleanup; Vendor Portal Updates)

  • Recruiting linguists for languages on demand

  • Answering all linguists’ inquiries, complaints, providing them with reference letters, etc.

  • Signing contractual documents with all our translators

  • Performance Measurement (Monthly Linguists Quality Assessments)

  • Running Annual Linguists’ Satisfaction Surveys

How a busy day looks like in VM:

Morning

  • Starting the day with checking the inbox, answering the urgent emails, quires from linguists, colleagues, sales managers, etc.

  • Checking the Jira board for new tasks (vendor requests) and splitting them among our team members

  • Creating the plan of the day and prioritizing the most urgent assignments

Noon

  • Working on the Vendor Requests received both from sales managers and project managers.

  • Discussing with the linguists, negotiating the rates, agreeing the deadlines

Afternoon

  • Share all the information we managed to get with the sales managers/ project managers.

  • Close the projects requests where the required scopes were achieved.

The most satisfying part of the day is then you manage to find linguists for an urgent job or a challenging language combination, and they meet all the project’s requirements, and most important accept our rates.

 
 
team, group, celebration
 
a day in the lifePCDev Travodstories, operations, vendor management