Making a career switch in the language services industry can be a complex process to undertake alone

12th April 2018

#Translation/Localization Project Management & QA

With an ever-growing community of agencies, M&A activity consolidating the commercial landscape and new opportunities on the client side springing up as the localization strategies of high-growth companies mature, even finding the right companies to talk to can be a challenge, let alone the right role and fit. Add to that a variety of multi-round interview schedules, dead-end and mis-matched processes, misaligned offer negotiations… a job search can quickly turn into months of distracting and stressful effort. Whilst working with a professional recruiter is often seen as a great way to get the ‘introductions’ to active hiring managers in the market, candidates who build a strong partnership with their recruiter can hugely improve their overall experience and get much more out of working together than a simple introduction. Savvy candidates put their recruiter to work on their behalf, and collaborate to secure faster processes, actionable feedback, cleaner negotiations and a better end result: the best role for their skills, interests and financial goals that the market has available. Here are a few ideas on how candidates in the language services industry can get maximum benefit from working with a recruitment specialist: Managing feedback and identifying areas of improvement – throughout each round of interview discussions, a strong recruiter will be debriefing with both candidate and hiring company to provide feedback, ensure key questions are on the discussion agenda and help both sides to advance a productive dialogue. Undertaking an interview process solo can mean moving through interview rounds with zero feedback or insight into what the hiring team’s thoughts, concerns and motivations might be. Setting time expectations – much of the frustration in an interview process can stem from a stop-start rhythm as everyone tries to juggle busy schedules. Recruiters can keep candidates notified about time-frames, any likely delays, and ensure that all parties know exactly where they are in a process so that they can manage their career search with confidence. Providing key insight – Adaptive Globalization has recruited within the language services industry for over ten years, and our recruiters offer candidates valuable intel on how to approach interview processes, details on hiring companies and individual hiring managers. A good recruiter will be able to brief candidates on interview formats, interviewer styles and preferences and guide a candidate to deliver a standout performance that truly represents their potential and capabilities to the hiring company. Managing expectations – negotiating is a major part of any process, and it’s not just salary. Benefits, vacation, pension, job title, flexible working, promotion time-frames… it’s all part of a complex conversation, and nothing is more frustrating than reaching the end of a long interview process only to be disappointed with the final offer. Professional recruiters are there to re-qualify expectations on both sides at every stage, ensuring that nobody invests time in mis-matched opportunities. The recruitment industry is an introduction business, and Adaptive’s network helps hundreds of translation and localization industry professionals each year find their next career step. But the introduction really only scratches the surface in terms of what we are able to provide candidates in their job searches. Remember, your consultant is there for you throughout the entire process, there are many ways that you can get the most out of recruiter at Adaptive Globalization outside of the introduction to a hiring manager, I encourage you to use as many as possible! Looking for the next step in your career? Get in touch - alex.balme@adaptiveglobalization.com

Welcome to our new website!

23rd March 2018

Welcome to Adaptive Globalization's new home online! Our rebuilt site offers candidates better access to our top jobs and showcases Adaptive's growing range of recruitment services across the Language Services & Technology space. Throughout the last year Adaptive Globalization has continued to build recruitment partnerships with new translation, localization and interpreting agencies around the world whilst continuing to recruit actively for clients we've supported for up to ten years. We've seen plenty of change across the market, as the M&A scene within the sector heated up, technology innovations continued to unlock new possibilities and clients have faced new challenges in recruiting essential skills and talent into their teams. Adaptive itself has also grown - in addition to supporting our LSP customers, we've helped more client-side language teams recruit than at any previous period, and have also grown our support capabilities for customers in areas such as Natural Language Processing, Multimedia Localization and Language Training. Our new website aims to provide clients with a more comprehensive vision of Adpative's capabilities, and offer digital job-seekers an improved and more intuitive interface with better accessibility to top jobs. The site also brings an enhanced job alert feature to help candidates stay up to date with new vacancies as they enter our networks. We look forward to continuing our role in providing the global language community with expert recruitment solutions to meet every challenge. Head over to our jobs page or get in touch to see if your dream job is out there.

Building Culture in Language Services Companies: An interview with Mark Brayan, CEO of Appen

26th February 2018

Adaptive Globalization speaks with thousands of professionals in the language services and technology industry every year about their career ambitions and development. Alongside job specifics such as responsibilities, location and pay, corporate culture is one of the major topics raised by of those exploring new career options. Often when discussing job opportunities Adaptive’s recruiters are questioned not only on culture as regards the local office space in which a candidate would be working, but on the role that corporate culture plays in the hiring company’s business operations and overall identity. For some organizations, culture is only peripherally addressed at a leadership level, with top and bottom-line considerations driving daily decision-making. For others, culture is a foundational component of business success and a key aspect of strategy. Defining and implementing corporate culture can be challenging, especially within a global business where international offices and local cultural differences must be factored in. To learn more about how to address these challenges, Adaptive spoke with Mark Brayan, CEO of Appen. AG: The first step in building a successful corporate culture is to have a clear vision for what culture means within an organization. How is this interpreted at Appen? MB: Culture is how people work together, how they get things done. If the culture isn’t going to achieve business objectives, it will fail. Strategy needs to be supported by culture – you can have the most elegant strategy in the world, but if you don’t have an enabling culture, that strategy won’t get implemented. When developing business plans, culture is a fundamental consideration as both culture and strategy have to be aligned in order for the organization to be successful. AG: How is culture created at Appen? MB: You can’t write down culture on a piece of paper and make it so – you have to create conditions, and culture creates itself within those conditions. Conditions can be formal, such as business structures, or informal, such as respect for the customer. As a business, you don’t create culture – you create conditions for culture. Where the business can help shape, culture is through creating the right structures and via the leadership of the business displaying the desired cultural behaviors. To reinforce this, Appen does have formalized culture and value statements, which in fact preceded my joining the business. These do have a physical and online presence around the business, and there is a system of encouragement to adopt these standards via employee awards based around the values. AG: Is culture within Appen static, or does it evolve? How is this evolution managed? MB: We shape the direction of our culture through ongoing feedback. We try to continually integrate employee input through tools such as engagement surveys. The primary values which emerge from these as important to Appen’s teams are respect for each other and respect for customers, and we work to ensure these are built into our norms and behaviors. Another major way in which culture should evolve is in accordance with shifting stakeholder requirements. When Appen transitioned from a private to a public company, a new group of stakeholders had to be integrated. From staff and customers, we then had to ensure that investors were considered and positively impacted by our culture. There are internal leadership meetings to discuss cultural goals and propagating culture – understanding what people value and what binds them to the company. it’s talked about, it’s an active part of dialogue, but it’s up to leadership to adopt it and work to implement it. AG: The first step in building a successful corporate culture is to have a clear vision for what culture means within an organization. How is this interpreted at Appen? MB: Culture is how people work together, how they get things done. If the culture isn’t going to achieve business objectives, it will fail. Strategy needs to be supported by culture – you can have the most elegant strategy in the world, but if you don’t have an enabling culture, that strategy won’t get implemented. When developing business plans, culture is a fundamental consideration as both culture and strategy have to be aligned in order for the organization to be successful. AG: Much of the discussion around corporate culture happens from an internal viewpoint. How does Appen’s cultural and value mix impact customers? MB: There is a definite benefit for customer, with regard to quality of work, time-frames, responsiveness and other aspects. Appen’s corporate culture is, in many ways, almost more customer-facing than internal-facing. The mindset is “how do we help the customer?”. There are direct links between culture, how Appen works with customers, and how the company performs. Good corporate performance is good for culture – it attracts talent, provides challenge and opportunity, and strong financial performance feeds culture. But if a company is struggling, then strong corporate culture is also vital – culture can be relied upon to support periods of poor performance. AG: What allowance is made for international variance in corporate culture? MB: Appen has offices in Australia, the Philippines, the US and the UK. That gives us a very rich set of cultures. However, there is consistency in those core corporate cultural elements that define Appen as a business. We have a wealth of cultural nuance around regions of the world which are a benefit in adding color and diversity to our teams. However, how people work together, how we treat each other, how we get things done – that’s the variable we work to keep consistent.

LSP Growth – An Up-Close Look with a Chief of Sales & Marketing Officer

8th January 2018

Growth is something that happens around a team. Sometimes to a team. But what’s it like viewing LSP growth from the top? To help answer that question, Adaptive Globalization’s Global Recruitment Director Tom Newman spoke with Véronique Ö;zkaya, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer with Xplanation, Chair of the Board with GALA and a former CSO with Moravia and VP with Lionbridge. Adaptive Globalization works with candidates across all areas of the language services and technology industry, with over 200 candidate placements made in 2016 so far. Throughout this large volume of interaction with industry professionals, without a shadow of a doubt the most commonly-heard aspiration among candidates is a desire to join a ‘growing’ company. Growth is exciting – it means change, it means progress, it means a move into the unknown. While growth certainly permeates almost all areas of a translation agency, it’s not often that members of the core production and sales teams are offered the chance to view the corporation’s development from a bird’s-eye view. AG: Xplanation’s growth has been rapid and spread across multiple geographies (11 countries and counting). What has been the reason to expand so fast across the map, and not focus on consolidation in primary markets? Veronique: Initially it was purely down to the circumstances of knowing a number of people in those geographies. They really had a startup attitude and could stretch from business development to admin tasks and recruitment. If you take an office like Sweden in the beginning, we had these multi-talent profiles so we knew we could afford to start from scratch and build around the skills of our team. We knew that the opportunity of regions like Denmark or Sweden was there – we saw strength in the manufacturing sector and a growing need for exports so it was an obvious move. Phase two of growth is a little bit more difficult, once hubs are established. That is more driven by our customers. What we do now is look at our customers and where we’re going to reinforce our capabilities. It’s not just geography – you need to reinforce your services, customers, and regional presence. We have a base, we know it has potential, and we want to accelerate that. But the core is really the people. The talent. AG: Why did you build production teams at each country? Veronique: We try to build production teams in-country wherever possible. It’s our approach to have a customer-facing capability at least at a production level as often as possible. In countries like the USA, for instance, we wanted a PM in that time zone. But beyond that, we have been careful to match cultures where possible, and not be purely time-zone or geography led. We need our customers and their support teams to mesh culturally and work together for best results. AG: Is the US market still a major target among Europe-based LSPs? Veronique: I’m a firm believer that there remains a lot of potential in the US. What is different from Europe is that decisions are made quicker, which is appealing. Selling to the US from a primarily Europe base is a challenge, however. We do have an offering with a lot of automation and cool technology, processes, and people – but the first engagement can be tough. We’ve definitely seen a big difference between having one office, to having multiple offices and country managers. This global platform has been a major accelerator in our ability to sell internationally. AG: With respect to your office in Beijing. Has the Far East been the most challenging region to establish yourself in, as a Western European business? Veronique: I think it is certainly more difficult than the US. It’s the culture, market, and trust-building. Even in America, people want to do business with Americans. In Japan and China, I’ve seen it repeatedly. A Chinese company will always feel more comfortable dealing with a Chinese company. I think it is just down to human nature to feel comfortable to what you can relate to. Despite our own industry’s best efforts, we haven’t reached a truly ‘global world’ yet! Local presence and cultural fit are still extremely important. AG: Does Xplanation have any plans for South America or other areas of the globe? Veronique: Our plans for the next 3+ years are principally strengthening significantly in Germany, the UK, and USA. Beyond that… many exciting things are coming! Not another geographical location, but we do have other a number of plans on the horizon which we’re very excited about and will contribute substantially to our continued growth. Keep your eyes open for news over the coming few quarters!