Sonatafy Technology has brought in four writers who are now permanent members of the client’s team, proving to be a good judge of character. Thanks to the team’s receptiveness to feedback, they’ve adjusted their processes to be as effective as possible, paving the way for a long-term engagement.
“Sonatafy did such an excellent job of listening to what we wanted and finding us suitable candidates.”
The Client
Introduce your business and what you do there.
I am the CEO of a software company called Sema.
The Challenge
What challenge were you trying to address with Sonatafy Technology?
I needed help with hiring great talent to keep up with aggressive customer growth.
The Approach
What was the scope of their involvement?
We needed to hire technical writers, specifically those with a software development background. This initiative was to support the growth of our professional services; we involve technical writing as part of the delivery of our product. Before Sonatafy started the recruitment process, we gave them some initial training to clarify our needs. They have helped us bring in four writers who we’ve hired directly and have become permanent team members. We supervise them like our other teammates. Additionally, Sonatafy has given our company advice on our product and engineering roadmap.
What is the team composition?
I worked with the CTO, an account manager, and two people from their staffing team.
How did you come to work with Sonatafy Technology?
I found them through word-of-mouth recommendations.
How much have you invested with them?
We’ve invested about $100,000.
What is the status of this engagement?
We started working together in June 2020, and it’s still ongoing.
What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
Our track record with the Sonatafy team’s candidates is better than those of other partners and even internal hiring. We have a really tight performance culture — we do a lot of training to set candidates up for success, but if they’re not the right fit, we let go of them. To measure how trustworthy and good their process is, the strongest metric we use is how much we want to continue working with the writers they’ve brought in. Sonatafy did such an excellent job of listening to what we wanted and finding us suitable candidates. Furthermore, the writers have been writing excellent client briefing materials. We were looking for a combination of speed and the quality of the work, and they brought that. The senior professionals who’ve evaluated them deemed their work extremely high quality. They’re on par with teammates we hired on our own.
How did Sonatafy Technology perform from a project management standpoint?
The project management has been excellent, fast, and consistent — their response times are always within a few hours. We use Slack, Jira, and email. The team gives regular weekly updates to let us know where we stand. In terms of feedback, Sonatafy has been very open — they’re constantly fine-tuning the process. When we turned down one of their first few candidates, we had a very positive conversation with them. There was no sense of defensiveness from them; they just focused on what they could do better.
What did you find most impressive about them?
The consistency of their delivery of suitable candidates is very distinctive from the delivery of other firms we’ve worked with. Sonatafy’s team has gone the extra mile. The additional advice they’ve given us has been incredibly helpful. They just gave us more value than other teams, which is pretty unique.
Are there any areas they could improve?
I can’t think of anything. We see Sonatafy as permanent partners — we’re so excited to expand the team alongside them.
Do you have any advice for potential customers?
Be super clear about your requirements and processes by clarifying who does the decision-making in the internal team and what the steps in the hiring process are. Invest time upfront to finetune the process and review candidates with them.
