Sonata Talent’s Recruiting Platforms and Processes: Smarter, Better, Faster
By: Chris Fruci
As a writer who covers new and innovative businesses, it was only a matter of time before I came across, Sonata Talent, an Austin, TX-based executive search and consulting firm that promises high-quality placements in less time than its recruiting peers.
This is a big promise, especially in today’s tight labor market where companies are competing over a limited number of talented candidates.
Fortunately, Founder and CEO, Phil Foti, gave me a behind-the-scenes look at his company’s differentiating platform. After not finding any recruiting and sourcing applications that would create a competitive advantage and serve clients well, Phil had his team build a proprietary software internally that helps Sonata Talent stand out from the pack in three key ways:
- Efficient & Quality Candidate Research
- Breadth, Timeliness, & Effectiveness of Outbound Communications
- Deeply Experienced & Empowered Team
Efficient & Quality Candidate Research
One of the first hurdles to filling a critical role within a company is identifying high-quality candidate leads who are worth pursuing.
Sonata Talent believes the highest quality leads are actually those who aren’t actively looking for jobs – passive and semi-passive candidates.
Foti explains, “high value candidates in our labor market simply aren’t applying to jobs online.”
Internal corporate recruiters typically don’t have the time, capacity, or resources to go after these candidates effectively so they look to an outside recruiting agency to help source leads for open positions.
Often times, corporate recruiters and even other search firms resort to mass media platforms like Monster, Indeed, and CareerBuilder where recruiters have to sift through thousands of low-quality applications just to find a talented fit who is also being heavily recruited by several other companies.
Or, they use a networking platform to generate a list of potential candidates who they then have to reach out to one-by-one. A time consuming and highly inefficient process.
Sonata Talent, like traditional firms, uses powerful networking sites to generate lists of candidates and has both onshore and offshore resources spotcheck the lists to ensure that the filters used produced the highest quality leads. The company uses proprietary technology to automate candidate profile collection and API’s to pull lead contact information from a number of different sources across the web in order to build a comprehensive profile that includes several potential touchpoints for multi-channel reach.
Once a list of candidates has been generated and internally approved, Sonata Talent’ software can then export lead lists for uploading into the company’s CRM platform where multi-channel outreach is automated on a large scale.
Breadth, Timeliness, & Effectiveness of Outbound Communications
“The recruitment landscape has evolved over the years, with candidates today getting bombarded by relentless and irrelevant messaging,” says Foti.
“…delivering competitive talent for our clients requires sophisticated ‘on message’ marketing to cut through the noise and multi-modal channels to assure our clients’ employment value proposition is being delivered.”
Where a traditional recruiting agency or internal corporate recruiter may only find a single email or phone number for outreach, Sonata Talent is able to strategically approach semi-passive and passive candidates in many different ways.
The company’s outreach channels include email, phone, voice, SMS, social media, and even snail mail. And campaigns are automated through Sonata Talent’ CRM and in-house systems which means the firm is able to reach talent 5X faster than traditional firms, a huge advantage in a tight labor market.
Sonata Talent also uses A/B testing with all of its campaigns to compare the effectiveness of different messages and methods. This helps the company iterate and constantly improve its outreach.
Deeply Experienced & Empowered Team
While many recruiting firms tend to employ less-experienced employees on the client side, Sonata Talent only works with seasoned account managers who are strategic partners of the firm and have at least eight to ten years of executive recruiting experience with hundreds of placements in their respective verticals.
Foti adds, “clients don’t just pay us to identify great candidates, we earn our fees by getting them to work for our clients. This is where our sales partners add tremendous value. They’re seasoned negotiators.”
Sonata Talent campaigns are developed by strong copywriters and content creators who have demonstrated success in sales and marcom roles in the past.
Empowered by a software platform that generates high-quality candidates with tremendous ease and speed, Sonata Talent’ executive recruiters are highly successful and stand out relative to their peers.
Result: More Placements & Lower Time-To-Fill
With efficient lead generation, optimized multi-channel outreach, and a deeply experienced recruiting team, Sonata Talent’ Time-To-Fill is 40% lower than the national average of 30 days across all industries.
Since 2004, Foti and Sonata Talent have placed hundreds of candidates in over 40+ industries and are built to continue outpacing and outperforming peers for the long haul.
Click here to learn more about how Sonata Talent can help you fill the gap in your team.