How Worksuite helped Media.Monks’ Language & Culture team gain more visibility into their talent pool and strengthen freelancer relationships

The Language and Culture team at Media.Monks works with freelancers in over 50 countries, who speak over 65 languages. They built their global network from the ground up, but as their talent pool grew, it became difficult to organize and manage them using manual processes like spreadsheets and emails.

For contractor sourcing and task assignments, the Media.Monks team needed a solution that would help them easily filter contractors for specific things like languages spoken, skills and experience, location, rates per hour, and rates per word.

“There’s a lot of variables that we need to filter for. That became impossible to manage in an Excel sheet once we went past a hundred talent. We have a team of about 13 that needed access to that sheet – and when you have people editing the same sheet for so many variables, it gets quite messy. We wanted a way to simplify things”

While the number one challenge for the Language & Culture team at Media.Monks was sorting and choosing the best talent for every job, they also needed to address other elements such as the influx of invoices for their finance team.

“With so many freelancers, it became a challenge for our finance team to sort through all the invoices. A lot of times our linguists will send several invoices per month. So when you have 300 plus people and each of them are sending four to five invoices a month…well…I wasn’t very popular with the finance team to say the least”

Invoicing overloads often caused delays in approvals and payouts, so it was important that the team found a solution that also enabled them to pay their freelancers on time.

Having worked with Worksuite previously, Mauricio knew that it could meet all of Media.Monks’ specific needs and streamline workflows for the Language and Culture team.

“The Worksuite Pay functionality really alleviated some of the weight that we were carrying. It helped take some of the pressure off our finance team, and helped us keep a good relationship with our linguists and creatives”

Worksuite partnered with the Language & Culture team at Media.Monks to customize the platform in a way that let their team find the right talent for every job quickly, and matched the way their finance team needed to receive information.

“The way that we work is so specific that there isn’t an “out of the box” service or product that exactly fits our needs and requirements. But the Worksuite team has always been fantastic, and they helped us customize what we needed. There are so many bits in our Worksuite portal that were customized for us with our specific needs in mind. So that was something that made a massive difference”

Worksuite enabled Media.Monks’ Language & Culture team to create lists and categorize contractors per client, so they are now able to easily provide the preferred linguists for a specific client.

They also use internal ratings so team members can leave reviews on their contractors based on quality, timely delivery, and responsiveness.

“User friendly and intuitive is basically the first impression I had of Worksuite, and that is what you want when you’re sorting through hundreds of freelancers. Our freelancers enjoy the fact that they can “pimp” their profiles, upload their portfolios and work examples, and make their page look like theirs—which is a nice thing for us too. I think they appreciate having that kind of personal page”

“Immediately we were saving time as soon as we started using it. It’s given us a well-organized global network that ensures we are equipped to choose the right people for the right jobs, and have a complete overview of our database”

As a centralized talent hub for their freelance copywriters, voiceover directors, linguists, and cultural consultants, Worksuite allows the Media.Monks Language and Culture team to:

“I would recommend Worksuite because of the ease of use, the effective and intuitive nature of it, and the time saving nature of it. And also the style of partnership that Worksuite provides, which to me is key. To have someone who actually sees you as a partner, not just as a client, and who takes suggestions and advice on board. The relationship aspect of it is quite important”