Sonya is a Program Manager with Pluribus International, a government contractor based out of Virginia. Describing herself as a “people” program manager, Sonya handles all of the administrative and financial needs of the clients in her portfolio. One of her largest responsibilities is the staffing for her clients, handling the entire hiring process from job posting to final interview.
Transcript
My name is Sonya Alford. I am a program manager for Pluribus International. We're a government contractor. Primarily think of myself as a people program manager. We hire a lot of employees that go work on contracts and support the government. So from a corporate standpoint, I manage all of their administrative needs from the company side. But beyond that, within the company, I'm responsible for my portfolio, which includes the financial management, paperwork, there's a lot of paperwork when you work with the government. (laughing) So really everything about the program. On the administrative side we do all of the hiring actions. So we do everything from the screening process, the government gives us their requirements. And we use those to screen and hire folks. A lot of prior military, we do a lot of support for DoD, so it's a very familiar environment for them. On the financial side, really the government obviously pays us to do the work for them. We in turn pay the employee, so it's keeping track of our overhead, and what does it mean, and making sure that we're solvent at the end of the day and not upside down. So we take the government requirement, we turn that into a job requisition. The recruiters do all of the screening, find the candidates. Once they come to me I'm responsible for all the interviews. We interview for a lot of factors. One obviously is their ability to fill the technical requirement of the position. But the other one is whether or not they'll be a good fit within our organization. And that's usually a two way conversation. What are they looking for? And do we kind of meet their needs from that? And then also what are we looking for in an employee? Do they kind of fit within our organizational culture? Do they want to be part of the team? And really go from there. If everything lines up, we usually go through the process of bringing them onboard. And then sending them out to the work site to work with the client. Busy week would be a lot of running around, maybe doing different site visits, to visit all the employees. We also have our corporate meetings with the bosses to talk about the overall performance of the company, what's going on, a lot of business development. What are we looking on the horizon at? What is it we want to do in the future? And kind of where are we gonna make our money down the road?
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