The engagement
How Sonar works
You subscribe, and within a week five named people are working your open roles. Here is exactly what that looks like — the intake, the sourcing, what lands in your hiring manager's inbox, and what we put in front of you every week.
Sonar is a subscription-based Recruiting-as-a-Service firm for mid-market companies in the United States.
That means no retainer against a single search and no percentage owed on each hire. It also means the work does not stop and start — the pod stays on your requisitions continuously, so the pipeline behind role three is already warm while role one is still in offer.
Step by step
What happens, in order
Six stages. The first two happen in week one; the last one is the reason a subscription outperforms a series of one-off searches.
Intake and role calibration
Before anyone sources a name, we run a working intake with the hiring manager who owns the decision and the TA leader who owns the process. We pull out the real scorecard: the two or three signals that separate a yes from a maybe, the compensation band the role can actually clear, the adjacent titles worth opening up, and who else in the market is competing for the same profile. We write it down and read it back. If the role as written cannot be filled at that band, we say so in that meeting rather than six weeks of silence later.
Your pod assembles around the requisitions
Five people are named to your account: an Account Manager, a Recruiter, a Sourcer, a Data Analyst, and a Candidate Ambassador. The same five, on the same requisitions, for the life of the engagement. There is no ticket queue, no rotating coordinator, and no re-explaining your business to a new rep every month. Your team meets them by name in the first week.
Continuous sourcing and outreach
Sourcing begins against the calibrated profile and does not stop when a slate starts to look full. The Sourcer builds and refreshes a live map of the market for each role. The Recruiter runs the candidate conversations. The Data Analyst keeps the search strategies, tooling, and outreach sequences tuned to what is converting in this market right now, not to a playbook written two years ago.
Submissions your hiring manager can act on
Every submission arrives with the screen behind it: where the candidate lands against each line of the scorecard, compensation expectations and notice period in writing, why they are open to the move, and the specific reservation they raised. Your hiring manager should be able to make an interview decision from the summary alone. In parallel, the Candidate Ambassador keeps every person in the process informed — confirmed timelines, real status updates, and a close-out for the candidates who do not advance.
The weekly cadence
A standing weekly session with your Account Manager, in a format your TA leader can forward without rewriting it. We walk the funnel role by role: what moved, what stalled, where the market is pushing back, and which requisitions need a decision rather than more candidates. Recalibration happens in that meeting, in the open, while it still changes the outcome.
When a role closes, the pipeline does not restart
An accepted offer moves the pod to the next requisition — it does not reset the work. The market map, the warm passive candidates, and the runners-up from that search stay live and stay nurtured. Someone who was a close second in the spring is often the first call in the fall. That compounding pipeline is the structural advantage of a subscription over a search-by-search transaction, and it is the reason the second and third hires move faster than the first.
Your pod
Who you actually work with
Not an account executive who hands you off. Five specialists, each with one job, all of them on your roles. Two of these seats — the Data Analyst and the Candidate Ambassador — do not exist at a traditional search firm, which is why funnel reporting and candidate follow-through are the first things to fall over everywhere else.
- 01
Account Manager
Owns the relationship and the weekly cadence, and is the one person accountable for the whole portfolio of open roles.
- 02
Recruiter
Works the requisitions and runs every candidate conversation, from first screen through offer close.
- 03
Sourcer
Builds and refreshes the pipeline continuously, so a slate is never assembled from scratch under deadline.
- 04
Data Analyst (AI Guru)
Runs the tooling and reports the funnel, and tunes search strategy against what is actually converting.
- 05
Candidate Ambassador
Keeps every candidate warm and informed, including the ones who do not get the offer — because they interview elsewhere and they talk.
You meet all five by name. Your hiring managers can reach the Recruiter directly; your TA leader has the Account Manager. Nothing routes through a general inbox.
Weekly reporting
What you get every week
Most recruiting partners report activity — calls placed, profiles viewed, messages sent. Activity is the easiest thing in this industry to manufacture and the least useful thing to receive. Sonar reports funnel quality instead: the ratios that tell you whether the search is actually working.
- Screen-to-submit ratio
- How many candidates we screened for every one we put in front of your hiring manager. The honest read on whether we are calibrated to the role.
- Submit-to-interview ratio
- How many of our submissions your hiring manager chose to interview. When it drifts, the intake was wrong — so we recalibrate instead of sending more.
- Days to first submission
- Elapsed time from a requisition opening to the first candidate in your inbox, tracked per role rather than averaged across the portfolio.
- Pipeline coverage per role
- How deep the active pipeline runs behind each open requisition, so you can see which searches are healthy and which need a decision from the business.
These arrive per role, week over week, with the trend line visible — the point is not the snapshot, it is the direction. A submit-to-interview ratio that slips two weeks running is a calibration problem, and it is a conversation we start rather than one you have to catch.
We do not publish benchmark numbers as marketing claims, because a ratio without its denominator and its role mix means nothing. What we commit to is the measurement itself: you will see these figures for your roles, every week, whether or not they flatter us.
Alongside your team
Sonar makes the talent function look good
Sonar is not a replacement for an internal TA team, and it is not an argument that yours is underperforming. It is capacity and methodology pointed at the requisition load your team was never staffed to absorb — with the credit, the reporting, and the hiring-manager relationships staying exactly where they belong.
Capacity your team defines
Your internal recruiters keep the roles they want to own — the ones tied to relationships, internal mobility, or a leadership hire that has to stay in-house. The pod takes the volume your team cannot get to without hiring ahead of budget. Which roles go where is your call, and it can change month to month.
Methodology your team keeps
Scorecards, market maps, search strings, and outreach sequences are documented in the open and shared with your team as they are built. Nothing about the way the pod works is a black box, and none of it walks out the door when the engagement changes shape.
Reporting you can put your name on
The weekly funnel report is built to be forwarded — to a hiring manager who wants to know where their role stands, or to a leadership meeting where TA has to defend its numbers. It makes the talent function look precise, because the underlying work is.
One accountable team, not five vendors
The pod replaces the tangle of point solutions, one-off searches, and sourcing tools that accumulate around an understaffed TA function. One relationship, one cadence, one place the answer comes from.
The measure we care about is whether your hiring managers stop asking why the role is still open. When that happens, it is your talent function they are complimenting.
Your side of it
What Sonar needs from you
Short list, and we would rather set the expectation now than discover it in month two. These are the three inputs the pod cannot manufacture on its own.
A calibrated intake
A working session with the hiring manager who actually makes the decision — not a forwarded job description. The single largest driver of a fast, accurate slate is whether the pod and the hiring manager agreed on the scorecard before sourcing started.
A responsive hiring manager
Interview availability held open and offer decisions made while the candidate is still in play. The strongest mid- and senior-level people are almost always in two or three processes at once, and a stalled calendar is the most common way a good slate is lost.
Timely feedback on submissions
Specific feedback on the first slate, inside two business days. Not a thumbs-down — the reason. "Too operational, not enough scale experience" retargets a search immediately; "not a fit" costs another cycle.
Give the pod those three and the engagement compounds: faster calibration, deeper pipelines, and a shorter path from an opened requisition to a signed offer on every role that follows.
See what your first week would look like
Tell us which roles are open and where they are stuck. We will walk you through how the pod would take them on, and what your first weekly report would show.