Talent Acquisition is not the same as it was just a single generation ago. In those days, professionals would sign on with a company and stay there for their entire career, changing employers only in the face of uncontrollable circumstances such as layoffs or corporate takeovers.
After the economic collapse of 2008, people quickly became disillusioned with the old employer/employee model. Today’s professionals may work at many companies over the course of their careers, making what used to be an infrequent event commonplace.
This willingness to change jobs combined with a market where new industries and products can appear literally overnight (think bitcoin, e-commerce, or mobile tech) created the perfect storm of opportunity and need.
Employers need a reliable way to quickly hire qualified talent, and professional recruiters need a go-to-resource to provide them with a pool of high-quality jobs. The opportunity was enormous for anyone willing to solve these problems.
Enter Reflik
Reflik is a New Jersey based company founded in 2014 to fill the need of employers to quickly and efficiently hire great people.
Reflik is poised to be a leader in talent acquisition because the core of its business model is automation and crowdsourcing. Circumventing labor-intensive processes such as setting up and handling accounts on multiple job boards, managing multiple vendors, and coordinating pre-screening interviews, Reflik’s clients are using a very simple system that quickly finds the perfect next hire for any job opening. They include Fortune 500 companies like MGM Resorts, Carmax, and Canon.
Simplifying The Recruiting Process
There are three main obstacles that employers face when it comes to filling open positions. Time-to-hire is too long. Finding qualified candidates is too difficult. Current solutions are not efficient. Job boards lack quality control and do not attract passive candidates. Many companies need to manage multiple recruiting vendors, which tend to not integrate with companies’ HR systems.
Reflik solves these problems, finding the perfect ready-to-hire candidates for companies in 10 days or less.
“The solutions that are available in the market today are simply not as efficient as they should be,” CEO and Co-Founder of Reflik Ashish Vachhani told us. “That’s where we are, as Reflik, leveraging the best practices of crowdsourcing to find the top talent for our customers in half the time compared to traditional mechanisms out there.”
The Reflik Solution
Once jobs go live on the Reflik platform, the right set of professional recruiters and staffing agencies, from Reflik’s recruiting community of 14,000+ members, search for qualified candidates to fill these positions.
Every client is assigned one dedicated account manager. Armed with Reflik’s proprietary software, account managers screen incoming submissions so the employer ends up with nothing but the best of the best.
Reflik’s clients do not worry about tedious tasks like manually overseeing multiple application channels or screening applicants through a time-consuming pre-interview process. Reflik enables talent acquisition leaders and hiring managers to focus on developing their teams and figuring out the kinds of candidates they need to take their business to the next level.
The key philosophy of Reflik
The philosophy behind Reflik is simple: casting a wide net will help source the best candidate for any opening.
“We have a very vibrant community of professional recruiters,” COO and Co-Founder of Reflik Ash Geria told us. “We are leveraging the social and professional connections of professional recruiters as well as their candidate database to be able to fill open positions.”
Someone in the “crowd” knows your next great hire; however, the key is accessing those relationships on a single platform.
Reflik’s clients have instant access to many candidates that just cannot be found through other sources.
Crowdsourcing as a business model
Everyone crowdsources. If your car breaks down and you don’t know a good mechanic, you may make a post to Facebook and ask your friends who they use. Within an hour or so, you have the names of several good mechanics qualified to work on your car, recommended to you by people that you trust.
That’s crowdsourcing at its most basic, and is the wireframe for the current Reflik model. Like most things that work exceptionally well, Reflik is almost deceptively simple.
Reflik allows anyone who wishes to recruit for them to share job descriptions privately and publicly – posting a job on social media, sharing it privately over an e-mail message or text.
If that job is filled by someone who was referred through your post, you are compensated a referral fee that averages around $8,000, which is some serious money for so little work. Yet it is much less than the cost of a traditional recruitment firm. Moreover, there is no charge to use Reflik’s platform, with the referral fee only being paid upon a successful hire.
The result is a huge win for everyone involved. The person referring the job collects their fee, the applicant gets a job, and the employer now has a great employee in less time.
Scaling this concept to the next level
Reflik is expanding on this basic model by focusing efforts on highly skilled candidates and jobs that are traditionally difficult to fill. Reflik works with companies from a wide variety of industries.
There are two main problems that employers using traditional recruitment methods face:
- Labor intensive vendor management and selection process
- Difficulty in finding candidates for skilled or highly technical positions
Historically, a company’s human resources department was responsible for managing all applicants themselves. This includes internal applicants, vendors, multiple job boards, as well as the flow of applications from the company website.
This is a very labor-intensive way to find new talent. It creates a bottleneck for companies that are trying to expand. Combined with a pre-screening process, finding one qualified candidate could takes weeks or even months.
The second part of the problem lies in the fact that the most skilled candidates are not spending their time on job boards. Job boards are fine for entry level jobs, but as the skill levels increase, job boards rapidly lose their effectiveness.
Vachhani agrees. “Once you start looking for hard-to-find professional roles like technology, finance, sales, and marketing, you’re going to find it more difficult to find talent on job boards. You’re not going to find passive candidates or senior candidates, who don’t hang out on job boards.”
Reflik’s platform is also designed to locate these “passive candidates” that Vachhani mentioned. These are professionals that a job board will never locate because they’re not actively looking for a job. They are, however, very open to new opportunities, should one come their way.
Solving these two traditional challenges is what makes Reflik’s crowdsourcing platform so effective. Everyone knows that the best jobs are found through a person’s network; Reflik simply leverages that reality to create a new paradigm in professional recruitment.
Offering a high level of integration
Aside from the traditional job boards, many companies also use recruitment agencies to locate specialized talent. However, this presents its own unique set of challenges.
Recruitment agencies are usually very specialized. Many companies use multiple agencies – one for technology and engineering roles, one for marketing, and so on.
According to Vachhani, “It’s a highly fragmented business model, and it can get time-consuming and burdensome. They [ recruitment agencies] don’t necessarily integrate with the customer’s Applicant Tracking Systems and the process is fairly inefficient because different agencies may specialize in different things and you have to manage multiple contracts.”
Reflik places great importance on offering a very high level of integration, seamlessly connecting their Talent Crowdsourcing Platform with the various talent management technologies used by their customers.
Reflik’s core belief is that the new technology of social media and its related derivatives has allowed unprecedented access to hundreds of recruiters and skilled professionals. Talent Crowdsourcing has allowed employers, recruiters, and applicants to be in touch on a level never previously imagined.
