About Susan: Susan Ahonen has over 25 years of experience in the financial services industry. She started off as a teller and, since finishing her career with Chemical Bank – New England as the Head of HR, started her own recruiting agency called Recruiting Edge Staffing.
After making her first submission on Reflik in March 2017, Susan has had a tremendous amount of success on the platform, building a lucrative recruiting agency of her own! Three different clients at Reflik have hired Susan’s candidates for Legal, Engineering, and Management positions. In addition, Susan is currently managing five shortlisted candidates – spanning the Manufacturing, Legal, and Healthcare Management verticals.
We sat down with Susan to learn more about her background as well as her experience with the Reflik platform. In the process, she gave us five reasons why she uses Reflik exclusively as a source for job requisitions – and how Reflik helps her to not just recruit better but also how it helps her to build a successful recruiting agency.
1. Top-rate employers, highly-desirable jobs
In many ways, recruiting and sales are similar. Good salespeople understand prospects’ needs and demonstrate how a product or service will help them meet that need.
Recruiters do the same thing with candidates. They understand what candidates want and need. Then, they demonstrate how the job in question will help a candidate achieve their goals.
In many cases, no matter how skilled of a negotiator she is, a recruiter is as strong as the jobs that she is working on. If a company does not give highly-qualified candidates competitive compensation packages and benefits, there is only so much a recruiter can do to convince the candidate that the job is a great opportunity for them.
Recruiters want to work with companies that give employees desirable compensation packages and benefits.
“Every company says that they provide competitive compensation packages and great benefits,” Susan said. “Very few actually deliver on that promise.”
She went on to talk about how Reflik’s clients are different. “Reflik’s clients are top-rate. The jobs they post on Reflik’s platform are easy to sell to candidates. These companies walk the walk.”
Reflik’s clients give top candidates exactly what they want. These companies understand the value of good talent. In turn, they are highly favored by recruiters.
2. Hundreds of job requisitions, one point of contact
After leaving Chemical Bank, as the Head of HR, Susan went on to start her own recruiting firm.
“Of all my responsibilities at Chemical Bank, finding new talent was my favorite,” Susan told us.
As the owner of a new recruiting firm, she wanted a solution that could provide her with many, many jobs, yet required her to manage just one relationship. For Susan, this solution was Reflik.
“With Reflik, I don’t have to worry about spreading myself thin with multiple clients or risking it all with just one. I have the opportunity to work with a lot of really great companies, while managing one solid relationship. It’s a dream come true.”
3. The Candidate Pipeline feature simplifies competing in the recruiting/staffing industry
Chuckling to herself, Susan told us: “Like most recruiters, I’m very competitive!”
“I want to know how many people are working on a job, how responsive a client seems to be to their submissions, figure out why a client might not be responsive, among other things, to learn what’s working and what’s not,” she said. “The Candidate Pipeline lets me do just that.”
The Reflik platform is equipped with a feature called “Candidate Pipeline.” It describes how many submissions were made for a job and where in the hiring process those submissions are. Susan uses this incredibly important information about the competitive landscape for each and every single job that she is working on to gain a serious competitive advantage.
4. Real-time reporting = Perfect follow-ups
Within the Reflik platform, there is a section called the Candidate Status Report. The report gives details about each submission: the candidate name, information about the job, application information, as well as the application and job status.
Susan told us, “The Candidate Status Report is very useful when conducting follow-ups.”
She uses the application status to build out a highly-targeted follow-up strategy. Whether a candidate is being reviewed by a Reflik account manager or the employer, or if the candidate has yet to give his or her consent, she knows who to contact (candidate or account manager) and what to say.
“Recruiting is 75% follow-ups,” Susan concluded. “Without the right information, following up successfully is impossible. With Reflik’s technology on my side, the whole process has become a lot easier.”
5. The perfect recruiter relations operation around – the best communication and feedback
Candidates and recruiters alike can face what has been referred to, in the HR business world, as a “black hole.” After a candidate applies, the employer fails to give any form of feedback. The application is lost in a “black hole.”
Reflik’s technology is built to solve this problem. One way it does that is by empowering the recruiter to make highly-effective follow ups. This brings the power back to the recruiter.
Another way is through a highly automated email delivery system. Whenever an action is taken by an account manager or the employer regarding a job that a recruiter is working on, that recruiter is immediately notified.
Suppose that a job is put on hold, closed, or filled. The Reflik platform is built to automatically send out an email as well as a notification within the Reflik platform to affected recruiters.
Similarly, when an employer or an account manager takes action on a submission, the recruiter who made the submission as well as the candidate in question are notified immediately.
As a business, moreover, Reflik is built around defeating the “black hole.” Account Managers shut down jobs that are not being actively persued by employers. In most cases, when a client is not giving back timely feedback, jobs are put on hold and the account manager actively follows up with the client for feedback.
“Reflik’s recruiter relations operation is top-notch,” Susan noted. “I never feel like I’m being left in the dark. I know what is happening with my candidates. Also, I receive detailed feedback for every candidate I submit. I have the information I need to find the perfect candidate – I get closer to filling a position with each submission.”
Reflik provides feedback for every submission recruiters make to help recruiters find the candidates employers want.
To conclude our conversation, Susan said: “Reflik is easy to use if you have the gumption to persevere and as long as you understand that recruiting has been and will always be a people business.”
To learn more about Reflik and see how it can help you build your own lucrative recruiting agency, please sign up now!
