Reflik is taking a social approach to job recruiting

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The belief is simple and generally accepted in the working world: The best way to find a new job is to hear about one from a friend.

There’s just one problem: Even in the fantasy world of Facebook, no one actually has that many friends.

Ashish Vachhani was undeterred. He felt there had to be a way to connect social media connections to job searches. Reflik, he said, is that way.

Call it the GoFundMe version of a job search or Uber for talent acquisition — Vachhani’s platform allows everyday people to become part-time recruiters.

The concept is simple: Post a Reflik job on any of your social sites. If one of your friends — or one of the many people connected to your friends — gets the job, the poster gets paid a referral fee that averages $8,000, far less than companies have traditionally paid recruitment firms.

Vachhani, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said it’s a modern-day business model for hiring.

“The solutions that are available in the market today are simply not as efficient as they should be,” he said. “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 and at half the cost compared to traditional mechanisms out there.”

Vachhani describes the model as a “marketplace,” with one side looking for talent and another side consisting of professional recruiters — 2,600 are currently on the site — and everyday individuals who may want to refer friends or connections. Or maybe apply for a job themselves.

“We have a very vibrant community of professional recruiters and industry professionals,” he said. “We are leveraging the social and professional connections of individuals along with the diverse candidate pool of our recruiting community to be able to fill open positions.”

To incentivize referrals by having recruiters tap into their connections and candidate pools, users have an opportunity to earn referral rewards.

That reward is only paid, however, when there is a hire. This means companies only have to pay a fee for the platform when the process works for it and talent is actually acquired.

This entire marketplace platform, Vachhani said, is what separates Reflik from the current competition.

Vachhani feels many job boards work well for entry-level positions, but require additional resources when seeking more seasoned talent.

“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,” he said. “You’re not going to find passive candidates or senior candidates, who don’t hang out on job boards.”

Then there are recruitment agencies, which Vachhani puts on the other side of the spectrum.

“The problem is it’s a highly fragmented business model and it can get expensive,” he said. “They don’t necessarily integrate with the customer and the process is fairly inefficient because different agencies may specialize in different things and you have to manage multiple contracts.”

Being able to offer that integration was extremely important for the Reflik team, who he said worked to make its diverse user base compatible with various technologies.

One example is the company’s partnership with Matawan-based iCIMS. The two companies worked together to make sure Reflik’s platform worked with iCIMS’ talent management software.

“We are able to integrate with the applicant tracking systems that they may be using, such as iCIMS, so the whole process is much more streamlined,” Vachhani said.

It all comes back to the main goal: to minimize the time and resources it can cost a company to find a good job candidate.

“We completely take away the administrative burden from the employers with one simple platform,” he said.

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