How floodgate deployed automation to unlock explosive growth with Recruiterflow

Founded in 2001, FloodGate Medical is a leading executive search firm focused on marketing, sales and go to market talent for the medical technology and medical devices industry. Over the last 21 years FloodGate has made a reputation for a deep understanding of the industry and delivering high impact outcomes for clients and candidates alike. 

We sat down with Chris Leuzze, Director of Operations at FloodGate to understand their business and why they moved to Recruiterflow. 

FloodGate Medical’s Journey from a Homegrown Software to Recruiterflow- 

“For the longest time, we mostly operated as RPO for our clients because of our deep understanding of their business and the industry. However, increasingly our clients needed us to do direct hiring and our delivery model changed. When we switched from RPO to direct recruiting, we needed less of what our customized software was designed to provide. And, of course. When there’s one customer, you carry all the maintenance and upgrade costs and all that yourself. So we started to look for what was out in the industry.”

FloodGate started with identifying their four pillars of operational excellence. The idea was to create a virtuous self reinforcing cycle that helps them scale and creates a framework to deliver 

1. Reduce administrative burden on the team and help the team to 
2. Focus on delivering a dazzling experience for candidates leading to
3. Wider candidate pool and referrals leading to
4. Faster execution for clients leading to growth of job orders and deeper client relationship

In sync with the core operational principles, Chris and the team identified some of the top priorities for their new ATS & CRM

• Intuitive & Fast platform that doesn’t require endless clicks and data entry to get something done
• Automate as much data logging as possible and reduce admin burden on the team
• Powerful and flexible API to integrate with their chatbot for candidates
• A client portal for better transparency and collaboration with the clients
• Creating a single source of truth for the entire team

“We wanted to focus on software that had all of these things integrated in one complete system. And you know, a lot of the  systems out there didn’t have that. Or at least they didn’t have it without a lot of development, like Bullhorn, you have to Bolt on something to it and have a separate vendor relationship, which wasn’t a great fit.” 

After doing thorough market research about recruitment CRM and ATS softwares in the market, their decision boiled down to Recruiterflow. As Chris puts it,

“We zeroed in on Recruiterflow because it is intuitive, robust, has a great API and most importantly the team behind the platform! Whenever we asked for an improvement or a feature, in a couple of days the team came back saying yeah that can be done and a week later, the feature was released!”

How does FloodGate Medical operate with Recruiterflow?

Reducing admin burden on recruiters:

“One of the things that we try to do is automate everything that doesn’t require any human discernment while not losing personal touch with candidates & clients”

There are two features that we use extensively to achieve this – recipes and APIs

Recruiting automation aka Recipes

Every candidate that is sourced at FloodGate is handpicked. As a candidate is sourced, FloodGate starts the outreach that is personalized and hyper targeted. If the candidate doesn’t respond after a cadence of messages, they are moved to a separate stage with a different messaging. All of these messages are automated and triggered as candidates move through different stages. 

APIs

Every search that is in Recruiterflow needs to have certain information configured. Using the API, they pull information into a google sheet and send an email to the entire team of all the open roles and mark it if there is any critical information that is pending. Making it really easy for the team to configure the right information in Recruiterflow.

Deliver a dazzling experience to candidate

Because each and every candidate that they reach out to is hand picked and vetted, FloodGate team makes sure that every outreach that they do is relevant to the candidate in question. However, FloodGate has completely reinvented the application process for it’s candidates. 

Application Process

FloodGate has done away with the old job description and application form process. For a workforce that is on the run and has only a fleeting second of attention to give you, it has implemented a chatbot. The idea is to give the most relevant bite sized information and make it dead simple for candidates to apply or give a referral.

The bot first gives you a short snippet of “why you’d love the job”, followed by “who’s the right fit”. After this, there is a video about the client and the role. A candidate can easily put in their information and don’t necessarily need a resume to complete the application and screening process. Right at the time when you have the candidate engaged, it prompts you to pick a slot on the recruiter’s calendar. 

“We don’t want the candidates to have a barrier before registering interest in a job with us. Also, a lot of candidates apply on their mobile devices when they don’t necessarily have their resume handy. Once we had a candidate who applied while they were in line at Disneyland! The candidate ended up getting the role!” 

Recruiting Process & Surveys

During the recruiting process, candidates are delivered personalized messages at different stages of the recruiting process. Also, candidates who either got placed or disqualified are sent an NPS survey that is also triggered by the recipes. The NPS survey helps them complete the feedback loop and continuously get better at delivering an exceptional experience to their candidates. 

The Impact That Recruiterflow Has Driven

“ With Recruiterflow we have been able to save at least 3 to 4 hours every week for each member of our team resulting in much wider candidate pool and reduced time to submit candidates and reduced time to fill a role”

With Recruiterflow, FloodGate has been able to build a virtuous cycle for continuous improvement and growth. And to top it off, the productivity doesn’t come at the cost of loss of administrative control or visibility.

There are 3 main benefits that they have been able to drive

Team wide adoption

Implementing something that is intuitive and easy for the recruiting team has ensured that all the candidate and conversation data gets logged in to Recruiterflow. Not because the management mandates it but rather because the recruiters actually see their jobs being easier with Recruiterflow. With a wider candidate pool in their database, they are able to find more and more candidates in their own database for every search that they run.

Higher Data Fidelity

Since every candidate and conversation is logged in the system, this gives the management a much better idea about the pipeline and better forecasting.  In addition to that, FloodGate Medical uses Recruiterflow’s API to run regular team wide emails and reports that helps recruiters identify great candidates in the pipeline and proactively alerts them if there is any data missing for the searches they are working on. 

Enhanced Productivity

FloodGate Medical’s pillar of operational excellence – minimizing the administrative burden on recruiters – has done wonders for the team. Using recruiting automation and APIs of Recruiterflow, every team member saves at least 3-4 hours every week. This results in more time spent on sourcing, nurturing relationships with clients & candidates and delivering better candidate experience. This has resulted in better fill rates and shorter time to hire for FloodGate Medical team. 

To learn more about Recruiterflow, book a demo with us or sign up for a free 14-day trial.