Led by the People Who Lived It
Two paths, one belief: recruiting works better when it's built around truly knowing one organization.
Arrow Rock Recruiting was co-founded by Gari and Eric Flowers, who each came to the same conclusion from opposite sides of the hiring table.
Gari's path started on a factory floor, not in a recruiting office — early in her career, she worked her way into a maintenance role at Milwaukee Tool, one of only two women in that department at the time. From there, her career took her into sales and leadership, where she built a sales organization of more than 4,000 people over 13 years, and later into office management, staffing, and agency recruiting. Eric spent more than two decades working in the steel industry itself, then several years in recruiting agencies, where he saw the same problem repeatedly: agencies recruiting across industries they didn't actually understand — able to prepare good interview questions, but unable to go beyond surface-level answers, because they didn't understand the culture or day-to-day realities of the industries they served.
That shared realization — that recruiting needed to be built on real industry experience, not just interviewing technique — became Arrow Rock's founding idea.
What Gari brings
Gari has spent her career building things — a sales organization of thousands, staffing operations, recruiting practices — and she brought that same builder's instinct to Arrow Rock. Rather than start another general agency, she made the deliberate choice to build something narrower and deeper: a firm structured around one organization, its roles, its culture, and the qualities that actually predict success. Her manufacturing floor experience gave her firsthand credibility in industrial environments most recruiters only see from the outside, and her recruiting background across staffing and technology sectors shaped how Arrow Rock evaluates candidates — looking past titles and keywords to the work ethic, safety mindset, and curiosity that actually predict who thrives.
What Eric brings
What Eric understands about this partnership wasn't learned from a website, an intake call, or a job description — it was built over years of shared experience. He knows the leaders personally, and he knows the people on the shop floor. He's worked and sweated alongside them, helped start new facilities, trained new teammates, and worked shoulder to shoulder with them through difficult periods. He's celebrated milestones with a CEO standing on one side of him and a newly hired teammate on the other. That history gives him an understanding no outside recruiter could gain through research alone — what the organization actually values, how its people work together, and what it takes to earn trust and truly become part of the team.
Why one partnership, not many clients
Once the partnership began, Arrow Rock made a deliberate choice not to bring on other clients. It's part personal — a genuine, years-long respect for the organization they serve — and part strategic: undivided focus lets the team go deeper than a firm split across many clients ever could. There's no question of whether a strong candidate might be presented somewhere else instead. Every decision is guided by one question: what's in our partner's best interest.
How the work actually gets done
A résumé shows what someone has done, not how they'll perform. Titles and keywords miss people with the right work ethic, safety mindset, curiosity, and dependability — qualities that matter as much as experience, especially in an industrial environment. That's why Arrow Rock built its process around experienced industry advisors — retired leaders who know which questions to ask, how to evaluate the answers, and what to look for beyond a résumé.
Neither founder will compromise on genuine alignment just to create the appearance of progress. For difficult searches, that sometimes means reviewing hundreds of profiles without presenting a single candidate — and being transparent about that rather than wasting a hiring manager's time.
What every candidate can expect
Regardless of outcome, every candidate should leave the process feeling heard and respected — treated as a person with real goals and motivations, not just another résumé to move through a pipeline.
Where this is headed
Five years from now, success looks like this: there's no real question about who to call when a hiring need comes up. Not an outside agency — a fully integrated, trusted extension of the team, built on institutional knowledge, specialized expertise, and a process proven over time.