Driving growth for your light industrial firm with Bullhorn One
The clerical and light industrial recruitment space is diverse, spanning geographies, generations, and industries, from construction to retail to hospitality and more. However, the goals for many of these firms remain the same: win more clients, increase market share, and generate more revenue.
Light industrial firms benefit when they leverage tools to help them work faster, more accurately, and at scale. Our recent GRID Light Industrial Talent Report Spotlight found that automating forms, time tracking, and payment improves worker loyalty by up to 50%. By placing workers quickly and filling more orders, light industrial firms can increase their market share and bring in more revenue.
To operate more efficiently, light industrial firms need to invest strategically. How can you remove bottlenecks for your team members so that they can achieve their goals? How can you achieve higher submissions, placements per recruiter, and a higher fill rate? How can you protect your margins and stay on top of open invoicing?
At Bullhorn, we’re dedicated to helping our customers in the light industrial space reach new heights. That’s why we’ve added a number of updates and enhancements to Bullhorn One in the last year to help light industrial firms work smarter, faster, and stronger.
“Over the past year, we’ve had a real focus on making sure that light industrial firms have the tools that they need to run their front and middle offices quickly and efficiently, making time entry a breeze regardless of how customers demand it be captured; allowing recruiters to provide first call resolution on payroll issues; automating the complicated rules to properly evaluate a timesheet for shifts, holidays, and FLSA; and providing the visibility needed to data via reporting and analytics. We remain committed to this vision as we look forward to the next year with improvements to how employee onboarding data is managed, bringing our ability to update timesheets closer to the ‘people who know’ with adjustments and change requests, and investing further in AI and automation to ease the load of payroll and billing specialists.”
– Tim Sebel, VP, Product Management, Pay & Bill
Below, check out our most recent Bullhorn One enhancements – and see what’s in store in the months to come.
Talent experience
When it comes to onboarding candidates, speed is essential. The GRID Light Industrial Talent Report Spotlight found that two-thirds of light industrial workers stopped an active hiring engagement with an agency did so because the process was too cumbersome. With the Bullhorn Talent Platform – light industrial candidates go from the initial intake to assignment-ready in 15 minutes from any device. With this dramatic reduction in the time it takes for candidates to fill out paperwork and provide key information, you can build a vetted and qualified workforce faster than ever. Agencies that prioritize the delivery of consumer-grade experiences during onboarding will see a dramatic reduction in time-to-fill and candidate acquisition cost. With a shorter onboarding process, firms will see lower candidate drop-offs and higher conversion rates.
Talent Platform delivers on complex onboarding requirements, but with the look of the modern consumer-grade apps we use day-to-day. Filling out forms and providing key information is made possible with intuitive design and a reduction in repetitive data entry. It’s more than onboarding. Talent Platform delivers a connected experience across the entire hiring journey and includes key touchpoints with workers to meet requirements. From WOTC and background check integrations to prescreening questions and safety video/quizzes embedded in the experience, Talent Platform is designed to eliminate the friction in the new hire and rehire process. It also includes an industry-leading I-9 and e-Verify process built natively within the platform.
What’s coming next?
Our team is always looking for new ways to automate the onboarding process and drive better compliance, including digital i-9 verification, improvements to field mapping, and more. We’re also looking for enhanced ways to use dashboards to provide visibility into talent funnel performance, drive better conversion, and find the areas where you should be changing people, processes, and technology to improve conversion. Keep an eye on future product release blogs for more updates to the Bullhorn Talent Platform.
Analytics
When you pair Bullhorn Analytics with Bullhorn One, you can ensure your team’s efforts are focused on the most valuable tasks. From producer-specific reports and metrics that show where sales and recruiting teams should be focusing their efforts, to configurable dashboards that can be tailored to any user group, your teams will be powered by actionable insights in real-time as they progress through their daily activities without ever leaving the ATS. Analytics provides a detailed view into the data that is critical to your business, from analyzing what clients you should focus on, what candidates need to be engaged next, to what jobs are the most profitable,
Pay & Bill dashboard is a great example. This dashboard provides a view of reports related to gross margin and contributions. By identifying paid and unpaid billable charges, splitting gross margin by client and job title, and seeing related ATS records, you can improve efficiency in your middle office and grow your profit margins.
What’s coming next?
Our vision for analytics is very exciting. We plan to expand the set of data available using Data Hub. With Data Hub, Analytics customers will gain access to Marketplace partner data and eventually external data sources for direct use within the Analytics module. We also plan to expand the list of pre-configured, persona-based dashboards. One example is to build a talent funnel dashboard that shows real-time onboarding performance and conversion within your pipeline. Eventually, we plan to harness the power of AI. Directive AI will allow us to take the concept of actionable insights to a whole new level. Predictive analytics, benchmarking, and trend analysis will give organizations a view into the future never seen before.
Pay & Bill
One of the most surefire ways to ensure candidate loyalty is to pay workers on time. The GRID Light Industrial Talent Report Spotlight found that 74% of light industrial workers who were paid on time would continue working with their current firm — a figure that falls to 50% among respondents who report not being paid on time. Though that may sound straightforward, paying candidates accurately, on time, and at scale – all while managing invoicing and billing – can be complicated in the light industrial space. That’s why Bullhorn One’s Pay & Bill solution includes several upgrades designed to simplify time capture, invoicing, and payroll.
Customer required fields (CRFs) enable you to leverage data entered by the candidate to be included in billing. For example, candidates can indicate in their time entry which factory or line they’re working on specific days or shifts; this information would then flow through to bill transactions and can be used for invoicing and financial reporting. This custom candidate information can also be used to split, group, and summarize invoice data to ensure you are meeting the unique needs of each client. CRFs help streamline data entry, eliminate the need for multiple placements based on criteria like location or department, and reduce human error, making invoicing and billing a smoother overall process.
To streamline data collection, you can now track purchase orders within Bullhorn. You can select purchase order (PO) numbers for placements or track individual purchase orders at the time entry level, and include those PO numbers on billable charges, invoicing, and reporting. This allows you to accurately capture, visualize, and track purchase orders within Bullhorn One. You’d then be able to store purchase orders against bill transactions, so those amounts and hours worked are accrued automatically, eliminating the need for clients to do any tracking or calculations outside of the system.
We’re also working to improve data access. One way we’ve done this is with paycheck visibility, which allows recruiters to view paycheck data, to quickly see gross pay, deductions, and net pay, in the ATS. This empowers recruiters to answer worker questions about paychecks without needing to route those questions to the payroll team, allowing them to work more efficiently on the ins and outs of payroll.
To help further automate the computation of pay and bill rates, streamline invoicing, and reduce manual error, we’ve added shift differentials to Bullhorn One’s Time and Labor engine. Shift differentials allow you to define a shift and have the Time and Labor engine automatically identify hours worked as belonging to a shift, so that shift can be priced appropriately. When workers are working differently timed shifts, this can be tracked with shift differentials, making it easier and faster to pay workers accurately.
Bullhorn Time + Expense also has new features designed to help increase efficiency and limit rote tasks: rapid time entry and transaction uploader. With rapid time entry, you can add or adjust time for a significant number of candidates at once. With transaction uploader, you can quickly and easily upload time files from other sources, like Excel, ADP, and Kronos, into Bullhorn, allowing your team to handle rote tasks in bulk and save valuable time.
What’s coming next?
In order to continue driving efficiencies in the middle and back office, we’ll soon be releasing a systematic accounting period, which will allow you to track when transactions come into your system and when they should be paid and billed. Systematic accounting periods will allow your team to align costs incurred and revenue recognized with what you’ve paid and billed in a given week. Accounting periods will automatically be closed, eliminating manual work and entry.
We’ll also soon be introducing direct deposit and pay card UI enhancements in the ATS to make in-person onboarding even easier. Recruiters can enter direct deposit and pay card details directly in the ATS and have them flow right into the payroll system. For example, recruiters can enter direct deposit information into the ATS and then that information automatically flows into the payroll system, ensuring that your ATS is your single source of truth. Additionally, if a worker prefers pay cards, recruiters will be able to enter that pay card information into the ATS which will also flow to the payroll system.
With these updates and enhancements to Bullhorn One, light industrial firms can drive more efficiency, ensure accuracy, and place workers quickly and at scale, ensuring more revenue and business growth. As we look to the year ahead, keep an eye out for more to come with Bullhorn One – and get ready to see your business reach new heights.