The Jacobson Group

While The Jacobson Group offers retained executive search, contingent permanent recruiting, and temporary staffing, they are seeing the greatest growth in the VMS portion of their temporary staffing business. The temporary business is not only the vast majority of Jacobson’s portfolio, but it is also the business that moves the quickest and has the fastest data flow throughout the system. Jacobson determined they would need to digitize their systems further to create an environment that would support their expansion.

During their evaluation of different vendors, the Jacobson team identified numerous challenges with their platform, including the following:

The Need to Support the Rapid Growth of the Business – Jacobson’s VMS business doubled in 2021 and is set to triple in volume in 2022. This came with its own set of challenges. A huge pain point was the need to audit VMS timesheets. Additionally, when a payment was remitted, VMS fees and discounts were not itemized and documented on invoices. These were very manual processes for their accounting team that would take a large portion of their time to complete. The team knew if they wanted to be well-positioned to support this explosive growth, they would need a modernized technology solution that could support this new, accelerated business.

According to Jennifer Shorr, Assistant Vice President of Operations at Jacobson, “As we moved into this next size of business, we really needed to address those fundamental and foundational technology platforms that support these operational functions like our invoicing and payroll systems. A lot of those systems were homegrown pre-Bullhorn One.”

Manual Processes and Opportunity for Data Errors – Before moving to Bullhorn One, Jacobson had a streamlined front-office utilizing Bullhorn’s ATS/CRM, VMS Sync & Submittals, and Onboarding solutions. However, their back-office was a combination of older homegrown systems and third-party payroll providers with no integrations, drastically slowing data flow back to their system of record.

“We were looking to replace a lot of our old homegrown systems. We knew we absolutely had to have integration between the systems,” said Jennifer. “Some of our systems didn’t talk to each other. That resulted in duplicative and sometimes triplicative manual data entry through our onboarding and payroll process. The manual work was really impacting that scalability for growth.” Entering the same data into multiple systems also created a large risk for data entry errors, with the chance that someone would forget to upload the data into a system and one of their operations processes would be inaccurate. Jacobson needed to find a solution that would integrate between their systems in order to remain compliant and reduce their team’s redundant work.

Improved Efficiency – The core reason for moving to Bullhorn One is due to the rapid growth Jacobson is experiencing in their VMS business. They needed a technology solution that would be able to handle all of their new, incoming data efficiently, and at scale. “A huge pain point for us every week is that we need to make sure we are auditing timesheets for our VMS clients. Then, when we have the payment remitted, we need to understand where the fees are coming from. With Bullhorn One, the new system will be real-time. We won’t have to wait on a human to pull the data and manipulate it and marry it with another source,” said Jennifer. By using Bullhorn One to reduce their number of redundant workflows, Jacobson will be able to allow their teams to be more strategic and focus on the areas that will drive value. They expect this improved efficiency will reduce their operating expenses.

Visibility into Data – Jacobson is excited to remove the barrier between their ATS and back-office side, resulting in a single data source and seamless data flow. According to Jennifer, “If we remove those redundant systems and create those integrations between the systems that don’t live in Bullhorn One, we’ve now ensured we have this single source of truth. I think that was really attractive to us as far as removing cumbersome, error-prone, and duplicate processes that will help us really scale to the growth we are already experiencing.”

Jacobson is also looking forward to having visibility into their financial data through Bullhorn One’s reporting capabilities. “Our business unit leaders will be able to have visibility and insight in real-time to see aging reports and gross margin reports,” said Jennifer. Their leadership team will now be able to receive data quicker and in a more digestible fashion, allowing them to review the trends and make strategic decisions for the business.

Expansion through Integrations – Jacobson appreciates the breadth and variety of marketplace partners available to them through their partnership with Bullhorn. “I think Bullhorn is so smart in that way, knowing they can’t be everything for everyone. There are hundreds of customers. We all sit in different spaces. We may all offer slightly different products,” said Jennifer. “I think it’s more meaningful to say ‘we can’t be experts in everything, so we will have open APIs and partner with different vendors you can easily integrate with Bullhorn.’ It can feel like a seamless suite of technology products.” Jacobson is excited they have the opportunity to integrate with Bullhorn’s marketplace partners as their own business continues to expand and evolve.