ep.education is a specialist education recruitment company. Since its inception in 1995, ep.education has been guided by its strong values and clear mission to ‘create excellence in education’ by bringing people together. They provide temporary, contract and permanent recruitment services throughout New Zealand whilst also offering international opportunities. We connected with Stuart Birch, Managing Director & Founder of ep.education to learn more about how they have harnessed Bullhorn and Bullhorn Automation so their whole team can work more effectively and efficiently engaging with clients and candidates.
The Challenge
For a recruitment agency it’s important to have a clear system in place to manage the critical data consultants need to access, edit and process daily. This is exactly what Stuart was looking for four years ago when he first started to explore new recruitment platforms for ep.education. “The holy grail is having that one source of truth. The one system that can manage all our data, for candidates, clients, and our jobs”, Stuart stated.
Working across the education sector means Stuart and his team have a variety of work presented to them on a daily basis. This could include looking for roles ranging from an early childhood teacher working with infants to a Year 12 teacher, teaching chemistry and physics. Education is a complex market, with a high level of compliance. “The work we do is complex, especially around the temp space”, Stuart explained. ep.education needed a platform to ensure their processes were consistent across their multiple offices. This is when they were introduced to the automation platform, Bullhorn Automation.
The Solution
After a system review, ep.education made the switch to Bullhorn when they recognised it could be their one central system, their source of truth. Bullhorn offered a customised solution which could cater to ep.education’s complex compliance needs and help them track bookings, candidates and clients.
Bullhorn Automation was implemented in mid-2020 at ep.education. It has allowed their team to excel at one of their key missions ‘to be high-touch’ with their candidates. “We work on relationships in the education sector, so it’s important our recruiters spend more time talking to people and engaging with them and Bullhorn Automation has certainly enabled us to do that”, Stuart said. ep.education have been able to automate their systems and set up processes that take away time consuming manual data entry from their recruiters. Bullhorn Automation has also meant ep.education are able to engage their clients and candidates via marketing in a more effective way.
The Results
Since partnering with Bullhorn, Stuart and his team have enjoyed a massive improvement on their old CRM. He describes the system simply, “Bullhorn’s always been a good solid platform for us, allowing us to work effectively in the management of our candidates and clients”.
The impact of Bullhorn Automation on ep.education has been widespread throughout the business. “Bullhorn Automation has been an absolute game changer right across the company through its automations”, Stuart stated. He continues, “We have a very big database, as you can imagine after 26 years. We’re now able to get much better value out of our database by working with our candidates and engaging with those people that are needing our services at the right time”. Over the past six months, ep.education have performed over 1 million automations resulting in 35 000 hours saved whilst engaging their team with 11 494 clients and candidates.
ep.education now has consistently cleaned and updated data as Bullhorn Automation’s survey function allows candidates to update their information themselves. It’s led their team to be able to work more efficiently with candidates helping to build solid relationships. “Bullhorn Automation has been a really useful tool to help us re-engage old candidates too, especially in the temp space”, Stuart explains. ep.education recently ran an automation targeted at 600 teachers they had past engagement with and in the space of a week were able to add 28 interested and qualified teachers back into their candidate pool. Stuart says, “Bullhorn Automation is like putting Bullhorn on nitrous. It’s really enabled us to be more efficient, have more fun, get more done and use what we’ve got more effectively”.
Bullhorn Automation has allowed ep.education to actively engage clients and candidates in marketing material they are interested in. 86 575 automated emails have been sent over the last 6 months with an open rate of almost 48%, showing the effectiveness of their communication. “We’re getting great coverage from Bullhorn Automation in all areas”, Stuart explained. They have the ability to view who opens their marketing emails and automations and are then able to have this information sent directly to the recruiter who was working with that particular client or candidate. “The type of data goes right where it needs to rather than sitting on a report, our team can reach out and build better relationships”.
The Future
Stuart and his team will continue to utilise Bullhorn and Bullhorn Automation to engage their clients and candidates at the right times. “Marketing in the current world has become more and more important. So our ability to market our services and to engage with candidates and clients is going to be critical over the next couple of years”, Stuart explains.
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