Automation in Practice: How to Get a Useable Database Again

by Billy Davis Jun. 3rd, 2022

Category: Learning Product

This client had a problem that everyone with a database has to some degree: they had junk data. 

Here was their problem—and how they fixed it:

There was a time in this company’s history that they parsed candidate records from external sources en masse. The records consistently missed vital info, such as contact information, phone numbers, emails, resumes, skills, categories, etc. They did, however, have some information sporadically in a few fields. When the recruiters at this company would search their database, many of these incomplete records would come up in their searches, which frustrated the recruiters to the point that they began to look to external sources for information rather than to their own database.

Then, Bullhorn Automation came along. The team created an automation to archive these junk candidates by utilising criteria that found candidates that didn’t have resumes or contact information, had no submissions or placements, and hadn’t been contacted in over five years.

As a result, the company cleansed about 30% of its database, with hundreds of thousands of archived candidate records. With this clean, pristine database, recruiters gained confidence back in their database and looked internally again as their first source.

Before Bullhorn Automation, the client had considered hiring a team to do this work manually, forecasting six to twelve months of work. This automation was able to run in the span of just a few hours.

An extra benefit of this automation was that it built motivation for additional automations to get the client’s database in an even better place. These could include re-engagement campaigns to reconnect with candidates and client contacts, surveys to fill in missing information, or field and status updates to copy information from one place into another.

Here’s how you can do this yourself:

The automation that powered this Automation in Practice is available from a Blueprint.

1. In the top right corner of your automations page, select Add Automation.
2. Scroll down to Start from Blueprint.
3. In the Blueprints section, select Archive Stale Candidates with Missing Data. 
4. Hit Save in the bottom right corner.
5. Within the list settings of the automation, you have plenty of options to customise. You can add additional criteria, like candidates who don’t have emails or phone numbers, haven’t been spoken to within a certain amount of time, or haven’t had a submission or placement. Depending on how quickly you’d like to archive these candidates, you can also expand or shrink the time window. However you’d like to implement it, the general idea is that anyone matching these criteria would then get their status set to archive, which would then remove them from the front end of the database and prevent them from showing up in searches.

There are plenty of additional automations you can leverage beyond this one. You can find examples in the tutorials available to learn how to update information. 

For example, under the Blueprints section, you can select Re-engage Passive Candidates for candidates or clients or Update Candidate Resume to allow candidates to upload a resume via a survey answer that will get parsed automatically into your system. You can even utilise surveys to capture missing data information with Capture Missing Candidate Data, which finds people missing key data, reaches out to them, and fills in their answers directly into those fields. There are also Blueprints where you can copy information from one place to another, so if you know information on a placement record, you can copy it to a candidate record or submission record. 

There are a wealth of powerful automations you can use to clean up your database; with Bullhorn Automation, your imagination is the limit.

See this Automation in Practice:

Watch the video below to see Billy Davis put this automation into practice: