Ethan Allen Workforce Solutions

How Connected Recruiting automations increased Ethan Allen’s productivity

Ethan Allen Workforce Solutions is the largest full-service agency in the Hudson Valley area, with a mission of simplifying how companies and talent connect. The team specializes in the healthcare, administrative, and industrial sectors while providing both direct recruitment and temporary staffing solutions. While Ethan Allen transitioned to the Bullhorn Platform over a year ago, they decided to implement Bullhorn Automation in February of 2022. Since then, the team has generated automations impacting each phase of the talent lifecycle to align with Bullhorn’s Connected Recruiting strategy.

Connected Recruiting is a strategy that empowers staffing firms to engage talent at every stage of the talent lifecycle: attract, engage, onboard, and nurture. By leveraging Connected Recruiting best practices, staffing firms can ensure an incredible experience for their talent, create an ever-growing and consistently engaged talent pool, and lower their cost of talent acquisition.

We had the opportunity to sit down with two experts from Ethan Allen Workforce Solutions, President Elizabeth Domenico and Director of Employee Experience Kelsey Anderson, to discuss how their automations support candidates from attracting through nurturing.

Attract

The first phase of the Connected Recruiting life cycle is “Attract.” During this phase, it’s crucial to efficiently pull talent in through job boards and follow up immediately to ensure they don’t slip through the cracks. The goal is to get more out of your job board spend, increase efficiency, and improve the candidate experience from the start.

Attracting candidates through AI Job and Auto Matching: Ethan Allen is currently launching AI Job and Auto Matching. By using AI and machine learning, Bullhorn can intelligently match candidates with current job openings from Ethan Allen’s ATS for use in any outbound communication. This helps engage candidates with relevant jobs and provides recruiters with matches without conducting a manual reach in ATS.

With AI Job Matching, Ethan Allen will be able to match candidates to potential jobs based on the personal information hosted within Bullhorn, such as their job title, location, skills, and industries. An automated campaign will be triggered for candidates, indicating the jobs that may be of interest to them. With Auto Matching, when a new job enters Ethan Allen’s database, an automation will be triggered to notify recruiters of candidates that match the job’s criteria. By adding these tools, Ethan Allen hopes to cut down their team’s manual work so they can focus on building relationships with their candidates and clients.

“We are setting up AI Job and Auto Matching so there will be even less manual work for us to do. Instead of setting up individual automations that alert candidates of jobs they might be a match for, the system will trigger the automations for us. I think it will be even more of a time saver for our recruiters,” said Domenico.

We’ve learned that the majority of the people you’ll work with are already in your database. So, we want to utilize automation to make sure that those candidates are notified of the jobs that they’re a fit for. Because of this, semantic matching will be huge for us.

Kelsey Anderson Director of Employee Experience, Ethan Allen Workforce Solutions

Engage

The next stage in the Connected Recruiting life cycle is “Engage.” In this phase, recruitment agencies should work to engage the talent that is already in their database, as well as new candidates, with the right message, at the right time, for the right opportunities. The goal is to increase the conversion of your existing talent pool to ultimately save time and lower the cost of talent acquisition.

Cleaning data to effectively communicate with talent: For Ethan Allen, the first step to effectively engaging with their talent was cleaning their data. Without accurate, up-to-date candidate information, they knew it would be impossible to systematically engage with their talent. So, the team partnered with Barclay Jones to evaluate the status of their data and get it cleaned up.

“We didn’t even realize how bad our data was until they pointed it out,” said Domenico. “For example, when we were starting to look into Semantic job matching, we realized that candidates weren’t required to fill out two of the fields on our job requisition forms. They were listed as optional, but having that candidate information is imperative to making the whole process work. So, Barclay Jones showed us three different automations and we got those up and running immediately.” Now, if one of Ethan Allen’s recruiters forgets to fill out a field when screening a candidate, they get an automated notification to go back and code it properly. Having up-to-date information enables the team to accurately identify what candidates are a good match for open roles.

Contacting available candidates with relevant roles: Ethan Allen has also set up regular automations to engage with their available candidates, and help them get placed. “We’ll send our available candidates a survey every 30 days asking questions that will give us a better chance of getting them placed. We ask if they’re still looking for work or to make sure we have their most up-to-date resume on file,” said Anderson. “We want to make sure that everything is updated for them, so we’re only contacting them with roles that could be a potential fit.” By using these engagement automations, Ethan Allen went from engaging with 33% more contacts in a 30-day period.

Onboard

The next stage in the Connected Recruiting life cycle is “Onboard.” By properly onboarding candidates, you can create a seamless and positive experience for them in the lead-up to the first day of a job, through the first few weeks. By engaging candidates frequently before their new role and beyond, you have the opportunity to reduce the rate of no-shows and improve the overall client and candidate experience.

Streamlining onboarding with Onboarding365: Ethan Allen currently uses Onboarding365 to onboard their candidates. “Before Covid, our process was quite a bit longer. We had everyone come into the office to fill out paperwork. Since switching to Bullhorn, we’ve streamlined our process,” said Anderson. With Onboarding365, Ethan Allen waits until they know they are going to move forward with a candidate before asking them for the necessary information and forms that they’re going to need.

The team starts by getting basic information from each candidate, such as their name, phone number, email address, and what type of work they’re looking for. That’s when automation comes in. “Once we have their basic information, we send them mobile-friendly paperwork to fill out. The automation is triggered based on the candidate status of ‘initiated’ or ‘in progress.’ Then, we use automations to follow up with the candidates until they fill out the paperwork. To make onboarding successful, we try to make it as easy as we can for them,” said Anderson.

Partnering automation with the human touch: While Ethan Allen uses automations to alleviate some of their recruiters’ manual work during the onboarding process, they know that nothing can fully replace the value of the human touch. According to Anderson, the onboarding automations free up time for their recruiters to manually do their candidates’ interview prep. “The interview preparations are still done manually because it’s nice to have that personal connection between the recruiter and employee, whether it’s a call or an email to make sure they’re available and ready for their interview,” said Anderson. “I think some things still need those personal touches.”

The onboarding automations have made the biggest impact on my team because I don’t need to manually go through everyone’s file to see where their progress is. The system just does it, and it’s one less audit that I have to manually do. It frees up time for my customer service team to focus on what actually needs to be done instead of doing follow up calls.

Kelsey Anderson Director of Employee Experience, Ethan Allen Workforce Solutions

Nurture

The final stage of Connected Recruiting is “Nurture.” During this phase, you can proactively nurture talent throughout their assignment so you can easily engage them for their next role. This increases your ability to extend a candidate’s assignment or redeploy them in a new role in the future.

Connecting with candidates on assignment: Ethan Allen has set up a date-based automation to ensure they are checking in with their candidates on assignment. When a candidate starts a new role, an automated notification is sent to their recruiter on their first and second days of work. After that, a notification is sent every seven days. “This notification is a reminder for the recruiter. The recruiter is then expected to follow up with a phone call to either the client or employee to check in and see how everything is going,” said Domenico. “We have automated the reminders, but we want to automate the check-ins as well. That is on our to-do list.”

Securing candidate and client feedback: In addition to automating check-ins with candidates on assignment, the Ethan Allen team is planning to automate feedback surveys at the end of a candidate’s assignment. “At the end of a placement, we want to automatically secure feedback from both the candidate and client. That way, we’ll get an understanding of what the candidate did and did not like in order to properly redeploy them, while understanding if they were a good fit for the client.”

How Bullhorn Automation Increased Ethan Allen’s Productivity

While focusing on creating automations that support each phase of the Connected Recruiting life cycle, Ethan Allen has been able to save time, resulting in increased productivity across their team. During this period, using Automation, Ethan Allen increased their time saved by 204%!

Previously, most of Ethan Allen’s processes were very manual. Their recruiters had to send their candidates reminders and keep track of all of their follow up communications. With Bullhorn Automation, that is taken off of their plates. “Having automations in place frees up time for our recruiters to build relationships with candidates and clients, because they don’t have to do admin tasks anymore,” said Anderson.” We’ve set the automations up to be ‘set it and forget it.’ That has freed up so much time across the board, for everybody on our team.”

From my standpoint, the biggest benefit of Bullhorn Automation is that it just makes work easier. Ultimately, it makes life easier. I can trust that the automations are running.

Elizabeth Domenico President of Ethan Allen Workforce Solutions

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