Centralised tech stack – When considering using AI, the IDR team wanted to make sure it would integrate with their current tech stack. Hayes has been working towards a centralised tech stack since 2015. Back then, Hayes recognised that IDR used several disparate systems that weren’t talking to each other, and he was determined to create a single source of information. Since then, his team has adopted Bullhorn One and the Bullhorn Talent Platform. When the IDR team decided to implement AI, they knew that Bullhorn Copilot would be the right choice, embedded right within their recruiters’ current interface.

“Our team was already in Bullhorn. So, Copilot is something that we can turn on, put a card on the dashboard, and start using with honestly very little training from day one,” said Hayes. “Having a product that sits right into our current system was an immediate benefit that I saw with Copilot.

Faster time to productivity – IDR invests in hiring a lot of entry-level employees. According to Hayes, these new recruiters are hired because they are great at relationship building and are naturals at running quality conversations with candidates and clients. However, when they start their new role, there is a learning curve jumping into IDR’s tech stack and workflows, such as creating candidate summaries and matching candidates to the right positions. “AI has done a good job of giving us more access to better training and taking away some of those areas that are tougher for newer recruiters to conceptualise, like Boolean strings or putting together candidate summaries,” said Hayes.

The faster new hires are trained, the faster they can start placing candidates and winning jobs over competitors. “Speed is everything, especially if customers are working with multiple recruitment partners,” said Hayes. While tasks like searching for quality candidates and writing summaries for a candidate have historically been considered more of an “art form,” Hayes believes that Copilot presents an opportunity to disrupt the industry and speed up these critical but previously time-consuming tasks.

With Copilot, IDR can accelerate their training process and shorten the time it takes for a new recruiter to become productive. “I can definitely tell a noticeable change in the amount of time my trainers are investing in some of these functions early on, and the amount of time it takes a new recruiter to adapt some of these skills,” said Hayes.

Increased efficiency – In addition to faster time to productivity, Copilot has given IDR’s recruiters the opportunity to focus on their most impactful tasks, increasing their overall efficiency. “Unlike other technologies, Copilot doesn’t drastically change your workflow,” said Hayes. “If anything, it speeds up your workflow so your recruiters can spend their time on the areas you want them to focus on, which is spending more quality time with their candidates and clients.”

With features like Copilot’s candidate summary capability, the team doesn’t need to spend as much time on the front end of candidate research. “The summary feature wraps candidate information into a bulleted format for our recruiters, so they can easily use the information when marketing candidates to clients,” said Hayes. It saves them time from having to research a bunch of stuff to create summarisations of these 20-page resumes in five bullets. So, there’s been a big benefit to that as well.”

Ultimately, IDR is not looking for AI to replace the job of their recruiters. Instead, the organisation wants to use AI to make their recruiters’ lives easier. “With Copilot, they have their own assistant sitting at their desk with them every day,” said Hayes. “Normally, when recruitment agencies need to format a candidate’s resume, the recruiter either needs to do it themselves or source it to someone else. Now, with Copilot, our recruiters can do it with the click of a button, while still having control over it and making edits as needed.”

For any piece of recruitment technology to be implemented successfully and reach widespread adoption, there needs to be buy-in across the team. According to Hayes, getting his team engaged on the front end of an implementation isn’t the issue. Instead, he wanted to prevent his team from making too-quick assumptions about the technology’s functionality during the implementation process. “Some recruitment organisations that hire experienced recruiters have a harder time with engagement at the front end. Having a younger audience of staff is easy for me because they want to try new things and are fairly savvy with technology. The problem with the younger staff is if it’s not working, they’re very quick to just move away from it,” said Hayes.

The solution? At IDR, they focus on training and feedback loops to ensure team members have a voice in the implementation and that their needs are being met at every step of the process. “Keeping an open line of communication with the people using the software is really important,” said Hayes. “Creating true early adopters is all about preventing folks from moving away from new systems due to inadequate training or lack of incentives.” Hayes believes that it is important to get employees involved with Copilot at the earliest stages of implementation in order to get them excited about the technology and the benefits it will bring to their workflow.

According to Hayes, another key to successful change management is making sure you’re leveraging the partnerships with your vendors to both receive training tools and provide helpful feedback. A technology provider who believes in partnerships is key. When it comes to Bullhorn and the Copilot early access program, IDR leans into the strong relationship they have built with their account owner, Kayla Clayton.

The team trusts that Kayla will actively listen to their feedback and get answers to all of their questions. “You can speak to industry peers about how to change a workflow or put a new process in place, but having experts to do that is very valuable,” said Hayes. “And I know that a lot of that starts with Kayla taking the time with us on a consistent basis to get that feedback and then actually know where to go within the organisation to drive that feedback and take action.” IDR’s relationship with Kayla and the Bullhorn team has helped them navigate their implementation of Copilot, and they will continue to partner throughout their journey with AI.

Allegis Group APAC had a high level of fragmentation across their core business processes. James Warwick, Allegis Group’s Chief Operating Officer, explains, “Our transformation team looks at our business as a set of core processes, predominantly based on ‘lead to offer’ (front office) and ‘order to cash’ (middle office).”

Allegis Group identified key gaps in how they supported their Sales & Services team. The Group wanted their front office system to be more than a ‘system of record’. Their teams were great at leveraging their database to serve their customers but Warwick knew “we needed to do more to support our people and to improve the experience for our clients and candidates as they go on the journey with us.”

In terms of their middle office Warwick commented, “Our middle office processes were quite siloed with multiple systems and manual workarounds in place,” said Warwick. “We relied heavily on tacit knowledge within our teams often resulting in errors and challenges in our operations.”

These problems weren’t just in the APAC region, it was present across the business in each of the regions Allegis operated in. “This led us to look for a more complete solution that allowed us more options to develop a broader more flexible capability”, Warwick said.

Looking to the future, Warwick emphasises “We have big plans to continue to improve how we serve our people and our customers and with the initial build we have a good foundation.” He says, “there is much to do still to drive improved support for our core operations teams especially with how we can use greater automation to enable our Sales and Services teams to spend more time focused on their customers. The platform we now have with Bullhorn for Salesforce and 2cloudnine is the key to our ability to continue to do so.”

In the short term, Allegis Group will be looking to complete the deployment of the platform across the eight countries they operate in APAC. Having completed the initial deployments in four countries so far, the business has been able to start to build a separate focus on product and innovation while their core PMO teams continue to focus on the remaining country deployments.

Before adopting Bullhorn, Talentpath had several challenges with their database. Their previous Applicant Tracking System (ATS) was outdated and couldn’t keep up with the evolving technology-driven market.

As a result of this, Talentpath Recruitment consultants weren’t using the database. “Its search function was really clunky. It really wasn’t very intuitive, so people wouldn’t use it. They [Talentpath’s consultants] weren’t using it to keep in touch with their candidates, they weren’t using it to find candidates,” Robson explained.

The old system could no longer deliver the user experience and team engagement that Talentpath desired. As Fazldeen added, “It had become stagnant. We are a forward-thinking business driven by innovation and solutions thinking. We need to ensure our clients and candidates are directly impacted by that innovation and dynamic thinking and our system was hindering our ability to do that. We didn’t have a system that could evolve at the same pace that we have over the years.”

Frustrated with the functionality of their old system, Talentpath decided to go to market in search of a new ATS that would solve all their pain points and drastically improve the candidate and client experience. They ultimately decided on Bullhorn.

Bullhorn provided the user-friendly, intuitive and dynamic platform that Talentpath Recruitment felt was essential for their team. Fazldeen and Robson attended Bullhorn’s annual Engage Sydney recruitment conference in 2022, where they witnessed genuine excitement and a sense of community amongst Bullhorn users, employees, and Marketplace partners. Fazldeen stated, “At Engage, before we’d even laid eyes on the Bullhorn platform, we were blown away by the energy and the story sharing from users who were genuinely engaged.” She continued, “Then we made a beeline for the Bullhorn Hub, and once we got into the platform, we were hooked.”

Something that stood out to Fazldeen and Robson was that Bullhorn shared Talentpath’s philosophy of hiring great people who are passionate about delivering a high level of service. “The biggest asset in our business is our people, our recruiters, who sit in front of customers and talk about what we do and deliver our service. We choose suppliers who are as invested in our business as much as we are. At a partnership level, Bullhorn has nurtured a trusted and valued relationship,” Fazldeen said.

After implementing Bullhorn as their trusted ATS, Talentpath has experienced an increase in team productivity and has delivered not only more talent solutions for its clients and candidates, but better, personalised communication as well. Their recruiters are now actively engaged in the system meaning their speed of delivery and the quality of their data is creating new business opportunities. “Bullhorn has become a central, pivotal tool in our toolkit that allows us to do all the things that we need to do,” Fazldeen stated.

Talentpath has also taken advantage of using Bullhorn Analytics to understand candidate and client data in minute detail and has noticed a number of positive results. Bullhorn’s Analytics capabilities have allowed them to gain real-time insights into not just individual performances but also overall business outcomes. As a result they’ve been able to make data-driven decisions. “The actionable insights have made the biggest impact. We now have the ability to take standard metrics one step further to help our consultants know what the next thing they should be doing is,” Robson explained. On top of daily tasks, Bullhorn Analytics has assisted Fazldeen in optimising their budget allocation by providing key insights into the most effective channels for Talentpath.

In addition to the above, Talentpath Recruitment has maximised the use of Bullhorn Automation to increase their targeted outreach and optimise core recruitment processes. Fazldeen describes the use of automation as providing their Bullhorn CRM with its “own little heartbeat”, seamlessly connecting their candidates and clients with their internal team and brand.

Fazldeen sees Bullhorn as a “big support” and is excited to continue working with the team to build on the strong partnership. Talentpath’s Account Manager, Joshua McCole, who has previous recruiting experience, played a pivotal role in enhancing Fazldeen’s experience during the sales process. “Josh’s ability to apply lived recruitment experience to the product and using in-depth knowledge to talk about the benefits was a game changer in our decision-making process. We loved Josh’s genuine passion for what we do as recruiters, he’s authentic and a great listener,” Fazldeen stated.

Similarly, Robson knows the Support team is always available to answer technical support questions when they arise. She has regular meetings with Bullhorn’s Customer Success Consultant, Matt Emmerson who builds an in-depth knowledge of Talentpath’s workflow so he can provide fresh insights on their ATS to improve efficiency and assist with new queries. Robson said, “Matt always lets us know what’s changing, what’s updated or what’s a better way to do something, we feel very connected.”

Talent offices across the APAC region had been on their previous system for a number of years with small gripes increasing over that time. “It became very cumbersome and labour intensive to maintain”, Gert Leppers, Global Chief Digital Officer at Talent explained.

There were a lot of manual processes and their tech stack did not all integrate well. This resulted in countless instances where information had to be downloaded from one system, then uploaded or manually entered into a different system. Consultants were working across different programs and in multiple windows, causing many time-consuming inefficiencies. On top of this, when Leppers and his team wanted to make customisations to their system, they had to rely on specific developers causing further delays.

Having a deep understanding of Talent Quarter operations for some time, Sue realised their large database of candidates wasn’t being utilised to its full potential. “We’re working in such a tight candidate market that we need to be able to maintain our candidate relationships, deliver an exceptional experience and have connection to them throughout their careers”, she explained.

Sue knew the importance of fully utilising their extensive candidate database and the potential that it could unlock for her team. “For us to be able to compete in a very competitive and tight market, to get speed to shortlist and get candidates out to clients quickly, I was of the view that we needed to do a complete revamp of our systems and processes”, Sue stated.

This is when Sue and her team embarked on a digital transformation journey with Bullhorn and its ecosystem of pre-integrated Marketplace partners.

Talent Quarter had a simple vision behind their digital transformation philosophy to ensure their team could unlock the potential in their database and enhance their candidate experience. Using Bullhorn has allowed the business to realise this vision. “We are now delivering the best possible system and processes using Bullhorn so our employees are enabled to deliver on the values that we have in the business to connect with people”, Sue explained. She added, “We want to make it easy for our consultants to do their jobs. We are using Bullhorn and Bullhorn Automation to make it easier for them to deliver our quality service with our methodology and touch points and be able to deliver a consistent experience across the business.”

Sue highlighted, “To have business processes, systems and data that has a tangible value is a real asset, you need to embark on a digital transformation journey to capture that.” She added, “We’re a relationship business and it’s all about how you bring value to those relationships.” Sue has no regrets in their technology transformation and looks forward to tackling the challenges within the industry head on.

While Emmbr has been using Bullhorn since its inception, when deciding on which system was right for the business, it had clear requirements. Their agency was looking for something that would grow and evolve with the company and could be fully – and easily – customised.

As part of their recent rebrand, Roe and his senior team did a full strategic review, which included assessing the ATS market to ensure Bullhorn was still fit for purpose. That research ultimately continued to “support that Bullhorn was the right partner for us,” said Anton. “We see Bullhorn as the core, so we’ve gone all in with Bullhorn, and really started to invest in what our stack around it looks like,” Anton explained.

INSIDE Recruitment has been partnering with Bullhorn for over seven years now. Prior to Bullhorn, they utilised a system that was not fully cloud based. They faced constant outages and knew it was time for a change. At the time, Troy was “looking for a CRM that wasn’t just going to suit their needs at that particular moment, they were looking to grow as well”, at that time Troy decided to go with Bullhorn after seeing that it would help them grow and achieve their business goals.

Kate joined INSIDE Recruitment four years ago to focus on enhancing the experience of people interacting with the business. This encompassed their candidates, clients as well as internal staff. She designed a ‘Candidate Experience Framework’ but found a number of barriers to implementing it. Inputting tasks and reminders into Bullhorn for consultants required their support team to do a large amount of manual data entry, taking at least 10 minutes per set of reminders. They found due to a number of years on the system and some human error, the data integrity of the platform had diminished. On top of that, INSIDE Recruitment was using a third party survey tool, adding to their data dilemmas. Kate explained, “We didn’t know the placements the [survey] responses were connected to and couldn’t follow up on them easily. It wasn’t aligning the two worlds of data.” This is when they discovered Bullhorn Automation.

Since implementing Bullhorn Automation along with Bullhorn, INSIDE Recruitment has seen a number of positive results. Kate noted the ease at which they can “configure Bullhorn itself.” She explains further, “If you want a new field, you can create that field and then pull that through the automation as well. So you’ve basically got this infinite number of ways to use it, it’s been amazing from that perspective.” She adds, “Automation has allowed us to update the right fields for us to stay connected and nurture our talent pools, both candidates and clients.” One of the core values at INSIDE Recruitment is to be ‘refreshingly personal’. So Kate acknowledges they don’t want to automate everything and take away the human touch, rather it’s about “striking the right balance” and using automation to assist their teams in enhancing the ‘people experience’.

With Bullhorn now their single source of truth, their teams across the business are more connected. This includes their support team, consultants and the finance team. “So our finance team works really closely with our support team and just being able to bring that data together to give them important updates as well,” Kate said. Additionally with their support team freed from manual data entry, they’ve been able to form stronger connections with INSIDE Recruitment’s candidates and clients.

INSIDE Recruitment has experienced a huge amount of organic growth using Bullhorn and Bullhorn Automation. They’ve gone from about 15 people to over 40 staff over the last few years. “We would not have been able to scale up the way that we have without the use of those tools”, Kate stated. “We’ve been able to optimise the potential of Bullhorn and Bullhorn Automation to provide consistency, drive best practices and adoption, engage more with our candidates and clients whilst finding the balance between personal and automated processes and still being refreshingly personal”, Kate said.

When FIRESOFT People launched their business back in 2012, they utilised a very low tech ATS tracking tool. When they decided to grow and scale the business they realised they needed a more robust solution. Erin Evans explained they were searching for a new platform that is “sticky for the long term, it needed to allow us to scale and not top out again.”

Their previous recruitment technology involved using separate systems that didn’t connect and “speak to one another.” They quickly realised this wasn’t a long term solution and saw the need for a system that enabled separate services to be added to their ATS which would result in one system operating as their “single source of truth.” Jessica noted, FIRESOFT wanted to “seek out that transparency and find out what’s happening with the company at any time” This is when the business made the move to Bullhorn, adding Bullhorn Automation and Bullhorn Analytics to their suite not long after, to ensure they had the robust long term solution they needed.

Since implementing Bullhorn, FIRESOFT has seen major improvements in their business performance. The key has been their ability to track and report on data, enabling the business to push towards better outcomes. “It has enabled consultants to really drive their own business every single day”, Erin explained.

Being able to create the right workflows and remove all the things that were not needed, resulted in phenomenal feedback from the FIRESOFT People consultants. “We loved that when our consultants asked, can we do this or that [with Bullhorn], the answer is always yes.” Erin detailed that “Over the years, being able to add in the marketplace partners and add in automation and data analytics, we just feel empowered.”

Bullhorn Automation has been effective on the marketing front for FIRESOFT People too. “You can reach a lot more people, much quicker with Bullhorn Automation”, Jessica explained. “We love that we are able to touch base with our candidates and clients more personally based on their actions. It has been really great from a customer experience perspective and elevating the marketing side of things through the business”, said Jessica. She gave the example of an application acknowledgment or rejection email. Jessica stated “It’s a simple one but they do go a long way. It’s those touchpoints with our brand that constantly remind candidates and potential clients that we are here, we’re thinking of them and if they need us they’re able to get in touch. It is helping with the customer journey, but it’s also eliminating a lot of the time and the effort that it would’ve taken traditionally to do to get to a certain task.”

By leveraging Bullhorn, FIRESOFT’s team has been able to work more closely across different functions of the business. They have a team named ‘Matrix’, a cross collaboration between marketing, admin and support who work closely together to create and execute many of their campaigns. In addition, FIRESOFT People know their Bullhorn Account Manager is just a phone call away should they need additional support or guidance. Jessica said, “Our account manager is really great at building those relationships and getting us the help we need to ensure that we are leveraging all of the Bullhorn platforms that we have.” She continued, “I’ve really appreciated the assistance that I get from our Bullhorn Account Manager. Relationships are very important in this day and age and that’s what we are trying to build with our own clients. So we do appreciate the personalised services that we receive [from Bullhorn].”

Ambition was facing a range of issues with the business being on two different ATS systems.

In Australia, they were using JobAdder while in Asia and the UK they were on itris. “We had a lot of instability with JobAdder in Australia which resulted in a lot of downtime and it began impacting our business”, James explained. Itris was an older client services style application, which was hosted internally in Ambition’s Hong Kong office and serviced their other international offices. “We deemed this a business risk with the way it was distributed to our individual consultants”, James stated.

Ambition faced fragmentation and many reporting issues, trying to combine data from the two different systems. It was also difficult to integrate other products into their existing technology stack. This is when they started their search for a new system and landed on Bullhorn.

Ambition has been using Bullhorn since 2017 and it is proven to be a reliable system they can trust across their global operations. The platform has brought their whole team onto a single platform in the cloud. “This has enabled us to share data globally which is something we could never do previously”, James highlighted. It has also allowed their team to be more agile which has been especially important over the last couple of years. James said, “The team can work from anywhere which has obviously been a massive help during the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether it be working from a laptop, mobile phone or whilst on the road, Bullhorn’s cloud based system has been a game changer for us. Enabling us to be more mobile and flexible.”

Reporting has gotten much more flexible with Bullhorn as well. “The ability to have global reporting has been a huge win for us”, James stated. “This also has resulted in cost considerations by being able to reduce the number of products we use and streamline those integrations.” Since joining Bullhorn Ambition have adopted a number of Bullhorn’s Marketplace Partners into their ecosystem such as Astute Payroll, Broadbean and Volcanic to seamlessly power their operations. Overall “[Bullhorn’s] been great for us from a cost perspective, business continuity and internal processes”, James stated.

The Future

James feels that automation will be key for the future of recruitment so has been using Bullhorn Automation for almost a year now.. “We are very excited that Bullhorn have brought Bullhorn Automation in house and we are really excited to see how it develops. Bullhorn Automation is an industry gamechanger, we feel that anything that can make consultants more efficient through technology is going to be a big win.”