Many people are familiar with the basics of the software development and release process. It happens in stages:

• “Alpha” means a release is not yet complete. Alpha releases will definitely have bugs, but are done enough that we can start to get feedback.
• “Beta” generally means that a release is functionally complete but may still change based on user feedback and still has some issues that are not yet resolved.
• “General Availability” (GA) means that a release is ready for broad use. There may be future enhancements, but its reached a point of completeness and quality

Beyond these basics, a lot of enterprise software companies have another stage that precedes GA called “Limited Release.” During this stage, the features are complete and of shipping quality, but deploying them in a staged fashion helps ensure that the rollout goes smoothly and has the least impact on customers. Over the past several months, we have been using this release process with several new features and investing in a number of infrastructure changes to support it. Overall, we’ve had success with it, so going forward we’re planning to adopt it for all releases.

Overall, this change in process means you will get higher quality, easier to adopt features because Bullhorn can gradually scale up the non-technical elements of a release — like our ability to handle support calls or help customers through configuration — and any issues we face early on will only affect a small number of users, which makes them easier to address quickly.So going forward we will be deploying new releases to a single cluster (a cluster corresponds to the first part of the URL that you see after you log into Bullhorn), then gradually expanding the deployment over the following weeks. Bullhorn will continue to notify your account and support contacts when a new release is coming, but since clusters will receive releases at different times, not all customers will receive this notification simultaneously.

So what’s the bottom line for iPhone lovers? When are you going to be able to use your iPhone with Bullhorn? As mentioned above, Bullhorn Mobile Sync for iPhone will go into limited release in mid-April, along with several other features we’ve been working on. Once we’re confident that there are no significant issues, we will release to the rest of our servers. We anticipate being done with this the entire release by the end of May. In the meantime, look for communications from Bullhorn as to when your cluster is scheduled for the update.

1. Improved duplicate checking. One of the key benefits of external job board integration is that Bullhorn tries to determine if a candidate you find on a job board is already in your database. This can save you time and resume views. Working closely with the job boards, we’ve significantly improved duplicate checking.
2. Searching tearsheets. When you’re searching your candidate database, do you want to limit the scope of your search just to the “Hot Candidates” list? Do you want to exclude people on a different list? Now you can add one or more tearsheets as criteria on a search, along with keywords, zip code radius, and all of the other attributes available in Integrated Resume Search.
3. Improved keyword highlighting.  Integrated Resume Search keyword highlighting is now vastly improved, particularly where searches include exact phrases (e.g., “project management) or where the words that matched were variants of your search term.
4. Improved result sorting. Depending on how you were using Integrated Resume Search, the search results did not always sort the results by the results score (i.e., how close the match was). Now every time you search, the closest matches will be at the top. No need to manually resort.
5. View last note on the results list. You can now make quicker judgments by scanning the contents of the last note in the extended view. If the last note says “spending the next year traveling the world,” you’ll know right away to move on down the list to find a viable candidate.
6. Page through results from the candidate record. Popular in other areas of Bullhorn, you can now page through the results of your search directly from the candidate record. Just click on the navigator arrow at the top right of the Candidate to move forward or backward through the results of your search.

If you’re not currently using Integrated Resume Search, contact your Bullhorn sales expert today.  Separate charges apply. 

We originally released IRS in the Fall of 2008. This feature introduced three important changes to candidate searching — a much-improved user interface, more powerful technology under the hood and, most notably, the ability to search the leading job boards from inside Bullhorn. Today, we support CareerBuilder, Monster, and Yahoo! HotJobs.

Anytime you make a big change in a product, you’re bound to run into a few kinks and sometimes users resist changing their habits, so as we’ve rolled this feature out to clients, we’ve gotten plenty of feedback (Recruiters are generally not shy). Thanks to all of you that helped us uncover the ways to build on this great technology.
Sometimes it’s the little things that can make a big difference, and in this case I’m sure anyone that searches for candidates will find these updates valuable. Here are the highlights:

1. Improved duplicate checking for external boards. One of the key benefits of external job board integration is that Bullhorn tries to determine if a candidate you find on a job board is already in your database. This can save you both time and resume views. Getting this right with limited data is a bit of an art, but we’ve worked with the job boards to get better dupe-checking data, and we’ve tweaked our algorithms, resulting in significant improvements. CareerBuilder users will benefit the most today, but we’ll be continuing to improve dupe checking with the other boards over the coming months.
2. Searching tearsheets. When you’re searching your candidate database, do you want to limit the scope of your search just to the “Hot Candidates” list? Do you want to exclude people on a different list? Now you can add one or more tearsheets as criteria on a search, along with keywords, zip code radius, and all of the other attributes available in IRS.
3. Improved keyword highlighting. We heard loud and clear from customers that search result highlighting needed some improvement. To make sure we got this right, we even sent an engineer out to sit with a few recruiters and hear their feedback firsthand. The results of those visits are a big improvement in keyword highlighting, particularly where searches include exact phrases (e.g., “project management) or where the words that matched were variants of your search term.
4. Improved result sorting. Depending on how you were using IRS, the search results did not always sort by the results score (i.e., how close the match was). Now, every time you search the closest matches will be at the top. No need to manually resort.
5. View last note on the results list. You can now make quicker judgments by scanning the contents of the last note in the extended view. If the last note says “spending the next year traveling the world,” you’ll know right away to move on down the list to find a viable candidate.
6. Page through results from the candidate record. Popular in other areas of the app, you can now page through the results of your search directly from the candidate record. Just click on the navigator arrow at the top right of the Candidate to move forward or backward through the results of your search.

The customers we’ve already shown this to have been overjoyed, and I’m looking forward to hearing more feedback (both positive and negative) once you get your hands on this latest release.

As a parting note, keep your ears open for further enhancements. In addition to more duplicate checking improvements, in the coming months Bullhorn is going to continue building out our sourcing solution. I’m particularly excited about the research we’re doing into “intelligent search.” Wouldn’t it be great if you could just tell Bullhorn to find you ten more candidates that looked like the one you just placed last week?

While we’ve long provided ways to load data into and pull data out of Bullhorn, we knew there was a lot more we could be enabling for our customers. With the new Bullhorn web service APIs, we’ve dramatically expanded the types of data that developers can access programmatically, and we’ve released a new event system that allows you to create real-time links between events that occur in Bullhorn (e.g., the creation of a placement) and business processes that are managed by other systems (e.g., billing). These capabilities have the potential to open up new possibilities for both tecchies and non-tecchies alike. If you’re looking for more technical information about our APIs, just search for “Integration APIs” in the Resource Center to find a link to the documentation.
Now, for some non-technical language. We’ve been working with a number of customers during the early release period to ensure the APIs provide the functionality they need. Here are some of the things that customers have been doing with the new APIs:

• Integrating Bullhorn data into applications on their corporate intranet
• Automating the flow of transactions between PeopleSoft and Bullhorn
• Feeding real-time transaction data into a corporate data warehouse
• Building a custom user interface for the Timecards module

I’m sure many of you are already thinking of additional ways you could use the APIs inside your company. We also have several partners working on integrating their products with Bullhorn. I have to keep these under wraps for the moment, but as we expand the partner capabilities of our platform, you can expect to see a whole universe of complimentary offerings that will allow you to spend more time talking to clients and candidates and, of course, making placements.

We’re very excited about this new step in Bullhorn’s development as a recruiting platform. As always, the development team is excited to learn about what you’re trying to accomplish. If you think there are ways we could improve this feature, let us know, or if you just want to show off what you’ve done, that’s always welcome too.