The number of people applying for unemployment benefits is at the highest level it’s been in three months. But these figures hold a puzzle because our data shows that companies have lots of open positions and they are having a hard time filling them. Last month Bullhorn processed 100,000 open job requests. Of those, only 30 percent of positions were filled. And we’re not the only one’s seeing this. The Bureau of Labor Statistics confirms the gap is real.  So, if there are jobs available and plenty of people looking for work, what’s the hold up?

“Jobs” is the topic du jour as we jump into the presidential election. We don’t have the answer, but we’re thinking about this strange problem and hope you will too.

Part of the issue is related to skills. It can be hard to find great software engineers familiar with all of the latest Web development tools and approaches a company might need. And sometimes it is geography. Not everyone can pack up and move to take a great job if they can’t get out from under their mortgage. On the employer side, the floodgates for new employees certainly aren’t wide open, so they may be taking their time to find the perfect candidate instead of the one who’s good enough.

But the search for that perfect candidate brings up another, more recently important factor, something we refer to as “cultural fit.”

Just this week there have been a number of articles about the importance of finding good people who also fit the culture of the work environment you want to build.  Fast Company reported that great companies like Google, Apple, and Nike are focused on “hiring great people” rather than hiring on expertise alone. And they’ll keep looking if a candidate has all the skills but might not be a great fit. An article in Eye on Sales reminded us that a tough economy provides an excellent opportunity to focus on maximizing the efficiency of your organization.  And nothing is less efficient than wasting time and money training a new employee who doesn’t work out after a couple of months.

Instead of rushing to fill the thousands of open positions out there, perhaps employers are adding a new “fit” filter to the hiring process and slowing things down. This might be putting additional drag on the employment numbers and be painful for job seekers in the short-term. But incorporating fit into hiring decisions will be a good thing in the long run by reducing the enormous costs of poor hires for both companies and individuals.

We got lots of feedback about Geoff Greene’s post about browser and Mac support from Mac fanatics.  Please check out the video below for my thoughts on this.

To get a setup like mine, once you have your Mac, do the following:

1. Buy VMware Fusion ($49.99 on vmware.com through the end of 2011).  There are lots of other virtualization options like Parallels, but VMware Fusion has the best integration with the Mac OS.
2. Install VMWare Fusion on your Mac.
3. Run VMWare’s Migration Assistant and follow these instructions to migrate your old windows PC to run on your Mac.
4. On your Mac, start VMWare Fusion, and run Unity View, so you can put the IE icon in your Mac dock, and then run IE like it’s a standalone app on your Mac.
5. Use Bullhorn as you normally would, and enjoy your Mac.

Surpassing the most optimistic expectations, LinkedIn is currently traded at roughly 30 times revenues and 564 times earnings. In comparison, Cisco, Intel and Microsoft are trading between 2 and 3 times revenues and between 9 and 15 times earnings. Clearly, investors feel that LinkedIn has a very bright future, even if it takes years for its fundamentals to catch up to the valuation. And, the stock is likely to hold that price or even rise from here, given the fact that LNKD is the only public vehicle for investors who want to bet on “social.”

• Will You Autograph My Term Sheet? The capital raised from the IPO gives LinkedIn the ability to simultaneously capitalize on two large opportunities: organic expansion and  product portfolio expansion via M&A. LinkedIn has an incredible channel: there are hundreds of products that it could acquire and distribute to its clients at fantastic margins. But, what should they buy? Every entrepreneur looking for an exit is waiting in line to talk to LinkedIn now. Their corporate development folks are the Justin Bieber of the tech industry — everyone wants an autograph. And, with their stock trading where it is, they should be able to write deals that really move the needle.
• Is LinkedIn Really “Social”? Not really. LinkedIn is a Swiss Army knife. It’s a professional Rolodex, a company research tool, a sales prospecting tool, a résumé database and, lastly, a job board. Remarkably, it actually does a damn fine job at these things. LinkedIn is not a communication platform. People don’t use LinkedIn the way people use Facebook and Twitter — i.e., a replacement for email and chat. Hence, LinkedIn is a professional network, not a social network.
• Facebook, Now That’s Good “Social.” People spend hours logged into Facebook every day; only sales people and recruiters spend that kind of time in LinkedIn. The information Facebook knows about people – their likes, interests, contacts, friends, relationship status, vocabulary (yeah, Facebook knows you can’t spell) – is all incredibly valuable to marketers, sales people and recruiters. Facebook’s data is like raw crude: highly valuable, but you need to refine it before you put it in your tank (Bullhorn Reach is like the refinery). LinkedIn may be the best source of candidate leads for recruiters today, but Facebook has the most long term potential.
• What The Hell Is Twitter? Twitter is a tool that let’s marketers shout messages at each other all day. Seriously, is any one reading what any one else is saying? That said, it is an incredible tool for content distribution. When content is compelling, relevant and timely, Twitter spreads the word faster than any thing else on the planet. The mainstream media learned that lesson on May 1st.
• Time to Join The Party. For those of you hoping social was just a fad that would eventually go away, here’s the bad news: the LinkedIn IPO just paved the way for more public and private investment dollars to flood into social technologies. So, it’s time to join the party.

Follow Art on Twitter.See the original post on the Bullhorn Reach blog. 

The Bullhorn team has been hard at work recently. We’ve been working on a mobile app for the iPhone, iPad and Android and an entirely new candidate search platform. We’ve been rolling out our improved Outlook/Exchange integration. And, we’ve been refining Bullhorn Reach, which helps recruiters leverage their social network connections and search engines to recruit talent and develop new client business.

Bullhorn Reach is graduating from private to open beta and so we’d like to invite all of our users to sign up for their free account here. After you’ve signed up, we’ll ask you to spread the word. If you get three other people to sign up, we’ll expedite your account activation and you’re in.

If you’re on the fence about signing up, here’s what a few early Bullhorn Reach beta users have to say:

“I love Bullhorn Reach” – Daren Pedley, Thornley Corporate Solutions Ltd. (UK)
“I LOVE this feature!!!!” – Roni from New York, on Reach Radar
“I received 4 job orders with Bullhorn Reach!” – Recruiter from Nevada
“I am receiving several great candidates every day through Bullhorn Reach via Facebook and Twitter” – J.K. from New Jersey

So sign up and tell your friends. You can’t beat the price!

 VIDEO: Art Papas describes the dramatic impact of social media and search on staffing and recruiting agencies.

For most of our industry’s history, recruiters reached new business contacts using paper: yellow page ads to touch prospective clients and job classifieds to connect with potential candidates. But then the Internet revolution shifted most paper-based communications online. Job boards provided a better way to find jobs and email made client communication easier. As candidates and clients adopted these new things, recruiters switched as well.

Now, a second wave of the Internet revolution is cresting, changing the way people and businesses interact again. Whether you call it Web 2.0, the social web, or whatever, two aspects matter most for recruiters:

People no longer want businesses interrupting them, whether with irrelevant emails or untimely cold calls. They want to connect on their terms, according to their timing.
People are increasingly turning to their personal and professional networks to help figure out which businesses to work with.

You can feel this wave swelling. Candidates can be found without job board ads. Clients don’t reply to emails as regularly. Candidates and clients are changing how they want to communicate again, and the staffing and recruiting agency community will have to adapt.

Are you Social? LinkedIn is Just the Beginning.

Most of us use LinkedIn – a lot. For many it’s their primary research and sourcing tool. But while recruiting professionals may spend hours per day on LinkedIn, no one else does. Clients and candidates spend their time on Facebook and Twitter. That’s where recruiters will have to be to connect with them.

Facebook has over half a billion users now, more than six times the amount on LinkedIn. Half of them log in on any given day, versus only 2.8 visits per month to LinkedIn. The average user spends more than an hour per day on Facebook. If you think it’s all Gen Y, guess again. 30% of them are between 35 and 50 years old, and the 50+ age range is their fastest growing group of users.

If you think Facebook is just for sharing photos and finding old flames, you’re mistaken. Let me share a personal story from two weeks ago: I was checking my Facebook wall before heading home when I noticed that an old high school buddy had joined a rapidly growing start-up that was looking to hire sales people and graphic artists. A recruiter responded within minutes, and my friend was happy to engage him since the time was right and the recruiter was already in his network.

And how about Twitter? Sure, it’s intimidating, but Twitter is rapidly becoming the preferred way to share content online. Already, about 100 conversations per minute  (per minute!)  about jobs and hiring flow through Twitter each day. Recruiters can’t afford to not to be there.
 

Are you found? It’s not Just about Social Media.

Familiar image? If you think this blog is strictly about social media, think again.  Yes, social media is one piece of the puzzle, but it’s bigger than that… much bigger. The term “SEO” (Search Engine Optimization) is something that most of us are familiar with by now, but what does it have to do with recruiting?

What happens when a candidate can’t find a job, or a client can’t find a recruiter through their social network? That’s right, they Google it- “Seattle marketing jobs”, “New Jersey recruiters”. Search is what connects people to things they need outside of their network.  Why? Because we all trust the results that Google and other search engines will return…but only the top results. 

Hundreds of thousands of clients and candidates turn to search to connect with recruiters each month. Having a beautiful Website isn’t enough. If you haven’t invested enough time and money into optimizing it for search, you probably aren’t showing up anywhere near the top which means you won’t be found and won’t get any new leads.

Riding the New Wave… Bullhorn Reach

While your prospect candidates and clients continue to ride the new communication wave, few recruiters have yet to join them.

Let’s face it – mastering just one of these tools and then growing a following and reputation takes a substantial amount of time, nevermind mastering all of the different networks. This is exactly why we just announced a new service to help – Bullhorn Reach. What makes Bullhorn Reach so unique is its ability to solve so many problems at once for not only recruiters, but sales.

In this industry, the three R’s are critical – Reach, Relationships and Reputation.  If you don’t have reach, you risk missing out on the passive gems that your clients are drooling for.  If you don’t have relationships, you’re likely bad at your job, and if you’re bad at your job, your recruiter/sales reputation will eventually plummet.  Bullhorn Reach harnesses the three R’s through one online service, taking the stress out of adapting to the new communication wave.

We are extending the Bullhorn Reach beta to a select number of staffing and recruiting agency professionals throughout the fall, followed by a commercial release this winter. To learn more about Bullhorn Reach and apply for the beta, visit www.bullhorn.com/reach.

I just read a blog post on TechCrunch by Vivek Wadhwa, titled, Is Entrepreneurship Just about The Exit?

The post posits that venture capital investors (known as “VCs”) drive technology entrepreneurs to focus too much energy on their exit strategy – either selling the company or IPO – rather than building great businesses. The article highlights bootstrapped, lifestyle businesses as an alternative approach to creating great technology businesses over the traditional VC route. It argues that the bootstrapped financing model, which is funding growth organically or from the “three Fs” – friends, family and fools, promotes the creation of truly great companies.

Clients often ask me about our investors, since financial strength is an important consideration when choosing a business partner. Bullhorn has lived through three different stages of corporate development. First, we were a venture capital-backed dotcom. Later, after refocusing our efforts to build a Software as a Service staffing and recruiting front-office application, we bootstrapped our way to profitability. Most recently, we’ve gone back to the VC backed approach to fund the organization’s current stage of growth. Having experience with both bootstrapping and VC backing, I can say that both have their merits. But, each has its time and place. This is true not only for software companies with VCs, but for any sort of business start-up with outside investors.

Lean and Mean
Bootstrapping is a great way to build a technology business to a certain point. It forces you to learn how to be pragmatic and listen carefully to your clients. If I had to point to a single thing that drove Bullhorn’s early success the most, it was that we had to win to survive. We could either delight our customers or go out of business. Anyone who started a business in 2009 probably knows exactly what I’m talking about.

Spend Money to Make Money
Bootstrapping, for all its positive effects, also has a downside, especially when it comes to technology companies. Once you’ve validated your business model, you reach a point where you need capital to support your growth. You need to promote and sell your offerings. You need to invest in infrastructure to be able to support your growth. You need to invest in outstanding services staff. All of these things require upfront investments. If you’re too cautious about spending, you open the door to competitors. If you’ve proven to yourself that you’ve built a great business, you’ve probably proven it to others as well and given enough time, they’ll over take you. That’s when venture capital investment can help.

VCs as Puppet Masters
In the article, Wadhwa paints VC investors as driving the agenda with entrepreneurs – forcing them to make decisions that serve only their interest – driving relentlessly toward a pay day. I’ve heard this from other entrepreneurs: “You took VC money. Do they call the shots now?” or “How long until they make you sell?” Most people picture VCs as puppeteers – having complete control over their portfolio companies and manipulating the management team’s every move. But, the reality is that most investors don’t have any control over the course a company will take. They can only do two things: make suggestions to management and replace the CEO. There’s no doubt that this is a powerful lever, but it’s really the nuclear option.

Let’s Not Fire the CEO
Most entrepreneurs are terrified of taking venture capital because they fear being replaced. If you’ve never grown a company from $1M to $100M, it’s natural to be unsure about whether or not you will be up for the task. But, most VCs won’t give you money if they don’t believe you can make it. And, they’ll usually be upfront about it if they have doubts. They invest in people just as much as they invest in products and markets and they want a big return on the capital they invest. Replacing a CEO is never easy and puts their entire investment at risk. The likelihood of finding another executive with the passion and enthusiasm of the person who built the business is low. It’s really in their best interest to make it work.

Stop Listening and Start Listening
CEOs get fired for one of two reasons: they either don’t listen to their investors or they listen to their investors. CEOs who don’t listen to their investors are very distressing for them. If investors believe you won’t entertain their input because you don’t value their opinion, they’ll worry that you’ll drive the company off of a cliff. They’ve seen more companies succeed and fail than you have, so you should be willing to listen. On the contrary, if all you do is follow the advice of your investors to a T, then you’re not a CEO – they are – which is also daunting for investors.

Achieving Balance
To build a successful organization, you have to be in tune with your clients, your team, your investors and your gut. If all you did was implement every suggestion your clients ever gave you, you would end up giving away your product and you’d go out of business. Clients typically don’t share your perspective because they aren’t standing in your shoes. So, similarly, if you did everything your investors told you to do, you’d make a lot of poor decisions. Achieving balance is critical. Your investors can be incredibly helpful in avoiding bad hires, analyzing acquisitions, thinking about sales and marketing strategies. But, unlike you, they aren’t on the ground, close to the clients. They will never have the full perspective that you will. So, when they steer you in a direction that you don’t think makes sense, you should acknowledge them, but tell them you disagree. In fact, it’s similar to what you do with clients every day.

Exit via Brute Force
Lastly, when it comes to giving investors a pay day, whether through IPO, strategic sale or a financial buyer, investors are entirely reliant upon management to drive the agenda. Very few companies would want to acquire a company where the management team is unwilling to participate in a merger. Wadhwa mentions registration rights in his post, where investors have the right to force a company to a public offering. While it may be possible to force to IPO, it’s hard to imagine a CEO trying to build enthusiasm for a public offering with a gun to his or her head. That’s far from the ideal exit scenario for any investor.

While it’s exciting to imagine that there’s a lot of skullduggery, arm twisting and palace intrigue in the board room of venture backed technology companies, goal setting, strategic planning and pitched debate are the modus operandi. Ultimately, everyone is aligned toward a common goal: building an innovative company that delivers products and services of incredible value to its clients. Investors know that if you accomplish that, great returns will be a natural by-product.

Sometimes I find myself scratching my head when I think about how things work in the industry—low order-to-fill ratios, in particular, is one issue I have yet to figure out. Why do so many job orders go unfilled, some without even a single cycle of recruiting time? As the market crawls out of the recession, job orders are flowing in again. But many firms are short staffed, which means covering every job order is going to be a big  challenge.
With this in mind, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to our clients about how they allocate their time. In particular, how they decide whether or not to work an incoming job order.
Not All Orders Are Created Equal

I hear over and over again that managers use several rules of thumb to prioritize orders. They work those that are from clients that:

• Have a long-standing relationship
• Pay a great rate
• Are relatively easy to recruit for

These criteria shift as the market changes and client relationships evolve. A good fee today could look low in as little as three months. Clients can agree to give you an exclusive on their orders and that would dramatically change their rank in the food chain.
 

Just Use the Force

The challenge here is that the job order prioritization scheme is highly subjective and ultimately locked in people’s heads, like “The Force” in Star Wars. Some account managers try to use a flag on the job order within their ATS to designate that it’s higher priority, but these flags can become chronically abused and thus, ignored. 
Job order prioritization strikes me as too critical to business success to remain so subjective. Consider its impact on critical factors like:

• Client retention: while some firms are incredibly disciplined about saying “no” when they’re too busy to fill an order, most feel they have to tell clients “yes” because clients who hear “no” too frequently eventually stop coming back. But if staff is not prioritizing the jobs of important clients and they go unfilled, they may stop coming back anyway.
• Revenue: prioritizing jobs that have higher probability of success and bigger spreads means more will close and those that do will generate higher margin
• Expenses: given that industry turnover is 30-40%, at any given time, about a third of a firm’s recruiting staff is fumbling around in the dark before they master “the force” and can prioritize themselves the orders that most deserve their attention.

A Possible Solution: Deal Scoring

The solution is to devise a numeric deal score on each order as it’s received. Yes, I was a math major, so of course my solution involves math, but bear with me. The idea here is that you could look at the things like a client’s historical orders-to-fill rate, the fee or spread on the order, the client’s responsiveness to submissions, even the availability of the required skill sets in your candidate pool and give each order a deal score. It could be as simple as giving the deal a number from 1 to 10. Then, recruiters could simply come in each morning, sort the orders by the deal score and get to work on those at the top of the list.

This concept is not new to business.  In fact, here at Bullhorn we use this approach to solve a similar problem. Last year, Karen Maloney and our Marketing team generated well over 10,000 potential sales leads – way too many for the Sales team to follow up with an equal degree of diligence. So leads get scored based on where the prospect is in the buying cycle, the potential size of the opportunity, etc. Sales can then focus effort on those leads most likely to generate revenue. This is a well-established approach that “baked in” to our marketing software. 

By developing a deal scoring process, you will be able to see if a recruiter spends time on low priority orders and point them in the right direction. Ideally, this will help to drive down recruiter turnover and decrease payroll expense, plus improve retention of key clients and grow revenue.
Has anyone tried to implement something like this?  If so, how well has it worked?

In 1999 we launched Bullhorn, an application exclusively delivered via Software as a Service or SaaS. At the time, people told us that the internet was for buying books and other people’s used stuff, not for enterprise software. I must have heard a thousand times, “large companies will never host their data on the internet”. Today, the market has turned 180 degrees and the world’s largest staffing firms will only consider cloud-based, zero-install solutions. Premised-based applications (i.e., those that involve a server on site or software installed on desktops) have officially been put on the endangered species list.

Since day one, a desire to challenge status quo in the industry with game-changing innovation has fueled Bullhorn’s efforts.  And, today we announced the launch of our latest innovation, the Bullhorn Marketplace- the industry’s first destination for staffing and recruiting software applications and services. Much like the iPhone and Facebook have opened their platforms to the development community with much success, Bullhorn has now opened its application platform to partners, customers and developers. With access to a rich set of APIs, now Bullhorn’s Alliance Partners can bring their products and services, all pre customized with Bullhorn, directly to our fast growing community of over 15,000 staffing and recruiting professionals worldwide.
 

What this means for our Customers

The number of technologies and online services that enhance productivity in the staffing industry has exploded – from job boards to communications tools, back office services to assessments and social networks. Recruiters and sales people are no longer judged on their ability to work a phone. The myriad of applications they use every waking hour on their PCs and mobile devices enhances their edge in the market.  Likewise, the integration between the back and front office is no longer a demand from executive teams, but an absolute necessity.

By opening up our platform to our partners, customers and the broader development community, we are breaking all of the chains that held true innovation back for decades. Now, a small, emerging vendor has the same opportunity that the large vendors have to integrate with our platform. And, we’ve made the evaluation, selection and deployment of these integrated offerings as easy as a few clicks.

• Wondering how to connect Bullhorn with your Accounting System?
• Want to tie your phone system to your client and candidate database?
• Want to eliminate cumbersome data entry from your work with VMS systems?
• Want to quickly automate and record phone screens for a list of qualified candidates?
• Our partners in the Bullhorn Marketplace have answered these questions and many others, while eliminated all of the pain typically associated with integration. No friction, no technical discussions of how, or how much to integrate – customers just pick a solution and get back to running their businesses.
   

From SaaS, to PaaS

The Bullhorn Marketplace is yet another evolutionary step as we emerge from SaaS (Software as a Service), to PaaS (Platform as a Service). And the value that this step presents to our customers and partners is 100% unmatched within our industry. By taking down the technical barriers between our customers and the products and services they use, Bullhorn has dramatically improved the experience for everyone involved: Bullhorn, its partners and of course, our customers.

So, I encourage you to check out the Bullhorn Marketplace and give our partners’ integrated offerings a try. If you don’t see one of your partners there, please point them in our direction. We’d love to have them join our team and I’m sure they’d love to gain access to our growing network of over 15,000 staffing and recruiting professionals.

A Bullhorn client, Neil Bernstein, of All Medical Personnel in Florida just sent me this article about Florida’s unemployment insurance crisis:

http://bit.ly/7acB6o

Because the federal government extended unemployment benefits last year, many state unemployment insurance funds are headed for bankruptcy unless they dramatically increase rates in 2010. For most employers, this is troubling, but for staffing firms placing employees in temporary assignments, this will be crippling. Because unemployment fees are front end loaded into the first 8 weeks of employment, unemployment is a big expense for staffing firms because of the short duration of most staffing assignments. Compound that with the fact that staffing firms typically have very high unemployment experience ratings and you have what amounts to a massive increase in costs for staffing firms. And, firms engaged in long term contracts with their clients will be unable to pass through these costs. This means that for lower wage employees, contract margins will likely swing into the red.

This problem is particularly acute in states like Florida, but is affecting the entire country. Staffing and recruiting firms are subsidizing a large portion of the unemployment benefits extension. Considering temporary workers only account for 2% of the US work force, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. And, this issue is extending the staffing industry’s worst downturn in its history. The media focuses a great deal of attention on the losses the automotive industry has suffered, yet the staffing industry employs nearly the same number of employees nationwide and it took a staggering 25-30% hit last year. In fact, the staffing industry probably should have received TARP or stimulus funds in 2009.

Perhaps it’s time the industry started to make some noise. As a staffing industry executive, in case if you haven’t done so already, it’s time to contact your state representatives. And, it’s also time to get involved with the American Staffing Association (ASA) so they can get their lobbying efforts into high gear and get the industry some much needed relief.

2009 was a year of winnowing. And, what made it such a tough year was the fact that the prior four years were easy years of growth. Four years of wind at our backs had made us all soft. Even those of us who survived the dotcom bust, who knew that markets can turn at any time, had grown a little complacent. Relaxed spending here, relaxed hiring there, a little less scrutiny of the numbers and suddenly, the strategies that made sense in years like ’06, ’07, and ’08 simply would not work in a climate like 2009.

Bullhorn was no exception. I still believe that we fielded a good team in 2008. People worked hard and we accomplished a lot. We had good raw talent, but 2009 required a different level of play all together. We were like freshmen showing up for pre-season practice: we were out of shape and our game had big holes. We simply didn’t have the benefit of the hard lessons of 2009. The hard-scrabble fight of a recession forced us to examine every aspect of our business, question prior decisions and make hard choices.

While there were many sleepless nights along the way, I can’t argue with the results. If the Bullhorn team of 2008 were up against the team we’re fielding in 2010, it wouldn’t even be a fair contest. Even though most of the individual players are the same, we’d outsell, out-service, out-innovate and out-smart them at every turn. Those scrappy freshman are juniors and seniors now, all at the height of their game and all working together as a team. Of course, hindsight makes me wish we had been more disciplined from 2004 – 2008, but I simply have to look ahead at what we’ll be capable of in 2010.

So, here’s where the team made big improvements in 2009:

Visibility and Process – We have always been a metrics driven organization. Our executive team dashboard used to contain 4 key metrics which we reviewed weekly as a team. The metrics were good diagnostics of the business’ health, but they were lagging indicators. It was only clear what had happened, but no one could tell what was going happen. For instance, we would look at Net Promoter Score (NPS) client survey data every quarter. Yet, we had no visibility into the leading indicators of client satisfaction: our Technical Support team’s ticket backlog or response times. So, we could never get ahead of potential customer service issues. We could only react. The same held true for our sales pipeline, or professional services productivity and even our development process.

We spent 2009 tearing into every area of the business, retooling it and making it measurable down to the individual desk level (this was critical). Then we aligned functional, team and individual goals around making big improvements. We changed processes and operational systems in almost every area of the company: R&D, Quality Assurance, Technical Support, Sales, Professional Services and Finance.

Now, when the executive team gets together, we have a whole series of charts, trend data and metrics we use each week that truly give us insight into what’s going on so we can get ahead of problems. It’s amazing the effect it’s had. Even something small, like instituting bi-weekly development demos so the entire company knows what the development team has been working on has had a big impact. It’s brought the company together and given each team much greater visibility on where we’re headed.

Culture and Team – we spent much of 2009 thinking about our culture. What makes a person a true fit for the Bullhorn team? What are the raw attributes of our best employees that make us win in the marketplace? Integrity, intelligence and hard work are obvious. What company wouldn’t value these things? The five core values that truly capture our culture are not so obvious. We have spent the past 5 years refining the core values list and I’m sure we’re not done yet, but my team feels more investment and ownership of the values than ever before and that’s a true sign that they capture who we are, rather than what we wish we were.

In 2009, we held up a measuring stick to our entire employee base on the five core values: Passion, Impact, Energizing, Edge and Accountability. We rewarded those that stacked up well on that score and were very candid with those that didn’t. We had always stressed candid feedback, but in-depth leadership training for every manager and supervisor made the message hit home. Managers dug deep and had some very tough conversations with those that weren’t measuring up. Ultimately, that candor helped people understand where they stood at the end of the day so they could adjust – and most did. As a result, the entire company is performing at a much higher level. And, we have a strong template for hiring and measuring our employees throughout the year.

We also spent a lot of energy balancing resources. We had grown quickly since 2004 and we had team sizes that didn’t necessarily align with the market. For instance, we were winning enterprise deals, but our resource allocation was geared to small and mid-size clients. We needed to segment our sales, account management and service staff to better service our entire client-base. Getting the mix of resources aligned to fit the market was an important step in getting our footing right for the next phase of growth.

Listening – the entire organization has tuned into the client much more than ever before. We’ve always been ahead of the curve here with things like Bullhorn Brainstorm and our use of NPS, but 2009 made us redouble our efforts. We knew that the economy was creating tremendous pressure for our clients and they themselves were in the process of changing and restructuring. We could either be seen as vendors or partners. We chose the latter and carved out resources dedicated to helping clients gain greater adoption of the system and conducting Quarterly Business Reviews (QBR’s) to help us stay close to our client’s goals as their strategies evolve. In the end, the organization has deepened its relationships with its clients and that will no doubt yield dividends as the market picks up in the years to come.

Innovation – 2009 was a year where we got serious about innovating. We’ve always invested a lot into R&D, but we really turned the heat up in 2009. We made the bet that every one else would be in hibernation mode, just trying to survive. And, we could really lead the market if we invested into the down turn. Not only did we increase our investment in our core product offerings, but we also wanted to invest in truly innovative initiatives. So we created a whole new R&D team dedicated solely to creating new products and services. That team is probably as big as the entire R&D team of our next largest competitor. The pay off of this investment will be big. We’ll be launching the first new product offering into beta in Q1. We had a very small alpha test in December and the early returns have been incredible. This team will continue to help Bullhorn lead the staffing and recruiting market in 2010 and beyond.

On to The 2010 Season
And we won’t stop refining our game in 2010. There’s a lot of work left to bring up our skills across the board. Every functional team will be growing in 2010. Adding resources while preserving and improving quality will be a challenge in of itself. And, just as we leveraged the new found discipline we gained from the dotcom bust during the years of expansion, we’ll leverage what we learned in 2009 into 2010 and 2011. While I don’t know if the wind will be at our backs in 2010, I do know that we’ll be a better company for having trained so hard in 2009.

Bring it on!