During Bullhorn’s 11 years of helping recruiters put people to work, we’ve spent lots of time developing technology to find the right candidates in their candidate databases. So have others, because candidate search is a critical step towards filling almost any job. Despite all the effort, few recruiters would say the problem has been licked. However, our upcoming Winter 2012 release makes a big leap forward in Candidate Search. If you’ve ever wished finding candidates in your resume database was faster, easier or just plain better, then read on.
Why is candidate search so hard?
There is a big, gnarly terminology problem when it comes to finding candidates. The terms you need to search for may not actually be the terms that you see on a resume or job description.Here’s an example from the world of technical staffing, where roles are are awash in lingo and skills are constantly changing. Heard of “Java” and “SQL”? They’re so 2005. It’s all about Ruby, Python, Mongo, Grails and EC2 now. Worse, many of these technologies have aliases. A developer experienced with the database technology MongoDB, may not put MongoDB any where in their resume, rather it will appear as “Mongo”, “NoSQL”, or “sharding.”
Search terminology is a big problem for recruiters in any specialized industry. Especially those new to recruiting. They’d better be highly trained in the art of b.s. if they want to survive. Unless you’ve spent a year or two with an industry, it’s tough to be successful, because you don’t know the lingo. The only way to hang around long enough to get that experience is to be great at building a personal rapport, make lots of phone calls, have thick skin when people get annoyed and maybe be lucky. No doubt this tough learning curve partly explains our industry’s costly employee turnover.
Introducing the next generation of Candidate Search
Our new Candidate Search tames the terminology beast and helps recruiters scale the learning curve. It studies your job description, an ideal candidate or your initial guess at keywords and suggests terms to help you pinpoint the ideal candidate.
How do we do that? We’ve analyzed more than 5 million resumes, identified keyword relationships and built a Learning Library that provides suggested terms to help you complete your search quickly.Here’s a simple example, searching for a staff accountant. I start with a few key terms from the job, such as “accounting” and “payroll.” Our new Candidate Search then suggests that I also include “general ledger”, “accounts payable”, and “balance sheet” because these have proven to help find the right candidates. And the Learning Library is futureproof since it gets smarter the more it is used. As the terminology evolves, Bullhorn Candidate Search adapts.
Recruiters no longer have to worry when a hiring manager throws out a skill they’ve never heard before. Chances are, others have and already figured out how to find the right candidates. And for the new recruiter who is still learning the lingo? Bullhorn’s new Candidate Search flattens the learning curve so they can succeed faster.
There’s a lot more in our new Candidate Search as well, such as dragging and dropping keywords to visually build your search, personalized views that let you search and view results just the way you want, and team collaboration that makes it easy to share knowledge and expertise across your company. We also make it easy for a recruiter to search their entire candidate database — resumes, notes, flags, dates — all at once. Search grandmasters can create complex Boolean queries as well. We’re in beta right now, so stay tuned as we put the finishing touches in place and begin rolling it out soon.
I’ve shared a few more thoughts on the challenge of search and our new capabilities in the video below.
This is a question we get asked often here at Bullhorn, so I figured I would take some time and provide a detailed response to those of you that are curious.
A Brief Rewind
Back when Bullhorn was ramping up in the early 2000’s, Internet Explorer was far and away the dominant web browser. This was especially true in the corporate world, where it held well over a 90% market share. At that same time, Apple’s market share of computer operating systems was less than 2%.
With this in mind, we developed a number of advanced capabilities leveraging Internet Explorer-specific technology. This made sense because it enabled new capabilities for our clients and helped them automate processes that previously were complex and time consuming- all via the dominant web browser. It was simply the right thing to do for our customers at the time.
On the mobile front, smartphones were just taking off. In response to this, Bullhorn jumped out ahead with a mobile web that launched (believe it or not) in 2003.
Prioritizing Demands in Today’s Rapidly Evolving Market
Fast forward to today, and there’s no question that the browser and device market has fragmented dramatically with a raft of great alternatives. As we continue to innovate and build out new product and services, it’s vital that we accommodate changing market dynamics and prioritize things that deliver the most immediate and valuable impact on our global customer base- all while continuing to advance recruiting agency-specific software capabilities.
Apple’s share of desktops and laptop operating systems has now quadrupled to 10%. And mobile website usage is surging. Before you know it, the majority of people browsing the web will spend more time on a mobile device than on a desktop or laptop.
In response to these trends, we’ve made sure Bullhorn works great on Mac using virtualization software including, VMWare Fusion, Parellels, or VirtualBox. We have many customers using Bullhorn like this all day, every day. We actually provided a sneak peak of our next generation mobile app at the Staffing Industry Executive Forum last month. This new capability is optimized for modern smartphones and tablets, and also works in any modern browser. You’ll hear much more about this soon.
But what about Internet Explorer?
Much of the recent feedback regarding Internet Explorer is that IE 7 and IE 8 are slower than other browsers, but IE 9 (just released a few days back) has actually caught up and passed the other browsers. Bullhorn fully supports IE9, so we encourage you to check it out.
As I mentioned earlier, it’s all about prioritization. Our early leveraging of Internet Explorer makes supporting other browsers more complex and time consuming. To support multiple browsers, many features and custom integrations will need to go through vigorous development and testing. We are tackling this, but it will take time.
In the meantime, as we create new features in Bullhorn, we are building them to work across all operating systems, browsers, and devices. This will ensure smoother transition for these features when we support other browsers down the road.
The topic of email and how it works to keep business flowing for staffing and recruiting professionals is an obsession here at Bullhorn. We are laser focused on helping recruiters maximize their effectiveness, while constantly assessing how Bullhorn compares to alternatives. It sounds obvious to say that email and communication are important. I mean, of course they are important. So what? Email is of vital importance to the staffing industry because on the other end of that email is either a candidate or a client. Each and every day, the use of email is a critical lubricant in the chain of revenue generation. If your email doesn’t work, you don’t make money – it’s that simple.
Bullhorn pioneered integrating email directly with ATS/CRM and was, in fact, one of the first webmail clients. With more than 10 years in the email business, we have been innovators in this area, while developing extensive domain expertise. We had webmail before there was Gmail. Along the way, we’ve learned a lot about email. We know how to scale it and design technology to work with email from a staffing perspective – we know what’s important about email, how to simplify the workflows around it, and how to make sure to preserve its value for a staffing business.
As we further explore email and its direct impact on staffing and recruiting firms, consider the following points that ring true for me and match Bullhorn’s product philosophy:
Email is the property of staffing firms.
With client and candidate activity so critical, data should be captured automatically.
Email history contains valuable context about your firm’s interactions with its partners and candidates.
The limits of Outlook as an ATS
Bullhorn’s biggest competitor is Outlook itself. Many firms, especially smaller ones, use Outlook as their ATS and CRM system. Each recruiter/sales person has a fantastically complex Outlook folder structure, complete with various workflows to keep track of business. The fact is, a single recruiter can be very efficient since they are in complete command of their data.
Outlook is designed to be a personal email management tool. It works great to manage messages and contacts for an individual, but trying to use it in a team environment as a shared database of knowledge just doesn’t work. You simply can’t run a business where everyone has their own database and workflow, right? No business should tolerate this.
Larger firms have established process and have lots of software to manage data and business workflow. I’m willing to bet the problem is that all of their best data is stuck in Outlook. That’s right…even at large firms with disciplined IT and process, recruiters and sales people squirrel data into Outlook – important data that is totally invisible to the firm.
Email and the associated information it contains around contacts and business is the property of the firm and one of its most valuable assets. But when firms continue to use Outlook as their ATS, they are leaving that most valuable asset in a completely vulnerable state. So why would anyone do this? They shouldn’t, and with our updated support for Outlook, Exchange, and other email systems, they don’t have to.
Plugins don’t actually plug any holes.
Many of our competitors have looked at the passion recruiters have for using Outlook and the need to integrate their ATS with Outlook by creating an “Outlook Plugin” – desktop software that is downloaded and installed into Outlook. Typically, you get functions to share data with Outlook, contacts, calendar items, email, etc. The more sophisticated variants of plugins also employ syncing technology. However, there are many weaknesses in this approach:
The firm’s data is at risk. Plugins allow users to grant the business access to important data that would otherwise never leave Outlook. Not only does the user have to install desktop software, but in most cases, the user has to take complex manual steps either to configure the plugin correctly to transfer data or, worse, move data from Outlook to the backend system for each item.
Business owners have limited access to proprietary data. Plugins can prevent the business owner from getting access to their proprietary data – the data that is their property.
Recruiters are given less flexibility. Plugins limit recruiters from working anywhere by tying them to their PCs. This lack of flexibility subsequently limits their productivity and potential business opportunities at the same time.
They are overly complex and hard to use. Outlook is not a simple application. Overloading it with additional screens, columns in the inbox, and dialog boxes can be overwhelming to a staff that is under pressure to perform.
I consider myself a fairly savvy user of technology. However, once I become familiar with the way an application functions, it can be very disconcerting to have anything change, especially software that I use every single day. If that’s true for me – someone who has immersed himself in the inner workings of technology and routinely installs new programs – imagine how a stressed-out recruiter would react to the myriad of new buttons that suddenly appear in a once familiar app? Why would anyone want to force users to change an app they know well and are comfortable with, unless it was absolutely necessary? It’s not necessary, so why do it?
Activity Tracking
The core business value from our approach is what we term “automatic activity tracking.”
All activity with any contact in the database is recorded in the database automatically, while the system provides simple ways to review or report on that data. This covers appointments (interviews), email, and notes as well as the associated contacts for each of these items. Bullhorn’s automatic activity tracking does not require any manual intervention from end-users or any desktop software installation or configuration. It ensures that the business keeps the data it rightfully owns.
There are no specific workflows that need to be followed to record activity in the database – no ongoing effort at all. It just happens as if by magic, automatically, behind-the-scenes. I think you get it. If you use a mail system like Exchange, a simple-one time configuration on the mail server ensures that all business-critical correspondence with your firm will be recorded in Bullhorn, from any device or client.
Activity Center
We’ve provided robust activity tracking via Bullhorn Mail for years. It’s one of the reasons customers love Bullhorn so much. We’ve also enabled users to work with Outlook, Exchange, or any email system they want while still having the speed and power of the Bullhorn ATS. Most recently, we updated our support for users who want to use Bullhorn with Outlook/Exchange or other email systems. We’re now providing the same elegant simplicity and power of activity tracking to enable the Bullhorn ATS and CRM to deeply integrate with and work alongside Outlook, or any other mail client and any other mail server. Staffing and recruiting firms with mail systems like Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes/Domino or even Gmail now have deep integration with the Bullhorn ATS and CRM.
But the secret sauce is in how we do it: everything is tracked automatically. We wanted to ensure that the fundamental rights that an organization has to keep their email contacts and communications are preserved automatically, so every communication and activity gets captured without any extra effort from the user. No special buttons to press or decision to be made – it all just happens. Use your mail system and apps like Outlook just as you always have. Use Bullhorn for managing jobs and clients, and finding, tracking and placing candidates.
A key ingredient in the secret sauce is the flexibility: you can access your email anywhere so you can work even when you’re on the go – and all of your data is still tracked automatically.
This means that the recruiter’s previous responsibility to figure out how to choose to track messages with clients and candidates is eliminated. With ~40% turnover in the industry, this means that if you are an owner or executive at a staffing firm, you no longer need to worry if a recruiter leaves. All of their information stays, so their replacement can pick up exactly where the former employee left off. Your client and candidate relationships don’t vanish if someone leaves. They stay with you where they rightfully belong.
Now you are probably saying, “How do you do that without an Outlook plugin?”
We provide a rich new capability in Bullhorn called the Activity Center, which makes it easy to identify new contacts or candidates that need to be processed into Bullhorn. There is no Outlook retraining since we don’t add any new gadgets into Outlook. We provide cutting edge tools in our web client to take almost all of the effort out of managing data.
The best way to understand how this works is to watch this video. In it, you’ll see how a recruiter can use Outlook (or any email client) and Bullhorn side by side. Take a look and let me know what you think in the comments section below.
The new Bullhorn status site is a major upgrade to the way Bullhorn communicates about system and service status. A few months ago the VP of Infrastructure, Chris Lalonde, blogged about the rollout of this new feature. I want to remind Bullhorn customers, especially the IT and support folks out there, of what’s special about the new Bullhorn status site and how they can use it to keep up-to-date with maintenance and other service related events.
The most significant upgrade is that the new status site is hosted by a 3rd party, Watchmouse. This means that the metrics about uptime and performance are not produced, edited or presented by Bullhorn. Not that you don’t trust us (of course!) but having a neutral 3rd party testing our site quality shows Bullhorn’s strong commitment to operational transparency. It also helps the Bullhorn ops team by separating the status environment from our own infrastructure, giving us confidence in the data, and access should our own systems be inaccessible.
Watchmouse has presence in datacenters throughout the globe. From these testing stations they test both the network and host performance. This data is the “current performance” metric you see on the status site. Let’s dive in to understand what these metrics tell us. Network performance is the time the data spends traversing the internet from our datacenter to your browser. Many variables can impact network time and this can be a significant contributor to poor performance. One thing to note about how the “current performance” metric is calculated is that it is a snapshot of performance from the most recently queried testing station. This may be a station in India, in which case you may see that “current performance” approaches 1 second, which is acceptable performance from that location. As the service cycles through the set of testing sites, this number will oscillate depending on proximity to our datacenter. Host performance is how long it takes our servers to produce the data. Added together, host and network time is biggest slice of the performance pie. There are other factors, such as the client network and/or the power of the client computer, but what you are seeing on http://status.bullhorn.com is a very useful picture of the overall health of the Bullhorn service.
The other very useful feature of the new status site is that all messages are available as an RSS feed: http://status.bullhorn.com/feed/9639. Many RSS readers will be able to sniff out the feed from the main status page, so you can just use http://status.bullhorn.com as your feed URL. Or you can use the URL that links directly to the feed itself (above). Most of you are probably using Outlook. This is good because you can configure Outlook to treat new RSS posts as incoming email, generating a new mail alert and, even better, you can apply rules to these posts. This can help you tailor your feed so you only get notified for items of interest to you. For example, if your company is on CLS4, you will want to get status updates about service issues and maintenance related to this cluster and you probably want status updates that affect all of Bullhorn. This is easy to do since we publish these status messages with headers that reflect the specific cluster and/or event type:
The new Bullhorn status site is an excellent tool for staying current with service changes to Bullhorn, both planned and unplanned. By using RSS and Outlook to get real time system alerts from Bullhorn, you can be proactive with your employees about events that might affect them.
The crisp sunshine of Las Vegas and the mild daytime temperatures make me wonder why I live in Boston. My wife is dealing with ice dams while I take a break between sessions to soak up the desert sun. The change in scenery has me in a different state of mind; I can take a longer view of Bullhorn, where it’s been and where it’s going. We’ve come a long a way in a short time. We’ve learned a lot through trials and errors. But here at Bullhorn Live and now in our 10th year, I am confident that Bullhorn is the best-of-breed staffing software out there. Watching folks line up at the Bullhorn cyber-cafe to check email and do business (did Sally make that placement?, easy enough to find out) on the web makes me smile as the promise made 10 years ago of a pure web native staffing application bears fruit. These folks haven’t lost a step even though they’re using a different computer many miles from their offices.
But it’s not enough.
We can’t rest on the success that brings us to Las Vegas this week. We still have a lot of work to do. VMS integration, telephony and sms integration, better groupware (check out that new calendar!), faster and more reliable service…these things are my new obsessions. Judging by the response here at the show, we’ve made the right choices. Our customers know what they need from Bullhorn to grow their business. All we have to do is listen.
It’s the final day of the SaaS Summit in San Francisco for me and Jerry Fain (VP of Services). The conference has had some highs and lows. The highs are, of course, the fact that what is assumed to be mainstream methods for doing business on the web, Bullhorn was pioneering nearly 8 years ago. The conference is packed with entrepreneurs trying to get a slice of the rapidly expanding SaaS pie. The themes of the conference are several: “Cloud Computing”, “SaaS Platforms”,”Mashups”. There is aggressive move to ”zero footprint development”, which means you can start your SaaS business and outsource 100% of your infrastructure and your platform. Even though Bullhorn has invested heavily it’s own infrastructure, we will be incrementally adopting these new technologies where they make sense for our business. With Mashups and CloudComp Bullhorn will be able to innovate at an even faster clip since we will be able to adopt technologies from across the web not just ones that we cook up in house.
The lows are the degree to which the legacy software vendors are trying to spin their existing technologies as part of this SaaS revolution. The Microsoft presenter shilled for every single Microsoft product as having some part to play in the SaaS movement. Everything from Vista to Word to the XBOX is proof of Microsoft’s leadership in SaaS. I could hardly suppress my disappointment in this presentation as it exposed how tone-deaf Microsoft has become. Both Oracle and IBM were also in this camp as they tried to include hosting Websphere or Oracle in the SaaS category. These guys are increasingly less relevant since they are providing specific toolsets but not highly evolved business platforms. Bullhorn and SalesForce provide SaaS platforms that are attracting the most customers and developers. For sure these legacy companies will be selling a lot of software over the next few years. But it is obvious to me the the best business and technical minds are migrating to pure SaaS and Bullhorn has been here since 2000.
We are listening. There is no doubt whatsoever from what we see on Brainstorm that the next area of effort for the Bullhorn Engineering team has to be the Bullhorn Calendar. People expect cutting edge functionality from Bullhorn. We have a sophisticated Web 2.0 email client with awesome searching capabilities but the calendar hasn’t been refreshed in some time. It needs to be brought up to the standard we’ve set in the rest of the application. In fact, we’re going to blaze some new territory with our upcoming version of the calendar. I’m throwing down the gauntlet to our UI team to come up with the best calendar app period, better than Outlook, better than Google. Plus it will be even more tightly integrated into the staffing workflow. We’ll have something in beta before the end of the year.
Stay tuned folks. Bullhorn just keeps getting better and better.
We are listening. There is no doubt whatsoever from what we see on Brainstorm that the next area of effort for the Bullhorn Engineering team has to be the Bullhorn Calendar. People expect cutting edge functionality from Bullhorn. We have a sophisticated Web 2.0 email client with awesome searching capabilities but the calendar hasn’t been refreshed in some time. It needs to be brought up to the standard we’ve set in the rest of the application. In fact, we’re going to blaze some new territory with our upcoming version of the calendar. I’m throwing down the gauntlet to our UI team to come up with the best calendar app period, better than Outlook, better than Google. Plus it will be even more tightly integrated into the staffing workflow. We’ll have something in beta before the end of the year. Stay tuned folks. Bullhorn just keeps getting better and better.
So there I am, with two awesome features to demo, the new calendar and Bullhorn IM, and the notebook I’m using slows to crawl. I managed to talk through the features but a picture is worth a thousand words and I feel that part of what folks are expecting is to see the cool new stuff we’re working on. I think, in the end, the vision of where Bullhorn is headed made sense to folks. We’re taking aim at desktop apps and specifically the idea that Outlook can’t be beat. The new calendar will be the first example of what will be a revolution for Bullhorn; when Barry fires up Bullhorn mail to a new customer he won’t have to be defensive about how it’s different than Outlook.
By now I’m sure most of you have seen Bullhorn Brainstorm, the website that allows you to submit features and see how they rank against features submitted by other Bullhornians. We’re going to be adding more content and commentary directly to the Brainstorm website but for now I’m going to use the Product Blog to provide feedback to the users about what we’re seeing on Brainstorm and how it maps up to our near-term development schedule.
Sorting by “This Year” lets me see the most popular features. One that surprised everyone by how quickly it shot to the top is “Attaching Email to Multiple Jobs”. This is a very good idea, simple to implement, and we’ve added it to the list of features we’ll be working on in the next few months.
I can also report that 3 other features are already in development and will be being released over the next few months: “Email Address Auto-complete”, “Infinite scrolling for Email”, and “Fast Inbox Searching”. As you might be able to tell, there’s a theme to these features, which is that they are all email/inbox related. My last blog was all about how we’re going after email as a focus for our technology and these about-to-be-released features are proof that we’re putting our money where our mouth is. A few more top features around email/calendar “Spell check as you go”, “file attachments to appts”, “Invitation email shows up in calendar” are also on the list for future release.
“Tearsheet field on Candidate” is another excellent idea but I bet a lot of you don’t know you can already do this by having your admin user include them in the view layout of the candidate. We have Bullhorn employees scanning Brainstorm and adding comments where features are already implemented in Bullhorn…so read those comments!
I just want to thank all the folks who took the time to add features to Bullhorn Brainstorm. I know you folks are busy but I also know you’re passionate about Bullhorn and want to make it better. We really appreciate your effort. Keep those ideas coming!
About Bullhorn
Bullhorn® web-based software and services improve the way employees
and employers come together. For over ten years our innovations have powered the recruiting and staffing operations of fast-growing start-ups up through the world's largest employment brands.
