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.

The worst enemy of good analysis is bad data. As the old adage goes, garbage in equals garbage out. No matter how diligent the members of your team (sales, recruiting, finance, etc.) are, given enough time, data entry errors always creep in, which means your reports will become increasingly inaccurate, and you will begin to make bad decisions about your business.

But this does not have to be the case. Outlined below are three concrete steps you can take as a manager or owner to improve the data that drives your ability to make good decisions.

Step 1. Pick Your Battles
You have a ton of data, but most of it doesn’t matter for tracking the key performance indicators (KPIs) that drive your business. Don’t ask your team to spend time meticulously maintaining information that doesn’t ultimately and tangibly drive performance.

To pick your battles with data entry (which is what you’re really fighting), start with this quick checklist:
• Identify the important values and activities
• Don’t ask your team to do any more than the minimum
• Start with KPIs that have a quick and visible payback for the team

Step 2. Make Data Quality a KPI
If you plan to compete on analytics, then data quality is a performance driver. In a weekly review with your sales rep you might say: “Hey John, great job placing those 2 candidates last week, but I noticed you have 3 data errors that are impacting your performance metrics this week already. I need you to clean those up today.”

Use errors in the indicators you selected from point 1 above as a negative when evaluating performance.

Among our clients, we tend to see that the majority of data errors are relatively quick fixes: a mis-typed salary range on a job, a missing end date on a job, a misplaced decimal on a fee arrangement, etc. The typical staffing firm has data errors on 60% of their job orders. (That is a lot of errors!)

Step 3. Fix It With Smart Guesses
If your average placement is $20k and you have a single Job Order in your pipeline worth $2M, you know that something is wrong. Or if a pay rate for a contract job is blank, you know that the job isn’t going to pay at 100% margin. So what can you do about it?

Fix this with a good guess. For example, take your average margin and the value of the Job Order, or if you’ve done enough business with that client, you can take their average margin or if not, the average margin for your collective client base.

Think you can do this in Excel? Probably, assuming that you are good with Excel and have the time. Could you write a few rules down that you could delegate to an admin to do every week? Probably, as long as there aren’t any anomalies. Think someone could write software to do this in an automated fashion, with better precision, available on demand? We do too.

Imperfect data should not prevent you from being analytical. Use this 3-step approach to get some quick wins and get on the analytics band wagon.

Placement to payment is broken
The placement to payment process runs from placement to time and expense tracking and approval, through to the time you get paid and the time you pay (ie: accounting and payroll.)  Few firms today have completely automated this.  Several big gaps exist.

1. It’s not the 1970’s anymore
Believe it or not, most staffing firms still have paper timecards and expense reports, and I think everyone would agree that’s a very antiquated approach and something that just doesn’t make sense anymore in today’s online, 24 x7 world.  Paper timecards and expense reports create a slow, manual, costly, error prone process.  One issue or mistake in the collection, reconciliation and data entry into your accounting and payroll systems can significantly derail or stop invoicing or payroll.

2. The dots aren’t connected
Most staffing firms aren’t making a complete connection between their ATS and these systems.  Data has to be manually entered and reentered and that again is slow, costly and error prone. And even if you are on what are supposed to be integrated front to back systems, there can frequently be functions that aren’t 100% automated.

3. Staff can’t answer questions
Without an automated placement to payment process front-line sales and recruiting staff can’t easily answer the following questions:
- What’s the status of my timecard?
- Where’s my check?
- When should we expect that invoice?
So they have to loop someone in from the finance time to search for answers, sometimes by digging through stacks of paper records.  Not only is this inefficient, but it damages relationships with candidates and clients.

4. Front to back shouldn’t hold you back
If you are on a front to back system today, you may not be using the best tools for the job.  Your ATS won’t be the easiest to use, or the most effective as helping you place great candidates, nor will you be using industry leading solutions for payroll and accounting from companies like Intuit, Microsoft, ADP or Paychex.
If you aren’t using the best stuff out there, particularly for sales and recruiting, then you are potentially not getting or filling as many jobs orders as possible.  And you are locked into a solution that doesn’t give you flexibility to change accounting or payroll, nor can it grow as your firm does.   There really is no need to sacrifice though.

Enter Bullhorn Time and Expense
Bullhorn developed a new module to close these placement to payment process gaps so that recruitment firms can reduce costs, move faster and improve customer service.   Bullhorn Time and Expense extends our recruiting software platform,  automates online time tracking, expense reports, and approvals, while integrating with the best accounting and payroll systems available.

Bullhorn Time and Expense can help you by:
1. Saving up to 75% of your processing costs of timecards and expense reports -  For example, Bullhorn Time and Expense user DeWinter Consulting  saved more than half of the annual cost of a full time head to administer timecards, expense reports, invoicing and payroll.
2. Automating time and expense tracking – With online tracking and approvals you can automate this process, and ensure it’s completed easily and in a timely fashion.
3. Providing pinpoint accuracy in billing and payroll –  By having online time and expense data automatically connected with payroll and accounting systems like QuickBooks, Dynamics Great Plains, ADP and Paychex you can eliminate mistakes that can occur with duplicate data entry.  That means you can bill and pay on time, with 100% accuracy every time.
4. Improving client service – Sales and recruiting have access to online reports to easily answer questions about timecards, expense reports, invoices and payroll.  And this means your team can deliver great candidate and client service that not only will help you keep the customers you have and but will make it easier to win new business as well.

To learn more about how Bullhorn Time and Expense works check out the press release, see a demo on bullhorn.com, or drop me a note in the comments at the bottom of the post.

Google recently released their Correlate tool, which aggregates all the search terms Google users enter in and looks for trends around the other terms used at the same time. If you enter “ATS”, you will see what searches correlate tightly with Applicant Tracking Systems. You might be surprised by the results:

As you can see, the #6 term searched for in conjunction with Applicant Tracking Systems is “vlookup excel“. In fact, 3 of the top 10 searches are Excel terms! This indicates that ATS users are trying to manage their data using Excel spreadsheets. And they are having trouble doing it because they are asking Google for help.

At InsightSquared, we have spoken with hundreds of staffing and recruiting firms about how they can use analytics to run their business more efficiently. Many of the decision makers at these firms were using Excel when they probably should have been using something more sophisticated, like a reporting tool. Based on our experience, here are 5 signals that indicate you may have graduated from Excel and should think about a reporting tool so you can keep an eye on your business.

 1. You Have Over 100K Rows Of Data

Excel 2003 and older can only handle up to 65,536 rows. Excel 2007 and later can handle up to a million in theory, but you better have awesome hardware. I would recommend looking for a real reporting suite once you get past 100K rows of data. That may seem like a lot, but it’s not. Consider this:

5 employees * 50 actions per day * 250 work days in a year * 2 years of data = 125,000 rows

So, if you have 5 or more employees you are probably starting to outgrow Excel even for basic activity analysis.

2. You Are Analyzing More Than Two Data Types

The above example was for just activity analysis.

What if you also want to analyze:

• Revenue data
• Job orders
• Candidates
• Employees
• Clients
• …more?

The effect of adding more input data is multiplicative: working with 50k rows of activity and 10k rows of revenue in Excel will behave more like 500k rows, not 60k. By the time you get to the third data type, your spreadsheet will be so complex that you’ll spend more time troubleshooting it than running your business.

3. You Are Using Vlookups and Sumifs

Excel has a lot of functions — 329 functions in Excel 2003, and 341 functions in Excel 2007. You’ll need heavy use of these if you want to aggregate and analyze big tables of data.  The following are the most relevant for reporting on business data:

• VLOOKUP() vs HLOOKUP()
• SUMIF() vs SUMIFS() vs SUM(IF())
• GETPIVOTDATA()

If you don’t know what all of those are, don’t worry! That means you’re normal. It also means you’ve probably outgrown Excel for your analysis needs. Yes, you could learn these functions and “program” in Excel to get it done, but…don’t you have a day job?

4. Your Data Is Not Spotless

In a one-person business if there’s a fishy data point you can spot and fix it yourself. The overall quantity of data is low, plus you did all the deals yourself. As the business grows, that is not so easy. Bad data will get lost in the sea of numbers. And since you didn’t do the deal yourself, you are less likely to spot the abnormality. As you add more data, and inevitably more mistakes, the effect on your reporting begins to have exponentially bad repercussions.

For example, we see these types of errors all the time:

• Zeroes or empty cells
• Mis-attributions of activities/deals
• 20% instead of 0.20%, or $90,000 per hour instead of $90,000 per year

These kinds of errors can single-handedly render your averages and analysis useless.  If you can’t scan a spreadsheet and recognize or validate the numbers yourself, you have outgrown Excel and you need a reporting system that can algorithmically detect errors for you.

5. You Spend Your Saturdays Updating Spreadsheets

Excel is wonderful for ad-hoc analysis. You can get to an answer once in minutes. However, once you start updating a spreadsheet each week, you will notice these growing pains:

• Data needs to be exported, imported, and recalculated
• Tables get longer, so references to them need to be re-defined
• New names get added, so inclusion/exclusion filters need to be redone

Invariably, something breaks and you’ll spend hours troubleshooting. Or even worse — you will fail to notice a mistake or error, meaning your analysis will be flawed, which will cause you to make bad business decisions. Imagine firing someone because you overlooked updating a formula.

If you are creating a “living” report, you can save yourself both time and risk by using reporting software where you can bake the report once and have updates happen automatically.

To learn more about running your business with analytics, read Bullhorn’s Brief on how staffing firms are leveraging reporting and analytics to make better business decisions.

Check out the Bullhorn Marketplace to learn more about InsightSquared, a Bullhorn Marketplace reporting partner.

PS. Thanks goes to @SueMarks for the inspiration for 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.

Clearly, our focus now should be on helping neighbors and other communities recover. But as I helplessly watched floods sweep away the businesses of friends in Vermont I wondered, might the widespread adoption of software-as-a-service ease recovery from this and future disasters?

Anyone running their business with cloud-based software like Bullhorn, Google Apps, or NetSuite can get back to their business information exactly where they left off once power and Internet access return. Or even sooner now that SaaS apps can be accessed via smartphones. Employees on the road or working from other offices remain fully productive regardless of the situation at headquarters. In contrast, customer lists, order information, accounting data and any other business information managed via servers on the premises may be lost for good.

The same holds true for consumers. Treasured family pictures stored with Snapfish and personal financial information with Mint will still be there. Of course these things represent just a fraction of what is lost, but are still no doubt meaningful.

Some might counter that we’ve just concentrated the business continuity risk into a few huge data centers so that if a disaster hits one of them then thousands of businesses will be taken out at one time. But last week’s events, which hammered data centers up and down the East Coast, proved that they are well-prepaired. For instance, Bullhorn’s data center has multiple, redundant internet and power connections as well as several stand-by diesel generators with thousands of gallons of fuel for on-site back-up power. Not to mention back-up routines and an ops staff larger than even our biggest customers could support on their own.

So while macroeconomic uncertainty still tops business leaders’ list of worries, recent disasters remind us that the age-old perils still exist. Hopefully Matt gets power back soon and can move operations back inside. That is, until it starts raining frogs and the plague of locusts hits.

In response to this feedback, we have just released the first of what will be a series of new structured help articles and videos that we call role-based learning. Role-based learning is content organized by your role, and we have published the first one for Bullhorn Administrators. We’ll have more soon for other roles including Sales, and Recruiting.

Administrator Role-Based Learning
The Administrator role-based learning guide is like a “curriculum” or “table of contents” relevant to admins. While you can still search for information, this outline guides you through the Bullhorn content so new admins can learn about everything from what their role is, to understanding what departments and private labels are, how to customize a record, adding a new user, requesting a feature, and getting information about Marketplace and Reach.

The admin role-based learning encompasses a number of big changes, beyond an outline of content.

- We overhauled nearly 250 Admin articles flushing out the details about specific features.
- For each article we identified which Product editions (Team, Corporate or Enterprise) the content is relevant to, any specific feature limitations, requirements to use the specific features, and when you need to engage Bullhorn Support.
- We relabeled the content so articles are better named and now grouped into sections.
- We created shorter YouTube like videos to cover major features thereby replacing the existing Admin eLearning.

Our goal is to make information easier to find and help you do your job faster and more effectively. Take a look at the admin role-based learning and tell me what you think. To access the admin role-based learning guide click “Resource Center” from the Support menu in Bullhorn, then click the Administrator button in the upper left corner.

Once you check it out, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what you think of this first role-based learning guide, what you love and what we can continue to improve.  Please let me know what you think in the comments below.

Jennifer de los Santos
Manager, Customer Information Services

For those of you who could not make the #truBoston event, we collected video, Twitter, and blog content that captures many of the great recruiting and staffing discussions.

VIDEO from the event

#truBoston – Future For Recruiting Part 1 | Top Trends for Candidates, Companies, & Tools	#truBoston – Future For Recruiting Part 2 | Creating Social Content to Attract Job Candidates	#truBoston – Future For Recruiting Part 3 | Correlation Between Social Recruiting & Candidates	#truBoston – Future For Recruiting Part 4 | What Gets Good Job Candidates in the Door?

#truBoston – Social Candidate Sourcing Using Twitter, Foursquare, & Empire Avenue	#truBoston – UPS Social Media Recruiting Case Study Part 1 – TMP Worldwide	#truBoston – UPS Social Media Recruiting Case Study Part 2 – TMP Worldwide

TWEETS from the event

Bill Boorman, Mike Vangel, Steve Levy, Max Heywood, Johnny Campbell, Melissa Kaplan, Kerry Noone, Jeff Moore, Geoff Webb, Meghan M. Biro, Bullhorn Live, Bullhorn Reach, Art Papas and Steven Duque on Twitter.

BLOGS from the event

Max Heywood on #truBoston
Bill Boorman – The Recruiting Unblog on #truBoston
Geoff Webb on #truBoston
Leanne Chase on #truBoston
Tom Bolt on #truBoston
Martin Couzins on #truBoston
Photos from #truBoston

Excerpt from Steven Duque’s blog entry:
“Recruiters often forget the “social” part of social media. During his session on UPS’ social recruiting efforts, TMP Worldwide’s Mike Vangel agreed: “Respect for dignity as a person is often lost in the automation of social recruiting.” In a similar vein, recruiting veteran Steve Levy, an endless fount of funny but poignant sayings at #TRUBoston, added, “The best unused social media tools are the phone call and the handshake.” We at Bullhorn agree.”    Read more here.

So what does this mean for recruiters using Bullhorn?
It means that candidates can choose to Apply with LinkedIn, and send you their LinkedIn profile to start their application, in lieu of a traditional resume.   Now candidates may like this because they feel their combination of work history can now be presented with their recommendations, and that this may be a better way to start the application process.   Plus if a candidate chooses this approach, they also instantly receive guidance on how they are connected via LinkedIn to people that work at your firm.

What’s great about this too is that if you are a Bullhorn ATS/CRM or Bullhorn Reach user, you can take advantage of this today.  Here’s how it works.

1. You publish your jobs to job boards and social networks via Bullhorn Reach.  If you are using the Bullhorn ATS/CRM, you can import them to Bullhorn Reach with just a single click.
2. A job seeker finds a job on say, Simply Hired, and when they click through that link, they are taken to your specific job listing on Bullhorn Reach.
3. On that page they can choose to contact you via Bullhorn Reach by hitting the “Let’s Talk” button. At that point, they can either manually complete a form and upload a resume or choose  “Apply with LinkedIn.”
4. If they choose the “Apply with LinkedIn” button, a version of their LinkedIn profile is sent to your account and you will get an email with a link to it.
5. And, if you are using the Bullhorn ATS/CRM, when a candidate uses the “Apply with LinkedIn” button, that action also gets captured as a web response against the job, and the candidate profile in the ATS gets created automatically using the data that the candidate provided via “Apply with LinkedIn.”

Pretty cool, right?  We’re very excited to be partnering with LinkedIn on this from the start, and looking forward to seeing how recruiters are going to take advantage of this new capability going forward.

You can read more at the Bullhorn Reach blog:

What do you think about “Apply with LinkedIn?”  Let us know in the comments.