Having been a veteran of many such conferences, I always find myself eagerly looking over the agenda and planning out which breakout sessions to attend.  Are you more interested in choosing the best metrics to judge your performance, or are you high on eliminating manual mistakes in the back office?   Which is more important to improve: your pipeline forecasting or your recruiting workflow?   It’s always great to have a sense of where to spend your time during the official conference hours, so you’re building yourself an agenda that’s going to expand your arsenal of tools and catapult you home ready to take on the world again.

Invariably, the value from conferences like Bullhorn Live go beyond than what you learn from Bullhorn and its partners.  The extra value-add is in what you learn from the other attendees.  What connections did you make?  What have they learned?  It’s this exchange of ideas, experiences, and war stories that really makes any user conference so valuable.  Bullhorn Live is no exception.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the session that I’m lucky enough to be moderating: Social Media for Business Growth.  Steven Duque and I have been spreading the word on the advantages using social media for recruiting in our webinar series, but we recognize that there’s always going to be a smidgeon of doubt if you only hear it from us.  So I’m pretty darn psyched that we’re current finalizing a three-person panel of recruiters to give real, concrete examples of how they’re using social media.  How is it working?  What challenges did they first encounter?  What overall effect has it had on their business?  After all, social media is anything but theoretical – it’s all about doing, and why did this work better than that, and accumulating the hey yeah me too connections that grow your sphere of influence and make social media a valuable channel for your sourcing efforts.

We’re all looking forward to seeing you in June!

Here’s a bit more context – we looked at two of the earliest companies using Candidate Search, and looked at their thousands of jobs, submission times, and placement times.  We then compared their submission and placement times for the 5 month period before they used Candidate Search and the 5 month period since they started using Candidate Search, and the results were clear.

The best way to learn about Candidate Search is by watching the demo below.

If you use Bullhorn currently, and haven’t signed up for you free upgrade, you can do so here.  If you don’t use Bullhorn currently, and want to improve your time to submission and time to placement, let us know.

Jonathan Wall:  Tell me about the Bowdoin Group.

Sarah Wachter:  The Bowdoin Group is an executive search firm based in Wellesley, MA.  We have about 45 employees split between a permanent team that focuses on retained executive placements and other permanent placements, and then a contract team of about 12 people that performs IT contract placement.

JW: And what’s your role at the Bowdoin Group?

SW: I am the Research and Data Manager, so I lead the research team that does sourcing and reporting for our retained clients and I’m also kind of the chief fixer.  I do a lot of vendor management, database management, resource strategy, along with employee training and best practices.  Basically, my job is to make everything run as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

JW: Tell me about what kind of searches you historically have conducted using Bullhorn.

SW: We’ve used Advanced Search for our searches.  Everyone at the Bowdoin Group has been responsible for sourcing candidates and entering them into Bullhorn and then retrieving them later. We’ve been in business for more than 16 years, so, as you can imagine there’s quite a lot of candidates in our system.

We’ve made a number of configuration changes, and our data hasn’t always been as consistent as we want it to be. Historically we’ve done a mix of both keyword and Boolean search. I personally trained every new employee on Boolean syntax and search techniques.  And it’s the very structured grammar that Boolean requires that isn’t very intuitive for people to grasp.

JW: What are the benefits you’ve seen by switching to Candidate Search?

SW: Candidate Search is definitely easier to use and a lot prettier.

One of the things we think is great are the suggested keywords.  Having some suggested terms that are related to what I’m already searching for can really help boost our accuracy.   Plus, being able to drag and drop terms, knowing that I don’t have to worry about if I’ve weighted or prioritized the terms correctly, that’s very useful.

Candidate Search knows that if you are in a certain vicinity of terms, you may want to search for a few related terms, and that means we are finding better candidates and not missing some good ones.

When the team saw the new saved searches, they were like “OH MY GOD, this is amazing!”  The ability to save searches and have them on the job and company really saves time.  We have long-term clients that we’ve been working with on a whole variety of openings.   We fill one particular position with them and then 6 months later they come back and they want another person just like that.

In that time period we have put several thousand candidates in to Bullhorn, and now we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.    We go back to that company, we go back to that opening, pull it up, and run the search again.  We can very quickly find the people who were added in the last few months, and we start calling.  That’s tremendously valuable from a business perspective.

We also just surveyed the team recently about how they felt about Candidate Search, and overall they really like it, feel it’s easier to use and love the ability to quickly add additional criteria to a search, as that makes it easy to find exactly what they are looking for.

JW: Tell me about the training and rollout.

SW: When we rolled it out we had training for everyone, but have also recently held some small group trainings and walked through the specific searches they are working on.  There was definitely a bit of “hey this is different,” but once the team spent a bit of time and understood the changes, they’re now like “hey this is better.”

JW:  Do you have any advice for firms that are going to be adopting this?

SW:   Candidate Search is a conceptual shift as far as how to think about search, but once people understand how it works, they really embrace it.   You need to take the time to make sure everyone is trained and productive.   Once you sit down with people and you explain that this is a change in how you are thinking about your search process, it is a lot more intuitive and a lot more straightforward.   If you’re only used to Boolean or keyword searches, you now have something new, where it’s easy to add in related terms, weight and prioritize terms, that you need to wrap your head around.

JW: What do you want to see in Candidate Search in the future?

SW: We’d love to be able to search on years of experience, the way LinkedIn does it.  And we’d love to be able to mark candidates that we’ve already viewed. So you do a search or you did several searches on a particular job opening and as you change your terms the same people are going to start coming up but having them displayed slightly differently, so you know that, hey I already looked at this person, I don’t need to check them again.

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.

Bullhorn’s yearly trends survey found that 88% of recruiters already use LinkedIn. So obviously it has already made its mark. But is it another arrow in the recruiter’s quiver, supplementing older tools? Or will it replace existing technologies? Dan Schawbel and others already wrote obituaries for job boards and the resume. But what about that other go-to recruiting tool, the ATS? If LinkedIn profiles replace resumes and candidates can “Apply with LinkedIn,” will recruiters still need a separate applicant tracking system?

Yes, for at least two important reasons.

History and The Long Tail
The need for a separate ATS only disappears when LinkedIn has a monopoly on candidate profiles. History suggests this is unlikely. Not even the most powerful tech giants won similar degrees of market power. Not IBM in computers, Microsoft in PC software or Netscape with browsers. And none of those companies had a competitor as powerful as Facebook. Instead, online profiles will live across a variety of geographic and industry-specific hosts in addition to LinkedIn such as Xing in Europe, Orkut in Latin America, RenRen in China, or Behance for creative workers. The situation will mirror job boards, where the rise of CareerBuilder and Monster did nothing to crowd out thousands of specialist boards. So most recruiters will still need a system that can work across multiple profile sources. They’ll just want it to integrate nicely with LinkedIn, as Bullhorn does

Beyond Applicant Tracking
Recruiters also rely on software for far more than just storing and searching resumes, and letting applicants apply.   Bullhorn is as much a staffing and recruiting-specific CRM system for managing candidate and client relationships as it is an ATS. Workflow capabilities streamline and automate all the steps involved in filling jobs. Metrics and analytics give managers insight into performance to run the business more intelligently. Providing mobile access, publishing to career portals, supporting billing and financial processes, and on and on.

If anything, the growing importance of data, speed, and automation to the success of staffing and recruiting businesses increases the value of a great software platform.

Do you agree?

Integrating key technologies that your firm leverages, streamlines numerous processes. Many of the technologies you leverage daily rely on the same data points: phone systems, email marketing, time cards, payroll, assessments, and background checks all use data points contained within your CRM/ATS. Integrating those technology vendors results in immediate time savings as each technology pulls the data the respective technology needs to do its job for you. Firms who integrate their technologies realize cost savings via the elimination of data entry errors, exporting & uploading of various data lists, and creating bi-directional information availability.

SkillStorm, a Bullhorn customer focused on IT & Engineering Staffing as well as Consulting & Outsourcing, continually looks internally to improve their processes. When SkillStorm replaced their suite of background check and drug screen providers with Talentwise (a Bullhorn Marketplace partner who provides a pre-built integration directly into Bullhorn), they immediately realized $10,000 in direct savings.

Additional time savings came via process improvement by having an integrated background check provider, which eliminated the rekeying of information into disparate systems which had previously been collected via fax, mail & overnight shipping. Prior to leveraging Talentwise, a dedicated resource manually entered candidate information into various background check & drug screening provider systems. Once the background check results were returned, the resource then relayed results back to the appropriate recruiter.

By selecting a single national integrated solution, recruiters, regardless of the location of the recruiter, candidate and client, can kick off their own background check without keying redundant information into Talentwise. In addition, they reduce the risk for the clients by providing quality, screened candidates. According to the Employment Screening: Mitigating Risk, Driving Down Cost Aberdeen report (which I highly recommend reading) quality of hire increases by 7% year-over-year when organizations employ candidate screening.

Using Talentwise’s streamlined background check system, they are informed of the results within Bullhorn directly. Talentwise relays results to SkillStorm 15% faster than the previous vendors, and by eliminating a bottleneck in the process, SkillStorm places candidates 20% faster than before. Aberdeen reports that companies like SkillStorm who have a fully integrated ATS and background check system are “79% more likely to be extremely satisfied with their screening solutions”. In addition, “the integration helps improve the efficiency of the hiring process by reducing time and cost to fill, and improves satisfaction with the screening solution itself”. As you see in Figure 4 from the Aberdeen Report, integration itself improves recruiters’ satisfaction by over 10%, while reducing time to fill by nearly 3% and reducing cost per hire by 4.5%.

As SkillStorm continues to move forward, all of the background checks pass/fail results are available within Bullhorn, allowing recruiters to quickly eliminate candidates who have previously failed background or drug screening. The long-term time and cost savings of having background check information available to their recruiters will incrementally continue to increase.

To learn more about the Talentwise integration with Bullhorn visit http://marketplace.bullhorn.com/talentwise.

So please take our very brief survey and let us know what you think. It should take you two minutes tops.
And when these training webinars are ready in the next few weeks, they’ll be posted  on the Bullhorn Resource Center Thanks in advanced for giving us your input, and we look forward to seeing you online at one of our upcoming sessions.

- Jonathan
Bullhorn product marketing