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:

Cluster: (all, cls2,cls4,cls5,cls6,cls7,cls20)
Type: (performance, availability, maintenance, release)
Service: (all, email, searching, reporting, api, mobile, calendar)
Status: (resolved, researching, scheduled, completed)
 

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.

Instructions for configuring Outlook RSS to link to Bullhorn’s status site.

Bilton’s basic thesis is that people are dramatically changing how they want to consume information. They are no longer satisfied with being part of a demographic for whom information is packaged in a magazine, daily paper, or cable TV schedule. They want their information personalized, and more importantly that personalization will not be based settings that they explicitly configure (filling out those annoying profiles on a web site) but implicit things, like the influence that their friends have on them (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc.).

What he means is that in the future the collective filtering you can get by following others or by sharing articles you find interesting with people in your network will be a far more powerful means of organizing information than subscribing to Time magazine or filling out a set of criteria on an Indeed or Monster subscription. He has a great example of a friend’s daughter who borrows his computer to read the news and then sits there reading through her Facebook feed, which contains a mixture of personal updates and links to news articles, blog posts, videos, and other content. To this 18-year-old girl, that is the news.

It’s a pretty powerful thesis. So while today you can see what the most emailed stories are in the NY Times, in the future you’ll see which articles your friends (or your friends’ friends) are emailing about, giving you a more focused lens on the news. I know this is true for me. These days, I get my first cut of  industry, national, and international news through links shared by my friends and connections on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Only after that do I turn to the more general news channels.
Which brings me to Bullhorn Reach. The recruiting business is all about building relationships, and if Bilton is right that people will filter their information through social channels, then recruiters need to make sure they build a brand in those channels. And that’s going to require more than just blasting out your job openings. You need to become a trusted source of useful information and commentary. Otherwise, no one will be listening. Only after people are paying attention will have the permission to talk to them about the job opening you have or the value you can provide them in meeting their staffing needs.

That’s why Bullhorn Reach will not only give recruiters the ability to publish their jobs on social networks, but also help them find and share articles that are going to be of interest to candidates and employers. It’s that useful content that is going to help you build your following, help you build your reputation online, and ultimately earn you the opportunity to engage with an employer about their recruiting needs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last month, we gave you a preview of the email improvements that we’ve been working on, all of which received many of your votes. I’m pleased to announce that Email Address Auto-Complete will be released on June 15th. We’re still Beta testing Fast Inbox Searching and Infinite Scroll but those are soon to follow. We also have a little more work to do on In-Line Images but rest assured, that’s on its way too.

Also slated for June 15th, Dragnet users will be able to run nationwide search and write their own Boolean search string.  Nationwide search and Boolean were the top two vote getters in the Dragnet category.

Stay tuned for the next lineup of features coming your way.  Democracy rules! Keep on squeaking!

Bullhorn Product Management

First let me introduce myself. My name is Vanny Kong and I recently joined Bullhorn as Product Manager. Among my duties as the Product Manager is to keep you informed of all the great features coming your way. We have a number of significant enhancements, noted below, that we will be making available to our customers in the coming weeks.  Once we’re ready to “go live” with them to all of our customers, we’ll notify you so you and your teams can get ready.
We’re particularly excited with the launch of Bullhorn Brainstorm, where you are able to share your ideas and vote on the features that you want. So far, we’ve received over 210 feature requests in less than two months. The Bullhorn Product Management team actively reads your postings to determine what matters most to you.  I am pleased to tell you that we’re nearly ready to rollout some of the great features that you’ve requested and voted for.
 

Here’s a preview of upcoming Inbox improvements that will go live soon.

Increased Efficiency with Email Auto-Complete 

When you type in an email address in the To, BCC, or CC fields of an email, the system will store those email addresses, up to 600, in memory so that when you begin typing an email address, the system will display the closest matching addresses from that stored list.

Fast Inbox Searching 

No longer will you have to wait patiently for your search results to return. We’ve implemented new technology that allows users to search for content in their inbox and have sub-second response time.

Infinite Scroll

Currently, the inbox displays a set number of email determined by the number of rows that you’ve chosen to display. We’ve stripped out this feature and replaced it with Infinite Scroll. Users will be able to scroll on the Inbox to see all messages in their box without having to “flip to next page.”

Viewing In-Line Images

You provided feedback that you wanted to see images in email so we’re working on letting you do that with any email sent using Outlook.   

In addition to the Inbox improvements, we’ve enhanced the Spam blocker capabilities so that you can classify email as spam and no longer receive email from that address.  We’ve also added functionality for users with Timecard Printing entitlements to print up to 1000 timecards at once. These two enhancements will be released this Friday, May 18th.
 

The Bullhorn Team is very excited to deliver these great features to you.  Stay tuned for further communication over the coming weeks as we prepare to release them to you and your team.

Vanny