Meet the automation all-stars
Three years ago at Engage Boston, Bullhorn introduced the very first panel of automation all-stars: customers who had already adopted automation and leveraged it to take their business to new heights.
Flash forward to 2025, and automation is now table stakes. Top-performing firms are 57% more likely to be using automation tools, according to Bullhorn’s GRID Industry Trends report. Yet the same research found that only 18% of firms say they’re in the advanced stages of digital transformation. This means that agencies that harness the power of automation stand to gain a competitive edge, even in today’s uncertain recruitment landscape. At this year’s Engage, we sat down with a new panel of automation all-stars who are doing just that.
LRS Healthcare’s Amy Slager, All Medical Personnel’s Erin Fryar, ManpowerGroup’s Bella Zamborini, and North Highland’s Ryan Gemmill spoke with automation expert Billy Davis to talk more about their journeys with Bullhorn Automation. Their insights provided a roadmap for recruitment professionals looking to transform their operations, enhance candidate experiences, and drive real business growth.
Automation in action
When it comes to automation, the possibilities are endless, which can make getting started daunting. To kick off the conversation, the panelists shared real-world use cases of how they’re putting automation to work every day.
Slager and her team have seen success with automated lead engagement. By filtering out uninterested or retired candidates and nurturing hot leads through targeted campaigns, her team saw 9.7% of clicks convert into new lead distribution – higher than the industry average of 6%. This isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about ensuring no high-potential candidate slips through the cracks.
Fryar delved into the operational side, detailing how automation streamlines VMS (Vendor Management System) orders. Many recruitment professionals know the pain of manually touching up every VMS order. Fryar’s team built an automation that automatically pulled orders, added missing location data, and assigned account and business development managers based on geography or client. The result? Orders arrived at the support team and recruiters as a “much greater shell,” as Fryar put it, ready for faster action. This proactive approach drastically reduced manual effort and accelerated the placement process.
Zamborini shared her personal favorite use case: push notifications through Bullhorn Automation for candidates using their mobile apps. Imagine candidates receiving instant job recommendations and task reminders directly on their phones – a seamless and personalized experience. This not only re-engages candidates but also puts the power of action directly in their hands, reflecting a holistic and forward-thinking approach to candidate engagement.
Each of these use cases included a common thread: automation empowers recruiters by handling tasks at scale, allowing them to step in at precisely the right moment with the right information. Automation doesn’t replace human touch; it enhances it.
Measuring what matters
The big question with any tech investment is: how do you ensure you’re seeing returns? The panelists showcased a few ways that they’re tracking the impact of automation and measuring success.
Fryar and her team take a multi-faceted approach, looking at efficiency, data hygiene, business process improvement, and marketing. For business processes, Fryar focuses on gains in efficiency, improved data quality (by correcting or preventing incorrect entries), and reducing the number of “touches” required per order. Ultimately, these metrics tie back to the core goal: faster placements and better candidate and client experiences.
Zamborini highlighted the importance of building a business case with both soft and hard benefits. While soft benefits like cleaner data and reduced risk are crucial, justifying ROI during challenging economic times meant focusing on “hard savings,” particularly the ability to sunset in-house tools by purchasing Bullhorn Automation. This approach demonstrates that automation isn’t just about incremental gains; it can drive significant cost savings and operational consolidation.
Slager brought it back to marketing, explicitly citing the success of their “ghosting campaign.” This automation re-engages candidates who have dropped out of contact, ensuring that “hot contacts” with completed profiles don’t fall through the cracks. “We are making sure that we stay re-engaged with those candidates,” Slager said.
Whether your goal is cost savings, more efficient recruitment, or happier candidates, choosing a few key KPIs and working towards those can help ensure that you and your team are getting the most out of your investment.
Charting your course
For those just embarking on their automation journey, the panelists offered crucial advice:
- Understand the business holistically: Slager stressed the importance of having an automation leader who understands the business from end to end. Automations don’t exist in a vacuum; a change in one area (like lead generation) can impact another (like back office operations). A holistic view ensures that your automations are fully integrated within your workflows and prevents unforeseen conflicts.
- Master your workflow and data hygiene first: “You need to know what you want to do with automation,” said Gemmill. Get your existing workflows organized and prioritize data hygiene before automating. This foundational work ensures you’re not just automating a flawed process.
- Document everything, early and often: Gemmill highlighted his team’s meticulous documentation of all of their automations — crucial for troubleshooting, growth, and ensuring continuity as teams evolve. Davis added that doing this upfront is “much, much, much easier than retroactively doing it when you have a hundred automations.”
- Foster a core stakeholder group: Fryar emphasized creating a core group of key stakeholders from different departments (such as accounting, finance, and marketing) and business lines. This ensures that when one stakeholder proposes a new automation, its impact is discussed across the entire business, fostering collaboration and preventing silos.
Pitfalls to avoid
The panelists also offered candid advice on what not to do:
- Automating without business buy-in: Slager warned against building automations without bringing the business on board, emphasizing the need for a change management process. An automation might seem great to an admin, but if it doesn’t solve a real business problem, it won’t be adopted.
- Creating individual automations for individual people: Davis strongly advised against this, calling it a “red flag.” Individual automations that don’t fit into a whole aren’t scalable and quickly fall apart. Broader AI solutions can offer scalable ways to customize communications without fragmenting your automation strategy.
- Automating everything at once (without prioritization): Zamborini pointed out that once people realize the power of automation, there’s often a “flood of requests.” A demand process is essential to prioritize what gets automated next, ensuring alignment with overarching business goals.
- Overly complex automations: Gemmill suggested that if an automation has “so many branches” that you can’t visualize it, it’s probably better to break it into two or three simpler automations. This makes them easier to catalog, manage, and troubleshoot.
- Setting it and forgetting it: Fryar highlighted the importance of a regular review process. Automations that worked perfectly six months ago might need tweaks, or even be rendered obsolete by new Bullhorn functionality. Regularly revisiting KPIs and functionality ensures your automations remain optimized and valuable.
Automation: The foundation of AI
Automation and AI go hand-in-hand, as Bullhorn’s Matt Fischer and Jason Heilman pointed out in their Vision for Innovation. Without automation, AI wouldn’t be nearly as powerful; automation was “the first foundation to benefiting from AI,” as Gemmill said. Having clean data and well-defined processes – often managed by automation – provides the optimal environment for AI to thrive.
“The foundation to get optimal AI results is going to be built from a combination of system, process, workflow, and automation, all synergistically working together,” added Davis. He emphasized a “crawl, walk, run” approach to recruitment AI tools like Amplify, encouraging organizations to introduce AI incrementally rather than waiting for “perfect” data – because perfection is an elusive goal.
From streamlining operations and improving data quality to enhancing candidate engagement and informing business decisions, the benefits of automation are vast. For firms looking to gain a competitive edge and build a foundation for AI adoption, automation is a necessity.
“Start now so that you understand the tool,” said Zamborini. “Amplify is going to expedite everything, and automation is the foundation.”