How Connected Recruiting automations supported NTIATIVE’s rapid growth

NTIATIVE is an IT recruitment agency based in Kraków, Poland. They specialise in mid-level to senior IT positions in the infrastructure, software development, and data science industries. The team has seen massive internal growth since 2020, expanding from a team of eight to 40 people. While this exponential growth brought many exciting opportunities, it also came with its own challenges.

With a global talent shortage and impending recession looming ahead, NTIATIVE needed a way to satisfy their clients’ needs with their services and technology. So, about a year and a half ago, the team decided to partner with Bullhorn Automation. Since then, the team has been putting together automations to impact each phase of Bullhorn’s Connected Recruiting lifecycle.

Connected Recruiting is a strategy that empowers staffing firms to engage talent at every stage of the talent lifecycle: attract, engage, onboard, and nurture. By leveraging Connected Recruiting best practices, staffing firms can ensure an incredible experience for their talent, create an ever-growing and consistently engaged talent pool, and lower their cost of talent acquisition.

We had the opportunity to chat with Adriano Corso, Head of Marketing at NTIATIVE, to dive into his team’s advanced automations and the Connected Recruiting strategies that have spelled success from attracting candidates to nurturing relationships.

Attract

The first phase of the Connected Recruiting lifecycle is “Attracting” talent. During this phase, it’s crucial to efficiently pull talent in through job boards and follow up immediately to ensure they don’t slip through the cracks. The goal is to get more out of your job board spend, increase efficiency, and improve the candidate experience from the start.

NTIATIVE uses several different channels to attract candidates. The team shares open job roles on social media channels and through their podcast promotions, while pulling from job boards to find relevant talent. One of their most successful automation campaigns was built to help the team understand how big their talent pool is on their social channels.

Facebook forms generate leads: In order to test out this audience, the team ran a salary campaign on Facebook that asked candidates what salary they were interested in receiving. “This campaign was quite simple, because Facebook already had all of the candidate’s information. Then, we were able to receive that information once someone filled out our instant form,” said Corso. “We automatically connected the Facebook leads form to Bullhorn, so the leads were sent directly into our system, using data mapping fields.” At the end of the campaign, NTIATIVE had the name, seniority level, and salary interest of each person that filled out the form. They spent $1,500 on the campaign, but left with 500 leads on potential candidates.

Building a large candidate database: In addition to out-of-the-box campaigns, NTIATIVE uses job boards to find new talent. Corso said that this process is simple. Once someone applies to an open role from a job board, the recruiter will receive a notification. While the candidate receives an automated confirmation email within 24 hours of applying for the position, the recruiter is expected to follow up with them. “Our goal is to make sure that the recruiter puts lists into Bullhorn. That way, months and years later, we can send emails to these candidates with open roles that are similar to the original job they applied for.” With this approach, NTIATIVE makes sure they’re going back to their database for future openings, instead of revisiting the job boards with every open role.

“We can [also] enter them into an automation job campaign based on an action they’ve taken on our website,” Corso said. NTIATIVE is currently building an automation that automatically sends an email to anyone that clicks five times on their website.

According to Corso, this phase in the Connected Recruiting life cycle is a huge focus for the NTIATIVE team. “We’re investing a lot in the ‘Attract’ phase of Connected Recruiting, because I believe that we can source more of our candidates from different sources. For example, there’s a huge potential in Facebook and YouTube. We don’t want to be fishing from the same pond as everyone else. Incorporating automations while sourcing from unique places can help us differentiate ourselves.”

Engage

The next stage in the Connected Recruiting life cycle is “Engage.” In this phase, recruitment agencies should work to engage the talent that is already in their database, as well as new candidates, with the right message, at the right time, for the right opportunities. The goal is to increase the conversion of your existing talent pool to ultimately save time and lower the cost of talent acquisition.

Cleaning their database to remain GDPR Compliant: NTIATIVE has focused their attention on engaging candidates through their GDPR campaign. With GDPR, the team is legally obligated to clean their database every 12 months. They need to confirm that they have permission to contact their candidates with marketing emails. NTIATIVE needed to scale how they contacted their candidate base for these permissions. So, they partnered with the Bullhorn Customer Success team to create an automated GDPR campaign using a “traffic light” approach.

According to Corso, the first step was obtaining consent. He said, “We sent a communication to our database of 20,000 candidates, letting them know that we were running the campaign for GDPR. Everyone had the option to choose from a green, yellow, and red button. If they clicked the green button, they were giving us permission to send them our newsletter and open jobs. If they clicked the yellow button, we only had permission to send them job opportunities. Finally, If they clicked the red button, they did not want us to contact them anymore.” From there, the second step in the process was creating automated email campaigns for each segment, based on the results of the initial consent email. For example, the team sent different versions of their newsletter, based on the recipients’ GDPR responses.

“The GDPR campaign helped us get our house clean while making our legal and operations happy. Now that we have engaged with the candidates and determined the segments, the next step is to nurture those segments. However, just the fact that we can segment people and send emails in a nice format is a good win,” said Corso.

Onboard

The next stage in the Connected Recruiting life cycle is “Onboard.” By properly onboarding candidates, you can create a seamless and positive experience for them in the lead-up to the first day of a job, through the first few weeks. By engaging candidates frequently before their new role and beyond, you have the opportunity to reduce the rate of no-shows and improve the overall client and candidate experience.

Distributing onboarding documents: Currently, NTIATIVE has a manual onboarding process, where a dedicated employee ensures candidates have the correct onboarding documents. Their recruiters are available to make sure that their candidates have a seamless transition into their new roles, and all questions are answered. Looking forward, NTIATIVE would like to use Bullhorn Automation to automate candidate document distribution. “I’d like to automate the onboarding documents from the moment the candidate is placed,” said Corso. “Then, if clients request onboarding support, we could send an email with all of the documents for candidates.”

Nurture

The final stage of Connected Recruiting is “Nurture.” During this phase, you can proactively nurture talent throughout their assignment so you can easily engage them for their next role. This increases your ability to extend a candidate’s assignment or redeploy them in a new role in the future.

Automating a referral program: NTIATIVE is about to launch an automated referral campaign to the talent in their database. In the campaign, the team is going to target their “silver medalists,” meaning candidates that were in the final interviews for roles, but were not ultimately chosen. “Sometimes the candidates join another company but remember us because of the great experience they had with us. In those cases, they may have their new company join as a client,” said Corso. NTIATIVE will give referral participants a €1,000 bonus for either a candidate or client referral.

In addition to the referral program and regular, automated touchbase emails with candidates in their database, NTIATIVE uses Bullhorn Automation to secure feedback from candidates in their database. This feedback comes in several forms.

Securing candidate and client feedback: One example of these feedback communications is the NPS survey. “NPS is one question that asks candidates how they would rate us on a scale from one to ten. The NPS email is automatically triggered to send to our candidates exactly two days after we mark a placement within Bullhorn,” said Corso. “We also use NPS for the clients. Every three to six months, we send our clients the NPS survey with more elaborate questions about the communication they received from their recruiter and how their overall experience was.”

Beyond NPS, NTIATIVE has built an automation to secure reviews on Google Business Profile. Every time the team fills a role for a client, the client receives a notification that congratulates them on the new employee, while asking for a recruiter review. This automation has proven to be quite successful. Corso said, “This year, we went from 20 reviews on Google My Business to 97 reviews. We also include the NPS survey in the same email, in an attempt to get both pieces of feedback at once.”

When looking at the branding side of things, I think the review campaign has made the biggest impact on the business. When we are able to show people that we have almost 100 reviews from candidates, it builds our credibility
Adriano Corso Head of Marketing, NTIATIVE

How Bullhorn Automation Supported NTIATIVE’s Rapid Growth

NTIATIVE’s team has focused on creating a series of well-rounded automations that touch almost every phase of the Connected Recruiting life cycle. According to Corso, these automations have improved his team’s efficiency across the board. “With Bullhorn Automation, our team’s workload has improved significantly. We are able to send an automated campaign to 120 candidates on behalf of a recruiter, requesting that they ‘Book a Meeting’ with that individual. This saves our recruiters from sending 120 emails. They just need to send us a list of contacts, and we can automate the rest!”

We’re trying to make marketing a crucial part of the recruitment industry. We think out of the box with automation integration, and there's more to come.
Adriano Corso Head of Marketing, NTIATIVE

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