After more than a decade in medical recruitment with a large agency, Emma Gordon co-founded Elective Recruitment so that she could focus solely on helping doctors navigate the complexities of their careers. The biggest focus for Elective Recruitment was to bring a human-first approach to medical recruitment. Their team’s passion for authentic conversations builds meaningful relationships where doctors are seen as people first. This focus at Elective Recruitment allows their team to understand doctors as individuals with lives beyond their careers and their recruiters aim to integrate doctors’ professional goals with personal well-being. This approach allows Elective Recruitment to deliver tailored opportunities and exceptional service every time.

The challenge

Elective Recruitment’s previous system struggled to keep up with the complexity of their tailored operations. Their business provides specialist services to doctors across the medical field from executive and permanent to contingent and locum opportunities, so they needed a system capable of supporting this full breadth of offerings. This was true on the client side, as well. As Gordon shared, “We recognise in our clients that one size does not fit all. So we needed a system that would allow us to do things in different ways for different clients.”

What seemed like a cost-effective option at the start quickly became inefficient, with essential features rendered unusable once customisation was added to suit Elective Recruitment’s needs. The lack of functionality created more admin, slowed processes, and limited their ability to serve clients and doctors effectively.

The solution

When evaluating new systems, Elective Recruitment needed a platform that could adapt to the varied needs of their clients and doctors. Gordon explained, “We had a very long wishlist of features for our new system, and only Bullhorn ticked all of our non-negotiables and a lot of nice-to-haves, as well.”

Knowing the importance of their next recruitment platform, Elective Recruitment did an extensive evaluation of a range of systems. Some were strong in permanent, and others in locum recruitment, but they all lacked the flexibility to support their full service offering. “There was only really Bullhorn that offered the full service, to cover all client options,” Gordon said. Focusing on ROI instead of price, Elective Recruitment chose Bullhorn for its ability to scale with them and the flexibility of the platform.

Powerful! That’s the keyword. Bullhorn is a system that allows you to nurture your network continually. That’s a really powerful resource for a recruitment business such as ours.
Emma Gordon Director, Elective Recruitment

The results

Bullhorn Automation has transformed how Elective Recruitment manages compliance and candidate care by taking the pressure off recruiters to remember and execute every detail. “Anybody running a recruitment desk will tell you how many balls they’ve got in the air…Now with automation we don’t have to remember. It takes the onus off the recruiter,” Gordon said. For example, automated reminders ensure international placements are compliant with visas and other essential documents, preventing issues like non-compliant doctors being onboarded or receiving the wrong communication.

For locum placements, automated surveys help identify workplace health and safety concerns early. Doctors have the chance to flag any issues, giving Elective Recruitment extra protection. These consistent, automated touchpoints create better communication and reduce risk. During the past six months alone, Elective recruitment has automated over 480,000 tasks, saving their team 16,000 hours.

“Our recruiters can spend all day working on inbound activity and be really busy, but actually not very productive because the work just doesn’t stop,” explained Gordon. Using Bullhorn Analytics, Elective Recruitment’s consultants get more clarity and direction on tasks that will have a real impact. “Bullhorn Analytics allows us to drill in on those clients that we’ve made revenue with, or clients who are at risk, or we’ve not spoken to in a while. It gives us a strategic approach,” Gordon said.

Dealing with the Bullhorn Support team has been a highlight for Gordon. “Bullhorn is second to none in the level of support…It’s seamless, it’s 24/7, it’s great!” she stated. The local support team is contactable via a number of channels and is always responsive to all issues, whether it’s a system issue or quick how-to question. Gordon said, “I am not a tech person at all, but when I’ve spoken to anybody from the support team, they speak to me in plain language and help me to understand what I need to do. The emails are clear. You can pick up the phone. The communication is straight away.”

Bullhorn Analytics allows us to drill in on those clients that we've made revenue with, or clients who are at risk, or we've not spoken to in a while. It gives us a strategic approach.
Emma Gordon Director, Elective Recruitment

The future

Looking to the future, Elective Recruitment are confident Bullhorn will continue to support their business needs and remain a core component of their operations. “We’ve built such a powerful system that’s unique to us, our business, and our processes that we could absolutely expand further with what we’ve got in place.” Gordon continues, “With Bullhorn, you could fit it into a hundred person business, and it would run itself. Obviously, we’re a small team. But the opportunity for growth is endless.”

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