Data & research
Q: What is Bullhorn?
A: For the past 26 years, Bullhorn has dedicated itself to building industry-leading, cloud-based software for the staffing and recruitment industry. Through partnerships with 10,000 customers globally, Bullhorn has built a vast knowledge base of recruitment best practices and deep domain expertise to help firms scale their businesses. Founder-led and headquartered in Boston, Bullhorn employs 1,400 people across 14 countries, focused on our core mission – delivering an incredible customer experience.
Q: What is the Bullhorn Partner Program?
A: The Bullhorn Partner Program enables technology providers to build turnkey integrated services to our platforms. The program is designed for companies that offer solutions to staffing and recruitment agencies. All partners must complete Bullhorn’s validation process to ensure an amazing customer experience.
Q: What criteria is necessary to join the Bullhorn Partnership Program?
A: We’re proud to support an expansive staffing-centric ecosystem. Any company is eligible to apply for a partnership. We look for:
Q: What are the costs for joining the Partner Program?
A: There is an annual platform fee to join the partner program. The Technical Services engagement to help build and validate your integration comes at an additional, one time cost between $1K – $4K depending on the scope of your integration. There is a 15% revenue share applied to all mutual customers, however for the first 14 mutual customers, the revenue share will be waived.
Q: Do you offer discounts on the $5,000 annual platform fee? Do you offer a monthly or quarterly payment plan?
A: The $5,000 annual platform fee allows us to dedicate the technical resources required to create, maintain, and troubleshoot your sandbox environment as well as maintaining our API documentation and integration guides. We are unable to offer a discount to this fee, and the fee must be paid in full at the beginning of each annual term.
Q: Is there any room to negotiate on the 15% revenue share?
A: The revenue share amount is standardised across all partners, and in most cases, will act as a direct sales incentive when the partner has 15 or more mutual customers. The value of our partnership program has always been the ability to provide our customers with this service, and therefore, the costs reflect that, so we are unable to negotiate this revenue share.
Q: Is the line 15 full, paying customers, or would free trial and/or pilot customers count?
A: All customers using your Integrated Service would count towards this number. You are allowed to work with trial or pilot customers; in fact we encourage that.15 customers leveraging the integration, even if they are not paying you, is our indication that you’ve reached product-market fit and should be able to successfully grow in the staffing market.
Q: Will I need to keep track and tell you when I have 15 customers?
A: You will be required to report on your mutual customers and the revenue associated with them. However, we also have visibility on this from our side.
Q: Will there be API limitations once we reach 15 customers and start paying revenue share?
A: Once you start paying revenue share, we increase the API limit by an order of magnitude, without an increase to the annual fee. There will still be API limits in place but those are to prevent abuse and are not aimed at charging partners an additional cost. If your integration exceeds the limits, you may be required to engage with our Technical Services team to optimize your integration.
Q: Do you accept redlines to the Partner agreement?
A: No. As Bullhorn is opening up access to our APIs and systems to partners, we do not require that same level of access to the partner solution. As such, we believe we are taking on more risk in the relationship. The terms set out in the contract, in particular in the Limitations of Liability and Indemnification sections, are meant to mitigate our risk and may not be made mutual.
Q: Can I just get access to my customer’s instance and build directly to them?
A: If you are building a one off integration for a single customer and do not intend to offer your integration to any additional customers, you can do this using our open APIs. You will first need to register yourself as a third party vendor by filling out this form. For any integration that is offered to more than a single customer, you would be required to sign up to the Partner Program and get your integration validated by Bullhorn. We do not offer unlimited and free access to anybody, and we want to ensure that our API is being used efficiently and responsibly so that we can guarantee our customers the best experience, knowing that partner integrations have been vetted and validated. For additional information, you can review our API Fair Use Policy.
Q: Can I leverage a third party to build my integration?
A: We do not permit third-party ‘connector’ or ‘middleware’ companies to build integrations with Bullhorn. Partners are required to leverage in-house developers to build a direct, platform-to-platform integration to the Bullhorn API.
Q: Do you provide technical support for partners?
A: Yes, every new partner is required to engage with a dedicated resource from our Technical Services team, which ranges from $1000 – $4000, to build their integration. This engagement includes a technical consultation and validation review that must be completed before onboarding any customers.
Additionally, we have technical resources allocated to help maintain sandbox environments and address any bugs, breakages, or access concerns, as well as extensive documentation and technical guides. There is an option for partners to purchase additional support hours should you need them.
Q: We’re ready to sign up! What are the next steps?
A: Once you’ve been qualified to join the Partner program, here are the next steps you can expect:
Q: How do I increase Bullhorn customer adoption of my integrated solution?
A: Partners should be prepared to promote, market, and pitch their integration to Bullhorn customers. Once your integration has been approved, you will be added to our list of approved Partners and are welcome to leverage our Bullhorn brand assets (which we will share during the onboarding process) to promote your integration through your own channels. Please note, we do not allow Partners to promote themselves as a Bullhorn Partner until they have completed the validation process.
Partners may become eligible for certain co-Marketing and co-Selling activities as the customer adoption of their integration grows. In the meantime, we encourage you to leverage your sandbox environment to engage customers with demos and create marketing collateral. Try out different strategies to get Bullhorn customers excited about your solution!
