Cooptalis is an international mobility operator that has supported candidates and companies in their international professional mobility projects since 2012. Cooptalis’ unique offering includes recruitment, immigration, relocation, and training for companies that have an international mobility project. Today, Cooptalis operates in 12 countries through 18 agencies: France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, The Netherlands, Morocco, Tunisia, Romania, Poland, Canada, Côte d’Ivoire, and Vietnam.

The Challenge

According to Julien Geffriaud, Digital Project Manager at Cooptalis, their goal in vetting new solutions was to offer future expatriates a complete digital solution to manage their project. To do so, they needed a cloud tool; a customizable online ATS that could integrate with other applications.

Nadia Hammouche, Recruitment Manager, explained that they realized that their old tool was not built for the volume of work they had and couldn’t handle the company’s needs. Completing targeted and precise searches, quickly finding candidates in the database, and visualizing the progress of their searches were not easy on their existing tool.

The inability to synchronize data from their old ATS with other systems was a problem—with no API interface, Cooptalis could neither add nor extract data.

The final problem was that it was not a SaaS tool, so it had to be installed on personal work stations and required server and database maintenance, making it cumbersome to administer. Finally, the financial model was for lifetime service licenses and included server maintenance costs, with little pricing flexibility.

Cooptalis conducted extensive research and tested several other providers, though only two ATSes caught their eye. Finally, the team opted for Bullhorn ATS & CRM for both the fulfillment of their technical criteria and the implementation support.

The Solution

Increased efficiency in recruiting operations

Before Bullhorn ATS & CRM, recruiters had to create a job description in a Word document and then upload a copy to each individual job site in order to publish an open role. Now, the team can publish directly on the Cooptalis website and other job boards with just a few clicks through the integration with Bullhorn Marketplace Partner Broadbean.

Where recruiters used to have to download a resume to their desktops and then upload it to the ATS, now each application arrives directly in Bullhorn ATS & CRM—recruiters just have to click to validate the candidate in order to move them forward. According to Julien, this improved process has increased recruiter efficiency by saving the team time processing incoming applications.

On the candidate side, the process has improved, as well. Before Bullhorn, candidates had to submit their resumes via email. Today, clients can submit their resumes directly through the Bullhorn Open Source Career Portal and the team can follow up with applicants with ease. According to Julien, the team has customized the module little by little and are very happy with the result. “This improves the experience of candidates who can apply with a few clicks,” Julien said.

Demo Bullhorn

Mobility and information sharing in real-time

According to Nadia, because Cooptalis is looking for skills abroad, they often hold recruitment sessions with their clients overseas. With Bullhorn, Cooptalis can both organize remote sessions and document notes from those sessions in real-time. Bullhorn also allows them to quickly capture all of their feedback on candidates. “It was difficult for us to do this before Bullhorn, so having these abilities now is a huge advantage.”

According to Nadia, “Bullhorn allows all of our colleagues working on a recruiting project to have real-time information, to give feedback to candidates and to send the offers. It also allows teams of sales managers to follow the progress of the process and have access to the same level of information from a single source.”

 

Cost reduction

After switching to Bullhorn ATS & CRM, Cooptalis’ pricing structure changed from lifetime service licenses and server maintenance costs to a subscription model with a price per month per user that includes the cost of support and future updates. Julien shared that the company was also able to save on the cost of its infrastructure by shutting down a server that, until the adoption of Bullhorn, the company had to maintain.

Julien is particularly pleased with the level of Bullhorn support, citing that he can request almost unlimited support.

 

Advice to potential buyers

Julien advises future Bullhorn users to take time to train their workforce on the product. “We started with the idea that we were going to form a project team and then we were going to let users use this new tool in a fairly flexible way,” he said. “We realized that even with an excellent tool, the need for extensive support was still there.”

“Now, when we start supporting our employees and we offer them more detailed training, they realize that there is a lot of functionality in the tool, a lot of shortcuts, efficiency gains on some actions, and many possibilities to customize the display and sorting of data. They are generally surprised and they discover the richness of the tool as they go along,” Julien said.

Julien also advises that a company should identify multiple administrators to customize their experience. “Bullhorn allows us to be autonomous with regard to configuration,” he said. “Especially with regard to personalization. We have, for example, the ability to modify fields and change their location, make some mandatory, or even create custom fields.”

“[Bullhorn] is able to meet [our personalization] needs by offering the ability to integrate systems while facilitating methods of research and information capture in different ways, which allowed us to build a very efficient and adapted database to our activities.” – Nadia Hammouche

The Bullhorn Support team responds quickly. You have a team that understands our needs, identifies the problem well and is very effective in solving it. I don't waste any more time contacting support for a ticket—it’s dealt with that day.
Julien Geffriaud Digital Project Manager, Cooptalis

The Future

According to Julien, Cooptalis started with around 20 users in October of 2018. After about a year, the team doubled the number of users and intends to continue to grow to new countries and acquire additional companies.

Nadia shares that while the company specialized in the IT sector for recruitment and expatriation of foreigners to France and French residents abroad, Cooptalis has begun development into additional industries, including pharmaceuticals, food services, and the automotive industry. As they grow, Cooptalis plans to develop these activities internationally.

When we expand to a new country or industry and want to increase our application volumes, we are confident that Bullhorn will allow us to harmonize our process around the world.
Nadia Hammouche Recruitment Manager, Cooptalis

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