UK Recruiters Go Mobile with SMS for Bullhorn

Earlier this year, I traveled to London to visit Bullhorn’s UK Managing Director, Peter Linas, and his growing team at our UK headquarters. During my trip, I had a number of in-depth discussions with Bullhorn clients, prospects and Bullhorn Marketplace partners. Our goal was two-fold: First, validate the product localisation work that we had already introduced (DD.MM.YYYY date formats, currency symbol flexibility, and UK postcode radius searching). Second, to learn more about the recruitment process in the UK and identify areas we could further improve Bullhorn to meet the needs of our growing user base there. Universally, the single piece of feedback that we heard from each and every client and prospect was: “we need SMS!” I knew Short Messaging Services (SMS, or ‘text messaging’) is a substantial part of the recruitment workflow in the UK, but it wasn’t until this trip that I saw just how valuable SMS is to UK recruitment professionals.

SMS provides a few important advantages over email that ultimately help recruiters make more placements:

  1. Responsiveness: Using SMS, you can quickly notify a list of existing candidates about a new vacancy and get back to your clients before any of your competitors.
  2. Read Rates: Unlike email, candidates will read nearly every SMS message they receive – just be sure to use this advantage selectively!
  3. Availability: Candidates tend to have their mobiles on them at all times, so you can communicate with them without having to wait until evenings or weekends when they can check their personal emails outside of their workplace.

With all this in mind, I’m excited to announce SMS for Bullhorn! In partnership with Sheffield-based Dialogue Communications, we’ve built SMS messaging capabilities directly into the Bullhorn system. You can now send an SMS message to candidates, contacts, and distribution lists – enabling you to leverage the benefits of SMS without having to spend time copying and pasting mobile numbers from Bullhorn into a separate system. Right now, we’ve rolled out this capability exclusively to our UK-based clients. So, if you’re based in the UK and are interested in learning more about SMS for Bullhorn, visit our Bullhorn Marketplace listing for details. We’re also interested in hearing from those of you in other locales. Is SMS functionality something you’re interested in using as well? Leave a note in the comments – we’d love to hear your thoughts.

This Bullhorn Blog post was written by Jim Lynch.

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