When he started working in staffing, Rolf Kramer quickly realized he wanted to do staffing in a “kinder, gentler way.” After gaining deep experience in the industry, he started his own IT staffing agency five years ago, and he’s been trying to do just that. Kramer has built Kranect, a Denver-based IT staffing firm. The firm’s success hinges on two factors: an intentional focus on one much-needed function (technology talent) and his secret sauce, building relationships. We asked him how he chose his firm’s focus and what advice he’d give other staffing agency leaders. Focus on Function “Focus has to start at a really high level — like 30,000 feet,” Kramer says. “It’s really hard to be all things to all people. You need to ask yourself, what group can we serve that’s interesting and also most likely to continue to see growth and provide adequate margins?” Kramer knew he was interested in IT talent. The candidates are interesting and the skill sets are in high demand. But he was careful not to focus his attention exclusively on one industry (like oil and gas or healthcare) or one IT specialization (like server development or quality assurance). He knew that every industry has ups and downs, and niches can change as technology or market needs evolve. As a result, he works with companies in all industries, helping them with their IT staffing needs. He’s glad he zoomed in on IT instead of going more general. Staffing is a big arena, and it just makes sense to pick a focus rather than to try to serve every potential client, Kramer says. Identify Your Ideal Client Running a focused staffing firm means carefully identifying clients that are the best fit. “My model doesn’t work well with really big companies with a VMS and multiple vendors,” he says. “We’re not built to race resumes to a tool to get those placements. My focus is finding candidates who want relationships and hiring managers who are willing to spend the time.” As a result, he focuses on contract work or contract to hire, and building relationships to find the right candidates for the right positions. “If we get to know hiring managers and our candidate base really well, we get really good at putting round pegs in round holes,” he says. The numbers prove that his staffing style is successful — with many long-term placements and contract extensions. “At the end of the day, we serve our clients the way they want to be served.” Use Your Focus to Set A Data Strategy Picking a focus area also helps Kramer keep very clean, useful data. Instead of trying to sort through different kinds of placements, since he’s only working in one function he can quickly compare placements to each other. “Once you’ve set your focus you can start getting the data to work for you and help you make decisions about your business,” he says. Working in the staffing industry may seem simple, Kramer says: “You get the job order, go out and find the talent,” he says. But the details can get complex quickly, and having data to rely on and a clear focus on the role you play for your clients can help. “Keep it simple,” he says, and keep collecting data: “The nature of data is that the more you have, the more real it is over time.” This interview originally appeared in our toolkit for growing your staffing firm. Want more insight and tips for running a successful staffing firm?  Check out Toolkit: Resources to Grow Your Staffing Firm from the Ground Up for useful tools and tips you can use to better your firm.

  25 Questions to Evaluate Your Healthcare Staffing Technology The temporary healthcare staffing industry is still full of opportunities if you’re prepared for them—the segment is expected to grow 18 percent from 2016 to 2026, far outpacing the projected seven percent growth for overall employment. But with competition for limited talent increasing and a host of compliance challenges for staffing firms, it’s also rife with unique obstacles and pitfalls. Is your firm equipped to handle them? With the right technology built specifically for the needs of healthcare staffing firms, you can be more productive and provide better service to your candidates and clients. Ask yourself the following questions and jot down your score to assess how well you are leveraging healthcare staffing technology. 1) Stay on top of your relationships Healthcare staffing is built on relationships—relationships with your clients, providers, and recruiters. But much of the current technology used in the industry isn’t built to manage relationships. Applicant tracking systems (ATS) built specifically for staffing professionals are designed to handle complex and numerous relationships across both candidates/providers and hiring facilities all in one system. If you aren’t able to answer yes to the questions below, it may be time to invest in a solution that helps you efficiently manage your candidates and clients. Goal: Give your relationships the attention they deserve to provide a better experience Assessment: Providers (Candidates): Do you have insight into the best time of day to contact candidates, as well as the best means for reaching them? Do you leverage automation to know far in advance which of your providers have upcoming expiring credentials and do you have procedures for collecting documents electronically and getting them renewed before the expiration date? Do you have SMS/text capabilities integrated with your ATS so you can engage with candidates who are on-the-go all the time? Facilities: Do you understand the goals of the facilities you work with across multiple decision-makers—the percent of clinical staff expected to be contingent workers, the areas in which they’re struggling to improve, and how you can help them achieve their results? Do you have real-time visibility into your relationships with all key contacts at multiple management levels across your top accounts? Do you know when is the best time of day to try and reach those contacts? Do you have ways to automatically identify problems and alert your team to them before they get escalated? Does your ATS help you assess the risk level of your relationships? Add Up Your Score: For each section, add up the number of questions that you can respond to with a positive answer. This will help you determine which areas you may want to supplement with a healthcare staffing technology solution. __/7 What your score means: A low score means you have room for growth when it comes to managing relationships with your providers and/or facilities. Examine your answers. If technological limitations are preventing you from providing the attention your providers and facilities deserve, consider using an ATS built for staffing healthcare professionals.   2) Redeploy more of your workers The talent shortage—the number one challenge across the industry, according to most professionals—isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. With new candidates becoming increasingly hard to find, how can you make up for the gap? One solution: redeploy more of your existing workers after their assignment ends. A quarter of staffing firms redeploy less than 10 percent of their workers, meaning for 90 percent of workers, the time and resources to find, credential, and place those providers is lost. To maximize your efficiency and profitability, redeploy more of your workforce. Goal: Use your staffing technology to redeploy more providers immediately after their assignments end Assessment: Does your ATS allow you to monitor when workers are coming off assignments and contact them? Can you easily identify open shifts that are a fit for your available providers and easily identify qualified providers to fill an open shift? Can you identify if their credentials are still valid, help expedite renewal, and/or request and process any new credentials that you need? Are you able to update their credentials electronically? From any device? Add Up Your Score: __/4 What your score means: A low score means you have an opportunity to redeploy more candidates—and become more profitable and efficient as a result. Leverage an ATS with the above capabilities to boost your redeployment rate.   3) Execute your growth strategy—then track and measure it Your firm isn’t going to grow by accident. An ATS with robust reporting capabilities is critical if you want to understand your business and how you can grow it. Check your current capabilities against this set of questions to see if you have everything you need to flourish. Goal: Measure your data and use it to make smarter business decisions Do you have a defined growth strategy in place to achieve your 2-3 year growth goals? Are you able to track all of the KPIs you need to understand your business? Time to fill? Fill ratio? Gross margin(by recruiter, job type, segment, office/region)? Drop-off rate—The number of candidates you lose during the credentialing process? Average ratio of providers working per recruiter? Recruiter performance metrics—placements, job orders, and reps? Ramp up time for new recruiters? Pipeline status—including views based on job order importance/value or created date, and conversion rates at various stages of the placement process? Do you have a good understanding of the reports you need to run to make actionable changes that’ll help you grow your business? Do you have easy access to the following data? Placement volumes—the number of providers you place. Pipeline velocity—The ratio of your win rate and deal size compared to the number of days it takes to complete a sales cycle. Margins—The profit leftover once operating costs are accounted for. Is your reporting system fully ad-hoc, so that you can analyze data in a way that makes most sense for your business, like by location or specialty, or are you refined to limited options? Do you know which sources for providers are most effective? Add Up Your Score: __/6 What your score means: If you have a low score, you may consider using a reporting solution that lets you track all of your pertinent business data. Monitoring this data enables you to make more informed decisions about your time, resources, and investments.   4) Be more productive and provide a better service Healthcare staffing is only getting more competitive. Are you delivering a better service than your competition? If the technology you use to run your firm is limited, your ability to deliver a great experience will be, too. Here are some top performance questions to consider. Goal: Use your healthcare staffing technology to maximize your performance Assessment: Does your ATS offer a flexible search solution so you can search by radius, credential, or custom fields? Does your ATS make it easy to shortlist candidates by skills and credentials? Do you have a best-in-class platform that’s extensible and customizable and extensible, so you can easily integrate with other software solutions? Are you able to integrate easily with other software solutions that’ll help you place your candidates? Can you automate: Credentialing? Onboarding? Shift scheduling? Back office activities (invoicing, payroll, timesheets, commissions, billing hours, etc.)? VMS job importing? Can you easily stitch or merge PDFs into a compact collection of credentials in one place? Does the time you spend on manual processes limit the amount of you can spend nurturing candidate relationships? Add Up Your Score: __/7 What your score means: Each ‘yes’ is a feature your firm can use to provide an incredible service and perform more efficiently. Take note of the capabilities you’re currently lacking and determine if they’ll help you meet your goals. To succeed in healthcare staffing, it’s essential to be able to perform a wide array of tasks and do them well. Technology built with healthcare staffing needs in mind allows you to execute on the unique demands of the healthcare industry and on the unique demands of the recruiting profession. With the right approach and the right technology, your firm will be in a great position to increase business and provide an incredible experience to your candidates and clients in 2018 and well beyond.   Want a closer look at Bullhorn's healthcare technology? Join our VP of Product Marketing as he leads a session walking through the day in the life of a healthcare staffing firm and addresses four key technologies to improve speed and productivity.   Four Must-Have Technologies for Healthcare Staffing March 15th at 2pm EDT [btn btn_link="http://pages.bullhorn.com/WBN18-03-15_4-Must-Have-Technologies-for-Healthcare-Staffing_WebinarRegistration.html?LS=Website&LSD=Healthcare_Questionnaire_NA&LA=Healthcare_WBN_180315_NA&LAD=Healthcare_WBN_180315_NA&utm_source=marketo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=healthcare_wbn_180315_na" btn_color="orange" btn_size="md" btn_text="Join Webinar"] 

  UPDATE: The 2019 Global Staffing & Recruitment Trends Survey is now underway. Take it here, and you can win one of thirty Amazon gift cards. [btn btn_link="https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/BlogNA?/LSD=Blog&LA=2019_Trends_Survey_Report_NA&utm_source=blog&utm_medium=website" btn_color="orange" btn_size="lg" btn_text="Take the 2019 Global Staffing & Recruitment Trends Survey "] What are the top trends that are shaping the staffing industry in 2018? What do staffing pros see as top priorities? Opportunities? Obstacles? For the eighth consecutive year, we asked and you answered: More than 1,400 staffing and recruiting professionals worldwide, from firms of all sizes operating in all sectors, weighed in with their thoughts on the current staffing landscape. In North America specifically, more than 900 respondents provided insight on what’s affecting their firms in 2018. They shared their outlook on future performance and revenue growth, top priorities and challenges for 2018, and their outlook on the economy and technology. Here are just a few of the many key takeaways from the 2018 North American Staffing & Recruiting Trends Report: The Industry's Outlook for 2018. Get your copy of the full report here. Optimism for 2018 (within reason) [Tweet "75% of #staffing pros expect their firm's revenue to increase in 2018 compared to 2017."] Staffing professionals are expecting big things for 2018, but they’re keeping their expectations grounded, compared to past years. Seventy-five percent of respondents expect to see their revenue increase in 2018 over the past year, slightly down from the 80 percent figure from last year. This grounded optimism is reflected in other predictions as well. Sixty-two percent of respondents think billable hours will increase (compared to 69 percent last year). On the plus side, expectations for increased hiring needs are higher than ever (70 percent compared to an already robust 69 percent from the previous year.) What’s changed?  One possible explanation is a dip in confidence about the current economy and business climate. A full 68 percent of respondents are very or somewhat concerned about the rate of economic growth and more than half of respondents are concerned about healthcare policies and inflation. Technology Takes Precedent [Tweet "52% of #staffing firms anticipate an increase in tech spending in 2018"] Technology is moving at a blistering pace and staffing firms are taking notice. More than half (52 percent) of staffing firms anticipate an increase in tech spending in 2018, compared to forty percent last year. Automation remains a hot topic for staffing firms. Twenty-three percent rank automation as a top priority and 36 percent rank it as a top challenge. Still, the potential for significant opportunity remains. More than a third (35 percent) of firms don’t automate during the prospecting, client engagement, or account management stages. And about 40 percent don’t automate candidate selection, screening, or nurturing. Need more convincing to embrace automation? Forty percent of respondents say automation’s greatest value to increased efficiencies and the same amount say its biggest benefit is increased engagement. How do staffing firms feel about digital staffing platforms like Upwork, Shiftgig, Catalant, and others? The jury’s still out. Sixty-three percent of respondents said they’re unsure whether these platforms will hurt or help their business. The good news: slightly more respondents say they’ll help their business than those who say they’ll hurt it (23 percent to 16 percent). [btn btn_link=" https://www.bullhorn.com/the-big-idea-bracket/?LS=Website&LSD=Blog&LA=MarchMadness2018&LAD=MarchMadness2018&utm_source=blog&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=MarchMadness2018 " btn_color="orange" btn_size="lg" btn_text="Got March Madness fever? Vote for the Next Big Idea in Staffing!"] Candidate experience matters (but who’s responsible?) [Tweet "The talent shortage ranks as the #1 challenge for staffing professionals in 2018."] The candidate experience is arguably more important than ever. Why? Staffing firms have an unprecedented incentive to make their candidates happy. Candidate-related concerns dominate the results of the survey. Candidate acquisition is again one of the top three priorities for staffing firms (42 percent say it’s a top priority), and the talent shortage is once again the top challenge for staffing professionals (64 percent). Perhaps most alarmingly, only 13 percent of respondents redeploy at least half of their candidates. In all these cases, an improved candidate experience can have a dramatic positive impact. If you do decide to prioritize the candidate experience (and you should), who’s responsible? Respondents have mixed views. Forty-eight percent say individual recruiters are responsible and 45 percent say it’s a shared responsibility. We side with the 45: delivering a truly rewarding candidate experience is something the whole firm contributes to, regardless of who’s on the front lines with candidates.   Referrals Are The New King of the Hill [Tweet "Candidate referrals rank as the #1 source of high-quality candidates."] Another reason to focus on the candidate experience? Referrals are critical to your firm’s ability to place new candidates. Referrals from existing candidates jumps to the top of the list as the single best source of talent this year. Nearly 30 percent say referrals are the absolute best source of high-quality talent, and 62 percent place them in their top three. Delivering a great candidate experience can pay off not just for filling a position today, but also for sourcing other candidates in the future via positive referrals. Referrals are important for growing your client base as well. If you want to bring in new business (11-25% of a typical staffing firm’s revenue), referrals from happy clients are key. How should you best bolster your relationship with existing clients? To keep client relationships going strong, firms cite consistent communication with hiring managers as the best strategy (86 percent), followed by quarterly business reviews (51 percent) and performance scorecards (38 percent). Don’t sleep on the value of customer satisfaction. Although it was last year’s number one metric, customer satisfaction fell to third place this year on the top metrics used to measure the recruiting/recruitment delivery process, behind fill rate and hit rate. While production numbers are important for profitability (the top priority for staffing firms in 2018), you’ll be able to sustain that success only by delivering an incredible customer experience. 2018 looks to be a pivotal and profitable year for staffing firms poised to handle the challenges ahead. Are you ready to be proactive—about owning the candidate experience, embracing new technology, and making new ground? This year will be your chance to find out. Want more insight on the trends, priorities, and challenges staffing pros say they’re facing in the year ahead? Read the full report and learn more about the opportunity that lies ahead for your firm in 2018.

In mystery novels, hidden data is everything. A skilled scribe can give you every clue you need to solve the identity of the killer or uncover the secret plot twist and remain confident that her secret is safe. This is because the valuable data is hidden. It may be obscured by a mess of irrelevant details, and it may be hidden because you aren't asking the right questions. The same principles apply to business, except the stakes are considerably higher. If you ignore the hidden data, instead of delighted surprise, you may lose customers, clients, and opportunities. To start unlocking the benefits of hidden data, ask yourself these questions. Am I asking the right questions? Or, alternatively, Am I asking the questions at all or are they being asked for me?  The questions we ask about data are often dictated by the reporting tools we use. Let's say you want to track the success of a Twitter campaign. Are you tracking profile visits because it will illuminate this question or because it is one of the metrics that Twitter provides? Determine the question you are trying to answer, the metrics you'll need to answer that question, and assess if the reporting solution you have can answer that question. If it can't, then you need to find a tool that will. The specific metrics that you need to track inevitably will vary by industry and your specific situation. These metrics are a good starting point for staffing and recruiting firms. [Tweet "Are you asking the right questions about your #staffing firm's data?"] Do I have the capabilities to answer those questions?  Customization: How much freedom do you have to set the parameters of your report? How easy is it for you to generate custom reports as the need arises and compare disparate data sets? If you come up with a question, do you have the freedom to generate a report that can answer it? Data Availability and Volume: Does your reporting solution track the metric that you're looking to analyze. Is it manual or automatic? Any data that is automatically collected is more likely to be complete than data that is subject to the whims of those entering said data. Time-Frame: Check the parameters for your reporting tools. Some reporting solutions will only track data from the moment you generate a report onward. This is great if you have the foresight to predict what you want to track at the beginning of a project but worthless for analyzing data that has already occurred. Other reporting solutions will only archive the last three weeks or months or years. Others may not allow you to pinpoint specific dates. [Tweet "Are your #staffing reports getting the job done?"] Is my data siloed?  The average business is drawing from more source of data than ever before. Enterprises use an average of 483 apps, a large number of which provide data. The more independent sources of data your organization has, the less likely you are to have a complete picture of what that data means. To combat siloed data, ensure that your data is transparent, accessible, and shareable.  Data that is locked away from the people that can use it most is as valuable as no data at all. Work to create a community where data is openly shared and accessible to all of the members of your team or organization. Start building smarter reports that will take your firm to the next level! Check out the ebook, From Reporting Zero to Staffing Hero: How to Build Reports to Better Run Your Business, for an in-depth exploration of these three reporting questions and the ways they can inform a better reporting strategy.

Recruiters know every candidate is unique, but it doesn’t always feel that way to candidates. It’s easy to lose your personal touch in the constant race against time. Do you personalize the candidate’s name in a bulk email and call it a day? Your candidates have probably noticed. Here are some easy and powerful candidate communication tips for building better, deeper candidate relationships. [btn btn_link="http://www.bullhorn.com/resources/recruiters-guide-candidate-engagement/?LS=Website&LSD=Blog&LA=Candidate_Engagement_eBook&LAD=Candidate_Engagement_eBook&utm_source=blog&utm_medium=website" btn_color="orange" btn_size="" btn_text="Do you have a candidate engagement strategy?"]   Reference Your Candidate Relationship History You can’t be personal with your candidates if you don’t remember anything about them, so log all your emails with candidates and take notes. Identify aspirations and personal information that comes up in conversation. Build upon your history in all of your communications with your candidates. Leverage your ATS or Recruitment CRM to find past conversations and notes about the candidate. Even the smallest details that you remember will remind your candidates that you see them as more than a paycheck. Don’t have a history with the candidate? Ask new candidates questions that will lead them to reveal more about themselves. It’ll impress them when you remember these details down the road. Customize Bulk Emails Bulk email is an inevitable reality of recruiting communication, and it’s unrealistic to do away with it all together. But there are many ways you can customize a bulk email to make it as personal as one written from scratch. Consider personalizing these fields: Name: Never, ever send out an email that starts “Dear, candidate.” If you can’t be bothered to use their name, how are you going to convince them that you’ll find them the right opportunity for their unique qualifications? Job category/profession: Don’t alert candidate about jobs that don’t relate directly to them. Time since your last interaction: Did you last talk to the candidate yesterday or three years ago? Use this to inform your greeting to your candidate. Relationship history: Segment your bulk emails into categories based on your history with your candidate. Are they a new candidate? A previous hire? A recently unsuccessful applicant? Your tone and content should differ depending on your history with them. Provide Value Outside of Job Offers There are so many ways to assist a candidate outside of sending recent job openings. You can offer terrific career advice, an opportunity to network, interview guidance, or resume tips. Use the candidate profile you’ve developed and your history with your candidate to identify a way to provide value. Get creative! Contact Candidates How They Like to be Contacted Every candidate is different. This doesn’t just apply to their skill sets and experiences, but to their preferred means of communication as well. When reaching out to candidates, choose the the method they respond to. Do they prefer a phone call? SMS text? Email? LinkedIn Message? This is where a candidate relationship management tool comes in handy. With a good ATS, it should take little effort to track your previous engagements to determine which methods have worked in the past. You can also leverage candidate analytics to discover the best time and day to reach someone. Your candidates will be more likely to respond, and they’ll appreciate that you went the extra mile. There’s never been a better or more vital time to focus on candidate engagement. Get the candidate engagement ebook to discover whether you should focus more on candidate engagement, and if so, which processes and technology you can tap to support your efforts.

Engage 2017 was an exciting, action-packed meeting of 1,000+ staffing professionals. Read our recap of the first full day's keynotes from Steven Levitt, Art Papas, the Bullhorn product team, and General Ann E. Dunwoody. On the second full day of Engage, Tim Sanders wowed us with a message of more compassion at work, we heard new ideas for Bullhorn technology at the Innovation Throwdown, the Bullseye Awards honored the most innovative people and organizations in staffing, and our talented breakout session speakers left us inspired to create amazing customer and candidate experiences. Tim Sanders: Love Is the Killer App Tim Sanders is the author of five books, including the New York Times bestseller Love Is the Killer App: How To Win Business & Influence Friends. His high-energy, mile-a-minute keynote was full of stats and stories from his career in sales, including his life-changing experience working for Mark Cuban. But Sanders' key takeaway for Engage attendees was closer to the heart: Caring is the key to your success. Leave a legacy of love. Sanders learned early in life the power of relationships. "I learned that the best time to develop relationships is long before you need them," he says. He had a difficult childhood and was often bullied, but his grandmother taught him to lead with love, even when others weren't acting especially loveable. "I decided to find a way to engage the bullies and trolls," he says. He learned to put himself in others' shoes and rethink what might be causing them to behave in a certain way. That skill served him well in his sales career. He threw himself into building connections and collaborating with others, especially people outside of his own team. He describes walking into the lunchroom at Yahoo! and making a decision: Every day, he was going to find a new group of people to sit with. After two years of lunches with strangers inside the company, he'd built an army of connections and allies that helped him when he faced big challenges. He's found that collaboration is actually pretty rare, so if you're willing to put in the work to build connections with people, you can set yourself apart. "Collaboration for most people is a last resort and not a first response," he says. https://twitter.com/a_tuts/status/873233224679534592 "If you want to be a success in business, you have to devote yourself to the success of other people and expect nothing in return," he says. He encouraged attendees to share three things with others: Compassion: "Be an empathetic human being. Take someone else's perspective and wear it. That's a superpower at work. That validation and sense of community is the greatest gift humans can give each other." Network: Set a goal to connect three people every week, without expecting any direct benefit or taking credit for any work they do together after you introduce them. Knowledge: Sanders is convinced that today's readers will be tomorrow's leaders. He reads at least one non-fiction book every two weeks, and says that the best gift you could give a customer is a book about their business challenges that you've read and annotated. https://twitter.com/JoannaMamo/status/873236597310988289 Finally, he left the audience with four "big love assumptions" that allow him to "scale his ability to care about people." He always assumes about others: They are paying it forward. (Even if someone doesn't thank you, assume they are passing on the favor to someone else.) They are operating under the best intentions. They are more likely clumsy than evil. You were just like them at one time. (You got where you are because someone helped you. Your willingness to help them can make them just like you.) https://twitter.com/_TomBennett/status/873239321859543042 Tim Sanders was an inspiration at Engage. You can find out what's been inspiring him by checking out the reading list he made just for Engage attendees, at timsanders.com/engage. Innovation Throwdown At our fourth annual Innovation Throwdown, some of Bullhorn's developers took the stage to pitch their side projects—the new ideas they're working on as part of Bullhorn's Innovation Week.  https://twitter.com/lbuffjones/status/873167850562887680 Bullhorn developer Yi Ren got a lot of laughs from his creative presentation. https://twitter.com/LMcKelvey/status/873166756663177216 The Engage audience listened to the five pitches, then voted in real time for their favorite.   The Bullseye Awards Leslie Vickrey, CEO and founder of ClearEdge Marketing, hosted the first annual Bullseye Awards. The awards were designed to recognize the people and the companies creating innovation and excellence in staffing. We received 100 nominations for the 3 awards categories, and we chose 10 total finalists. Congratulations to the winners: Rising Star in Sales and Recruiting: Rachel Freedenberg, Division Manager at Treeline, Inc. Rising Star in Operations and Technology: Gina Chisholm, Director of Marketing and Technology at Kelly Mitchell Group Most Innovative Use of Technology: Apex Systems Breakout Session Highlights Engage 2017 featured more than 40 speakers across six tracks, focused on engaging customers, candidates, leadership, the future, and Bullhorn technology. The On-Demand Workforce Is Here to Stay Shiftgig CEO Eddie Lou outlined the future of work, in a workforce where 250,000 Baby Boomers are retiring every month. The Gig Economy is driven by Millennials and others who want new ways to work. Businesses can embrace those new expectations from workers—or be left behind. Lou shared five takeaways on the future of work: Today’s worker holds the power. Employees are no longer “lifers.” Members of Generation Z might work for 30 different companies over their careers. Frequent feedback is the new normal. Your online work is today’s resume. Labor platforms are consolidating to create a less fragmented staffing landscape. The biggest digital companies are also getting into the HR space. https://twitter.com/nicolemplant/status/872900282203746304 The Power of Failing Forward Loretta Penn, former President at Spherion Staffing, gave Engage attendees an inspiring lesson on failure. She thinks of the word "fail" as an acronym for "From All I’ve Learned." She shared common reasons leaders fail, and ways to rethink those mistakes, including:   Why We Fail: We put 'I' over 'we' and don't listen to others' feedback. The Fix: Surround yourself with people who will call you out on your shortcomings, and allow yourself to be vulnerable.   Why We Fail: We try to do too much. “When you have 19 goals, you don’t have goals anymore… you have a wish list,” she says. The Fix: Ask yourself three questions: “Can I do it?” “Why should I do it?” If someone else could do it, “when should you give it to them?” "We have a lot to learn, and we have a lot of opportunities to make mistakes," she says, "but most of all, we have a boat load of things that we can do to enhance our success." https://twitter.com/rpennie/status/872899805672071168 The Future of AI in Staffing One of the most interesting panel discussions was about finding the balance between bots and humans as AI starts to make an impact on the way we work in the staffing industry. While AI will make staffing firms faster and more efficient, it will not take the place of humans when it comes to building relationships, the panel agreed. "AI is not going to replace the connection in relationships," says Jay Brunetti, CEO of HireAlliance. “AI is a collaborative thing. It is there to augment those experiences. Embrace it and leverage these technologies,” says Eyal Grayevsky, CEO of FirstJob. But, Brunetti cautions, AI will take over parts of the traditional recruiting job. "If you are a recruiter that relies on speed, you won’t beat the machine. Make sure you are focused on the providing value." “The recruiters are going to be there, it is just a shift in skill set," Grayevsky says. Jonathan Novich, VP, Platform & Staffing Technologies at Bullhorn, warns that we need to be aware of our own prejudices and dispositions to ensure that we don't inadvertently pass them on to our AI. “We need to be cognizant of our own biases when we train,” he says. The panelists' overarching message: Embrace AI and experiment with new ways to improve your core business processes. “We can expect to work harder, but also tech will work harder for us,” says Adrianne Nelson of Staffing Industry Analysts. https://twitter.com/Bullhorn/status/873189773325864960 Fun at Engage We can't recap Engage without mentioning all of the fun that happened outside the sessions. For a new twist on the normal conference lunch, we hosted a Lunch & Learn on Thursday, where attendees joined speakers, marketplace partners, and Bullhorn pros for lively roundtable discussions. CareerBuilder hosted a Taste of Boston party, featuring our hometown's best burgers, lobster rolls, pizza, donuts, ice cream, and beers, plus t-shirt making and a full set by Bullhorn's home-grown band, Stampede. https://twitter.com/Diana_C_Fischer/status/873021754733670400 Engage 2017 Sponsors Huge thanks to all of our sponsors, who helped make Engage 2017 so memorable, including our platinum sponsors: CareerBuilder, CloudCall, First Advantage, Indeed, and Kyloe Partners. Engage 2018: Registration's Open! Get more pictures, videos and sound bites by following #BullhornEngage. Ready for next year? Registration for Engage 2018 is now open — reserve your spot for June 2018 in Boston! 

In a recent survey of more than 600 staffing leaders on their experience using Vendor Management Systems (VMS), the results were clear: staffing firms are largely dissatisfied with VMS. Many of the biggest factors in the dissatisfaction are related to time. Respondents to the survey, created by Bullhorn in collaboration with Inavero, noted that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish all essential tasks and that VMS processes are inefficient and frustrating. Here are three findings from the report to help you get the most out of your time using a VMS. Automate, automate, automate There’s no better way to improve your efficiency  and profitability than automation. Yet close to 60 percent of firms operate completely manually when it comes to screening, formatting, and submitting candidates, which dramatically slows down response times. From top to bottom, staffing firms with automated VMS workflows reported greater efficiency, faster speed, and higher numbers of candidate submissions and fill rates. Highlights include up to 55 percent more interviews in a month and 33 percent higher fill rates. It’s not all about speed, either. Firm satisfaction with VMS directly correlated to the level of steps that were automated. Respondents who automated 5 to 6 steps had nearly double the satisfaction rate as respondents who automated 1 to 2 steps. Analyze your time management Many of the issues related to VMS satisfaction were directly correlated with time management. Twenty-one percent of respondents reported a mismanagement of internal resources as one of the biggest barriers to VMS profitability and 46 percent of respondents reported dissatisfaction with the time spent submitting candidates through the VMS. Most firms aren’t operating as efficiently as they’d like to be, and reconfiguring the way your recruiters use their time can go a long way in improving your efficiency. In our survey, we asked firms to estimate how their recruiters spend time on various VMS-related tasks. As you can see, recruiters spend less than half their day actively sourcing and screening candidates. Much of the day is spent on non-value add tasks that could be automated. Do you monitor how your recruiters are spending time? By tracking the time spent on VMS, you can cut out unnecessary tasks and create a more efficient system. Accurately report on your metrics, NOW Are you tracking your VMS metrics, like time-to-submit, time-to-fill, and fill-rate? If you’re not, how can you ensure that the data in your ATS is accurate and up-to-date? The sooner you start reporting on your metrics, the sooner you start testing process improvements that will give you the greatest gains. Having metrics at your fingertips also allows you to proactively take your results to clients to foster collaborative strategies for mutual improvement. Real-time tactical feedback can allow your firm to make improvements to efficiency as you detect them— a must in an increasingly competitive and time-sensitive landscape. Want to learn more about VMS automation? Check out this infographic on why automating your VMS process is one of the best investments you can make.  

We’re thrilled to announce that Steven Levitt, the award-winning writer and economist famous for taking an unconventional and analytical approach to problem-solving, is taking the main stage at Engage 2017. Levitt is the co-author of four New York Times bestsellers, the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, and one of TIME Magazine’s 100 People Who Shape Our World. Steven Levitt and co-author Stephen Dubner left an indelible cultural mark in 2005 with Freakonomics, a book applying creative thinking filtered through the lens of an economist to solve life’s riddles. Freakonomics became an instant cultural phenomenon, spawning follow-up books, a film, a New York Times blog, and a podcast, all while spending an impressive eight years on the New York Times bestseller list. [single_quote quote_text="Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done." quote_name="Steven Levitt" quote_company="Think Like a Freak"]   Levitt has used his limitless curiosity and unconventional approach to problem-solving to reveal hidden insights about everything from business to bagels and baby names—and that’s just the B’s! The guiding principles that define his work—the belief that simple questions can lead to startling conclusions and that data can tell surprising stories if you know where to look—have profound implications for staffing firms and leaders looking to adopt a unique perspective to their business decisions. With his trademark blend of captivating storytelling and unconventional analysis, Steven will tell counterintuitive stories that enlighten, illuminate, and inspire. Register for Engage today to be a part of this can’t-miss keynote and learn how to approach your business like a freak. [btn btn_link="engage.bullhorn.com" btn_color="orange" btn_size="lg" btn_text="Learn More About Engage 2017"] About Engage: Engage is the ideal event for exploring the opportunities and challenges associated with accelerating your business growth in the new relationship economy. You’ll learn to build better business relationships and more effectively engaging customers, candidates, and employees. We’ll explore the impact of emerging technologies on relationship-based businesses. Now celebrating our 10th year, Engage brings together practitioners and innovative business leaders in B2B services industries including Staffing and Recruiting, SaaS, and Consulting, but is still intimate enough that you’ll see some of your favorite staffing friends.

What trends are shaping the staffing industry in 2017? What do staffing pros see as top priorities? Opportunities? Obstacles? For the seventh consecutive year, we asked and you answered: More than 1,440 staffing and recruiting professionals worldwide, from firms of all sizes operating in all sectors, weighed in with thoughts on the current staffing landscape.  In North America specifically, more than 800 respondents provided insight on what’s affecting their firms in 2017. They shared their outlook on future performance and revenue growth, top priorities and challenges for 2017, political sentiment and industry confidence under the Trump administration, candidate and client engagement, and much more! Here are just a few of the many key takeaways from the 2017 North American Staffing and Recruitment Trends Report: Above and Beyond Business as Usual. Get your copy of the full report here. [Tweet "#Staffing pros give their insights and predictions for 2017"] Bring it on, 2017! 2016 was a good year for staffing firms. More than three three-quarters of respondents surveyed at the tail end of 2016 expected to meet or exceed 2016 revenue goals. Still, more than one in five (22 percent) anticipated a revenue shortfall for 2016. So staffing professionals expect more of the same for 2017, right? Wrong. Expectations for this year are through the roof. Four out of five respondents foresee a revenue increase in 2017 (80 percent), and almost one in five (17 percent) expect revenue growth of more than 25 percent. What’s driving this optimism? Outstanding growth from temporary placements, driven by repeat clients facing talent shortages in key sectors. Repeat business will be crucial for firms since most predict existing clients will generate more than half of their revenue in 2017. Financial Priorities Take Precedent Like most years, staffing firms have their plates full in 2017. Between the talent shortage, technology adoption, candidate and client engagement, and ambitious revenue goals, staffing firms aren’t lacking options when it comes to allocating their resources. With finite time and money, firms must choose wisely, or risk falling behind the competition. Which priorities stand out? Increasing profitability and driving revenue top respondents’ priorities lists, ranked by 56 percent and 47 percent respectively as a primary goal. The talent shortage also continued to weigh heavily on respondents: Candidate acquisition and sourcing came in third with thirty-seven percent. [Tweet "56% of #staffing pros cite increasing profitability as a primary goal for 2017"] Priorities were remarkably consistent across roles and firm size with a few notable exceptions. Executives were predictably more concerned with revenue growth than those in production roles (54 percent and 44 percent, respectively). The very largest firms (over $250 million in revenue) were less likely to place revenue growth in their top three priorities than smaller firms. Employment brand development and marketing were top priorities for large firms. What are firms least concerned with accomplishing in 2017? Moving to VMS ranked as the lowest priority, with 36 percent ranking it in the bottom three. But sleeping on VMS could be a mistake: About 50 percent of larger firms (over $100 million in revenue) use a VMS to drive at least 25 percent of their revenue. Obstacles to Success Are Everywhere You Look Staffing leaders may have high hopes for 2017, but that doesn’t mean they think it’ll be an easy year. A number of disruptions and challenges stand in the way of firms looking to improve revenue and profitability. The firms that are best able to anticipate and rise above these challenges stand the best chance of meeting lofty expectations for the year. Mentioned earlier, the talent shortage is the most cited obstacle for 2017. More than 60 percent of all respondents rank it as a top three challenge, followed by pricing pressures (53 percent) and economic uncertainty (37 percent). [Tweet "60% of #recruitment pros say the talent shortage is a major obstacle for 2017"] Do staffing firms see the Trump Administration as an obstacle or an opportunity? The jury’s still out; respondents were divided on the implications of Trump’s presidency for their firm’s success. Thirty-eight percent believe their firm will be better off in 2017 under President Trump’s administration, compared to 21 percent who believe their firm will be worse off. Roughly one out of five respondents listed Trump’s presidency as a top macroeconomic concern for 2017. Technology related-concerns round out the list of the top challenges staffing firms face in 2017. More than 20 percent of respondents cited leveraging technology to improve business operations and expanding their VMS model as a top challenge. Technology Will Separate the Contenders From the Pretenders Speaking of technology, staffing firms have taken a proactive approach to technology adoption: 64 percent of firms use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to track candidate activity and 60 percent use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system for business development. But there’s still plenty of room for improvement: More than a third of firms (34 percent) make fewer than 25 percent of their total placements from candidates already in their ATS or CRM. Many staffing firms plan to stay ahead of the competition through technology in 2017: 40 percent of professionals predict an increase in tech investments in the coming year. [Tweet "2 out of 5 staffing pros predict an increase in tech investments in the coming year"] The most innovative and aggressive firms stride towards success through greater operational efficiency, client retention, candidate engagement, and pure hard work and grit. In other words, they’re going above and beyond business as usual, and the findings of this year’s report highlight exactly how they’re doing it. Want more insight on the trends, priorities, and challenges staffing pros say they face in the year ahead? Read the full report and learn more about the opportunity that lies ahead for firms in 2017.

2016 was a solid year for the staffing and recruitment industry. Revenue was up, repeat client business boomed, staffing leaders were optimistic, and cutting-edge technologies helped support this momentum. Overall, the past year was positive and a good one to be in the staffing and recruitment business. So what does 2017 have in store for firms? What opportunities exist? What challenges lie ahead? How do firms feel about present economic and political factors? What’s their outlook on hiring? Their take on Trump? How are they serving clients and candidates? And where are they placing their bets and making investments? These are just a few of the questions we sought to uncover in our soon-to-be-released 2017 North American Staffing and Recruiting Trends Report, an annual report for which we conducted a global survey of more than 1,400 staffing and recruiting professionals at firms of all sizes operating in all sectors. For this year’s survey, respondents shared how they’re planning to tackle challenges, overcome uncertainty, and build sustainable profitability in the year ahead. Here are a few highlights: 2017 looks like a banner year for the staffing industry in comparison to last year. Curious about what’s happening across the staffing landscape, what firms expect in terms of performance in 2017, key performance metrics they use to manage their business, and best practices you can tap into to boost your business? Request a copy of the full report to learn more about the opportunity that lies ahead for staffing and recruiting firms in 2017.

You probably know reports are essential for tracking and improving the performance of your staffing firm, but do you take a strategic approach to creating and using them? In the battle against time, staffing reports often get the short-shrift. Do you run a report with the pre-set defaults that come with your reporting solution or with custom parameters that make sense for your business? Do you run reports with a purpose or because it's part of your job responsibility? Do you make adjustments based on the data or do you just collect it? Reporting can be incredibly impactful for the success of yourself, your team, and your firm if you take the right approach. Ask yourself these three questions to get in the right mind-frame for building and running reports. [btn btn_link="http://www.bullhorn.com/resources/reporting-zero-to-staffing-hero/?LS=Website&LSD=Blog&LA=Reports_to_Better_Run_Your_Business&LAD=Reports_to_Better_Run_Your_Business&utm_source=blog&utm_medium=website" btn_color="orange" btn_size="lg" btn_text="Get the new ebook: From Reporting Zero to Staffing Hero!"] Are you using the right metrics? What data are you tracking and how are you using it? A staffing firm’s data can be broken down into two larger categories: performance metrics and business health metrics. Performance metrics are essential for improving operational efficiency and empowering your team to be as successful as possible. Business health metrics are critical for managing new and existing accounts, revenue, and profitability. Check out the ebook, From Reporting Zero to Staffing Hero, for an in-depth analysis of the metrics that comprise these two essential categories of data. Are you building the right reports? The way you build your reports is just as important as the data you use. Before you build a staffing report, be sure you understand what information you’re looking for, why you’re creating the report, and who the report is for. Are you building reports to tell a story about what happened or are you looking to gain insights about what decisions to make next? In particular, consider: What Question Are You Trying to Answer? What important question does this staffing report answer? If you’re not asking a specific question, you’re likely to end up with data overload and a report that says too much without really saying anything at all. If you find that you're running a report that doesn't answer any particular question, chances are that you can replace it with a more efficient or useful report. What Purpose Does This Report Serve? Are you running a report to find areas for improvement? To build a narrative? To support a suggestion for your business? Data is about context, and understanding your report’s purpose allows you to select the appropriate context. Are your reporting tools getting the job done? You might have a great idea for an impactful staffing report, but do you have the technical capabilities to actually build it? Don’t let technological limitations from your reporting solution prevent you from analyzing and presenting data in a meaningful way. Some questions to consider: Can you build ad-hoc reports? Pre-built reports limit your ability to discover new information to unforeseen questions. Ad-hoc reporting gives you the freedom to think up a question and answer it in the most precise manner possible. Want to discover how many calls a specific recruiter makes on average on Fridays? An ad-hoc staffing report is your best bet. Does your report utilize real-time data? Real-time data enables real-time decisions. Are you using the most relevant and recent data available to you? The staffing industry is fast-paced, and older data may be holding you back from making the most informed decisions possible. Is your report aesthetically pleasing? Looks matter, at least when it comes to reports. Poor presentation can undercut the meaning and impact of your data, or it may ensure that your report doesn't get seen at all. Can you illustrate your reports with charts and graphs? Visual representations of your data are often more striking and persuasive. Start building smarter reports that will take your firm to the next level! Check out the new ebook, From Reporting Zero to Staffing Hero: How to Build Reports to Better Run Your Business, for an in-depth exploration of these three reporting questions and the ways they can inform a better reporting strategy.  

How do you approach interviews? Do you focus on building relationships, or are you just following a checklist and trying to move on to the next task? Your interviews with candidates shape the candidate experience, so it's worth the effort to revisit and refine your interviewing process. Recruiting all comes down to relationships, says Donna Carroll, global head of professional staffing at North Highland. She’s been in the industry for more than 20 years, and she knows that an important part of relationship-building is getting the interview right. “We have an appreciation and understanding for the difference between a great recruiter and an average one, and a high level of expectation around the candidate experience,” she says of North Highland. We asked her what interview mistakes recruiters should stop making. Here’s what she had to say. More On The Blog: 3 Proactive Ways to Handle Open Reqs Mistake No. 1: Judging Too Quickly Recruiters often have a tendency to judge people right out of the gate and not give them a chance in the interview, Carroll says. If someone isn’t dressed as expected or doesn’t seem to have the level of manners deemed necessary for a plum position, recruiters often pass judgment and write them off. “We’ve got to be comfortable with the shifting world of work,” Carroll says. “There may be people who don’t present the same way we do or handle themselves the way we’ve expected them to. It just means people have to be coached and schooled a little more on that.” Be flexible and understanding, Carroll says, and look for the diamond in the rough who could be your next perfect placement. [Tweet "#Recruiting Interview Mistake: Judging #candidates too quickly"] Mistake No. 2: Running on Autopilot Recruiters should avoid falling into a rut when they’re talking with candidates, Carroll says. It’s easy to switch to autopilot mode during an interview — ask the same questions, note the same answers, check on their success metrics. But to really shine as a recruiter, you have to take the interview a step further. “It’s not about the process; it’s about building a relationship,” Carroll says. Millennials in particular want to understand more about the companies they might work for and how their work will affect it, rather than just learning about the tasks that need to be done. Carroll recommends being more of a “talent agent” than a recruiter by asking questions about fit and culture, rather than just whether a candidate has the necessary skills. [Tweet "#Recruiting Interview Mistake: Checking off the boxes"] Mistake No. 3: Failing to Follow Up As a recruiter, it can be easy to focus just on the short term. But, interviews should take the long term into account, Carroll says. Use the interview as an occasion to set expectations for the relationship down the road. Talk about what the candidate might expect throughout the process, and follow up with them about next steps if they need another placement. “Touching base with an individual, even once they’re placed, is a high-value tool and something that’s not maximized,” she says. [Tweet "#Recruiting Interview Mistake: Failing to follow up"] Mistake No. 4: Not Staying Relevant No matter what segment of the industry you’re in, you have to keep on eye on the horizon, Carroll says. “You have to be passionate about what you do and keep yourself out there.” Carroll recommends participating in user groups and associations within the industry you recruit for. These meetings can connect you with potential clients and candidates but more importantly will help you stay up-to-date on the biggest issues in the industry, giving you ideas to talk about in your candidate interviews. [Tweet "#Recruiting Interview Mistake: Falling out of the loop"] In charge of a growing recruiting team? Manage the challenges can hamper your recruiting efforts with these metrics to guide your business.  

Five Major Challenges for Consulting Agency Leaders   Consultants face industry-specific challenges each and every day that make their jobs difficult. Communication can get jumbled when multiple people are working on the same project, frequent travel interferes with productivity, and email inboxes are constantly clogged. In this whitepaper we outline five major pain points that consulting agency leaders have to deal with as they attempt to run and grow their businesses. We also offer solutions for each of these issues so that you can keep your clients and employees happy. Some of the challenges addressed in this paper include: Striving for open communication within complex accounts Keeping up with cluttered email inboxes Maintaining productivity in the face of heavy travel demands Preventing and coping with employee turnover To download "Five Major Challenges for Consultants", please fill out the short form below [marketo_form form_id="1269"]

  Top 5 Ways to Scare Away Recruiters [INFOGRAPHIC] Biggest Recruiter Pet Peeves This infographic defines the top five candidate behaviors that scare away recruiters and other factors that negatively impact a job seeker’s chance of landing a job. The anonymous survey of 1,500 recruiters and hiring managers revealed that applying to irrelevant jobs topped the list of recruiter pet peeves.  

  How Are Recruiters Using Social Media? [INFOGRAPHIC] Trends in Social Recruiting In February 2012, Bullhorn released its first social recruiting report. This infographic explores which social networks are utilized most often and how effective each network is for sourcing candidates.

For something so important to the success of a business, analytics are far too commonly insufficient,  inaccessible, and incomplete. An effective reporting suite needs to be robust, intuitive, and customizable to your business needs. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce our newest product, Bullhorn Canvas, an ad hoc reporting tool that enables you to know your business inside and out. What is Bullhorn Canvas? Bullhorn Canvas is a business analytics suite that combines the power of deep analytics with a user-friendly experience, enabling you to explore every dimension of your business. Unlock powerful data-driven insights and take action to drive business results, fast. Your Business Isn’t Generic, So Why Are Your Reports? Bullhorn Canvas goes beyond standard reporting, putting the power of ad hoc reporting in your hands. Select only the metrics that are relevant to your business and ignore the white noise. You can build any type of report for any purpose and customize as needed. With Bullhorn Canvas, you can unlock the data that would otherwise be siloed across departments, teams and regions. Find the Data That Matters and Share it with the People That Matter—Your Coworkers Bullhorn Canvas gives you complete visibility into the state of your business. Track new and current accounts, gauge employee performance trends, and monitor employee activities to provide custom feedback, boost performance, and capitalize on the right growth opportunities With its ad hoc reporting flexibility, your time can be spent analyzing reports instead of  running them. Find something worth sharing? All the data in Bullhorn Canvas can easily be shared with coworkers, facilitating necessary business investments and improvements. Real-Time Data for Real-Time Decisions Utilize real-time business and performance data to inform smarter business investments. Understand the true health of your business with powerful insights from otherwise hidden data and make real improvements in employee performance, account management, and operational efficiency. Learn more about how Bullhorn Canvas can help your business by signing up for the Dec. 6 webinar!    

Getting dumped by your customer can be devastating, especially when it’s one that’s been with you since the beginning or one of your biggest advocates. But if we’re honest with ourselves, customers don’t just decide to leave. There were likely plenty of telltale signs indicating your customer was less than thrilled or on the market for another solution. Maybe you ignored them, or maybe you didn’t have the right tools in place to even know a problem was growing. Either way, your customer’s gone and you’ve learned a valuable lesson -- one that’ll help you proactively look for relationship signals that’ll help you be better prepared the next time around. Here are 5 things that signal your customer may be about to jump ship: Silence. No communication means there’s no relationship. Engaged customers actively use your platform, ask questions, and provide feedback on ways you can make it better. If they’ve gone silent all of a sudden, you may have a disengaged customer that’s looking for an escape plan. Your Contact’s Changed. When your contact transitions into another role or leaves the company, it can be a sign that changes are coming. Someone inherits the role and that person may have very little experience with your solution or may not see the value you’ve provided and can continue to deliver. Even worse -- that person could be looking to make some sweeping changes to prove he’s different from his predecessor. For the sake of your relationship and to avoid potential churn, it’s critical to start engaging your new contact before he seeks other options. Your NPS is Plunging. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a common metric companies use to measure customer happiness. Your company may use this or some other customer health metric, but it’s important to pay careful attention to the trends. A significant drop in NPS is a clear sign your customers aren’t happy and may be shopping around for alternatives. Acquisition. Your customer gets acquired by another company. The new company will likely have their own vendor relationships, but that doesn’t mean you’ll lose the account. Don’t wait for your customer to contact you because it might be too late. Be proactive and offer assistance during the transition. These situations serve as reminders about why strong relationships matter in business. If you weren’t highly engaged with your customer and didn’t know about an impending change in their business, it may be too late when you find out. Spend Dramatically Drops. The amount your customers are spending with you can correlate with the strength of your relationship. If your customer cuts their spend, even though you think you’re delivering value, there’s a good chance your customer relationship may be on the downturn. When you’re faced with these scenarios, the key is to engage and be proactive with your customers. Don’t be defensive. Instead, take the opportunity to listen and understand your customer’s needs so you can get your relationship back on track. Use technology to keep track of conversations with clients, NPS, and other customer health trends over time and you can avoid being blindsided and get ahead of customer issues before they arise. Learn more about how you can use technology to proactively address client relationship issues, reduce customer churn, and grow your business by keeping your clients happy.

Bullhorn Engage 2016 is here! Earlier today, the 1,000 attendees gathered in Boston heard about Bullhorn's vision from CEO Art Papas, got a peek inside new Bullhorn innovation, and learned business (and sleep!) lessons from Arianna Huffington. Whether you're with us at Engage or you're following along from home, here's a recap of Thursday's keynote messages.   Art Papas: The Bullhorn Vision How do you engage the most important constituents in your work life: customers, leaders, and talent. That was the question Art Papas asked to kick off Engage. He shared three themes that are shaping today's business. 1. We're living in an age of transparency. We're being held accountable (by customers and by employees) in ways we never were before. Social media and online review platforms have amplified word of mouth. Good news spreads fast, and bad news spreads faster. It's not just consumers rating restaurants or hotels. B2B software buyers can visit software review sites and find out what it's really like to be a Bullhorn customer. Prospective hires can read employee reviews on Glassdoor.  But leaders can't control every single customer interaction. Somewhere, one of your employees might be doing something that's disgruntling a customer. These days, you're only as good as your worst customer interaction. You can think of your customer experience like a train. The train looks good. It's nice and shiny and clean. Everything's working. Then, someone doesn't return a customer's message. Or one employee leaves a bad review on Glassdoor. So, a little spot of graffiti shows up on the train. What happens next matters a lot. A little graffiti isn't a big deal, but if you ignore it instead of quickly cleaning it up, the train quickly gets covered in graffiti.  What's the solution? Technology alone isn't the fix, but it can play a role to warn you about the graffiti you need to pay attention to. https://twitter.com/Bullhorn/status/740898023371378688   2. Robots are here, but they'll never take the place of relationship builders. Think about an industry that was nonexistent in the 1960s: Staffing. Now, contingent staffing is a $120 billion business.  Another industry that was nonexistent just a decade or two ago: Robotics. Art has been interested in the rise of robots for several years. What's crazy is how quickly robots are improving. They're sophisticated, they can learn and they're taking humans' jobs. Robots are currently replacing accountants, telemarketers and factory workers. That's a little scary, but there's a silver lining: Robots won't ever take the place of humans for relationship building. When people get bad medical news, or need help finding a new job, or need advice about improving their business, they want a human's help. https://twitter.com/hurststatus/status/740900737723596801 In a nutshell: If you're in sales, you have a future. If you adopt the adage that we're all in sales, we all have a future.   3. Work needs purpose. The conversation about work culture has gotten a little cacophonous. Core values, purpose, culture...is this just about millennials? Art says no. We're all working all the time, thanks to our always-on smartphones with hundreds of red notifications. When you feel over-worked and exhausted, it's natural to come to work, look around, and wonder what the mission really is. Maybe you hear talk about core values, but you don't really see them in action.  Gallup research shows companies need a mission people want to get behind -- beyond just making the boss rich. With tools like Glassdoor, they can find a company with the mission they want.  If you're a nonprofit, it's easy to clarify your mission and rally people around it. But how can B2B companies define a meaningful mission? At Bullhorn, we came up with a mission that really resonated: Create an incredible customer experience.  https://twitter.com/Bullhorn/status/740902084162293760 We created a huge sign for our new building lobby. We also created new core values that are designed to reflect the behavior we want from employees. These values are based on what we've learned over the past decade about what customers like and what makes them want to come back and do business with us again. We got really specific about what to do — and what not to do. We score people on those core values every quarter. Our incredible customer experience cycle helps employees see how the mission relates to them. If we live the mission, then we have raving fans, who grow the business by telling their friends, which means we have to hire more people, create management jobs for our top performers to move into, we can create better products and services and drive growth and momentum in a positive cycle. Art drives home the core values that lead to incredible customer experiences by publicly recognizing Bullhorn employees who have done great work. https://twitter.com/gordonburnes/status/740904144882520064 The results: The customer experience index went off the charts, sales went through the roof, Bullhorn's NPS grew, and the employee experience went way up -- Bullhorn used to have a 3.0 score on Glassdoor, and now has a 4.5. "For me as a leader, I feel better about what I'm doing. I get my energy from this. It's really rewarding. Culture isn't just touchy-feely; it's about actually running a better business," Art says.   Turning Vision into Innovation After Art outlined the vision and mission that drive Bullhorn, Matt Fisher and Bryan Roy took the stage to share how Bullhorn is translating that vision into innovative new products and features. Their key focus: using technology to create "radical transparency" and better attract talent and engage people. They gave a sneak peek at two new Bullhorn technologies: Sales Duel: We've built the spirit of fantasy football into sales contests to truly impact behavior. Bullhorn's first foray into gamification of sales performance is available now at salesduel.com.  Canvas: Ad hoc reporting is here! Our new drag-and-drop report builder puts reporting directly in your hands. Build reports just the way you want them. The goal: to make automation simpler -- streamlining processes by clicks, not by code. https://twitter.com/Bullhorn/status/740913309470359552 One of the themes of Art's keynote was how much we're all working. We're always connected to work and we're bombarded by notifications and messages. Our Thursday afternoon keynote speaker, Arianna Huffington, dug into how we can all cope and improve: Sleep!   Arianna Huffington: Leadership and the Importance of Sleep Arianna Huffington, author and founder of The Huffington Post, has a new book, "The Sleep Revolution." She realized nine years ago that something about her hard-charging, busy career had to change. She collapsed from exhaustion and after seeing many doctors, the diagnosis was simple: She needed to sleep more. The result of that moment nine years ago has been a deep dive into the science of sleep. "Humans aren't machines," she says, and in order to build productive workplaces, we need to realize that and make some changes to our always-connected work culture. She shared a few changes her team has made at The Huffington Post to help employees rest, recharge and come to work as their best selves: They banned devices from meetings. "We give people beautiful leatherbound notebooks to take notes. If you have something more important to do, don't come to the meeting. But if you come, be present." She says her leadership meetings have gotten shorter and more productive because of the device ban. They give employees enough time to really rest and recharge, especially on vacation. They borrowed an idea from the German automaker Daimler. When an employee puts up an Out of Office email message, it's some version of: "I'm on vacation, if this is urgent, please contact [another contact person], or email me again after my vacation end date. This email will be deleted." When employees return from vacation, they do so to an empty inbox, and they're not tempted to check and respond to email while they're gone. They focus on building teams. Everyone needs someone they can pass work to. "If you're a leader and you haven't built a team to delegate things to, you're failing as a leader." After her recent vacation, she was humbled to find that everything ran just fine without her. They opened two nap rooms. At first, she said people were hesitant to be seen taking a 20-minute nap in the middle of the work day. But now, the rooms are always full as people take an opportunity to hit the reset button. She predicts that nap rooms will become as universal as conference rooms in offices. "Sleep affects every aspect of our health, productivity, and happiness," she says. She encourages leaders to read her book for sleep advice. Her number one tip? Don't sleep with your phone. Her bedtime routine includes "gently escorting" all of her devices out of her bedroom, taking a hot bath, and letting the day end so she can recharge and prepare for the next day. "Burnout isn't necessary to succeed. Sleep is becoming a competitive advantage. Time we sleep is time we can connect with ourselves to allow deeper wisdom to take over." She looks forward to a newly developing culture of sleep, where it's easier to recruit and retain talent, be productive and creative, and have the resilience we need to manage the change and acceleration we're all facing. Follow Engage coverage on Twitter #BullhornEngage. If you're at Engage, download the mobile app iTunes or Google Play. We'll see you at this afternoon's sessions!

Engage 2016 is only a week away! Don't miss this chance to leverage the conference's in-depth sessions and interactive product access, network with your many amazing peers, and take advantage of Engage's numerous educational features. Check out "Engage 2016 by the Numbers" below to find out more about what Engage can offer to you and your team, and register today at engage.bullhorn.com.