Take your database to the next level with AI
In today’s unpredictable recruitment landscape, the most successful agencies are working smarter, not harder, by leveraging cutting-edge technology to transform their operations. But even the most powerful technology can only take you so far unless it’s built on a strong foundation: a clean database.
A meticulous approach to your data, combined with the power of AI and automation, can elevate your business to unprecedented heights. Below, read insights from a conversation between Bullhorn experts Erik Mateev, Kat Lazzaro, and Tom Washington on building a clean database – and the tools you can lean on to keep it that way.
The unseen impact of dirty data
Data hygiene, at its core, is about ensuring your database contains information that is clean, accurately formatted, and complete. It’s about having all the right information exactly where your team needs it to succeed.
Why is this so crucial, especially now?
- Speed and efficiency: Incomplete records cripple your team’s ability to work with data. Searches become less effective, automations stumble, and even your analytics can produce skewed results.
- Trust and adoption: If your recruiters don’t trust the data, they’ll abandon your ATS and resort to external sources – often rediscovering information you already own, leading to wasted time and unnecessary costs.
- Enhanced business processes: Clean, complete profiles enrich your understanding of candidates, clients, and jobs. This improves everything from business development to the core recruitment process, making everyone’s life easier.
The recruitment market is undeniably tough. Our annual GRID Industry Trend Reports have revealed a steady decrease in revenue growth for agencies since 2022. Companies are cautious with hiring, and candidates prioritise job security. Yet, some agencies consistently outperform the market.
What’s their secret? They’re focused on improving candidate experience, matching talent to jobs more effectively, and drastically reducing time-to-fill. They’re achieving this by upgrading their technology, particularly in automation and AI.
Automation: The engine of clean data
Poor workflows and manual data entry are notorious culprits behind bad data. Recruiters, understandably, prioritise revenue-generating activities over admin tasks. This is where automation becomes your secret weapon.
Consider these game-changing automation use cases:
- Automated status updates: Instead of relying on individual recruiters to manually update candidate or sales contact statuses, build business rules within your automation platform. For instance, if a candidate hasn’t had a note or submission in a set timeframe, their status automatically shifts from ‘active’ to ‘passive.’ This removes subjectivity and ensures consistent data.
- Consolidating candidate skills: Recruiters often input variations of the same skill (e.g., “Java,” “J2EE,” “Javascript”). Automation can standardise these, consolidating them under a singular, uniform skill. This makes searching for talent significantly easier and more accurate.
- Self-service data hygiene: A significant portion of your ATS candidates might be “dead” – their information is outdated, rendering them effectively unreachable. You can leverage automation to build lists of these dormant candidates (e.g., last note date over 24 months ago, no submissions, never placed). Then, launch an automated engagement campaign, sending surveys that prompt candidates to update their resumes or missing contact details. This maximises your existing investment in candidate acquisition and reactivates valuable talent. Traditionally, uncontactable candidates were archived, but with AI, that’s no longer the only option.
AI: Beyond automation – enriching and optimising
While automation handles the “how,” AI takes on the “what,” “where,” and “why.” Recruitment AI tools are capable of going beyond simple rule-based actions to intelligent data enrichment and optimised matching.
Here are a few powerful ways AI is transforming data hygiene and recruitment:
- Enriching candidate and job data: Many ATS records are missing critical information (e.g., candidate email, phone number, current employer, or job salary, start date). This data often exists elsewhere in your system, like in a candidate’s CV, but isn’t parsed into the correct fields. An enrichment agent can automatically extract this information from places like the CV and populate the right fields. This instantly makes previously uncontactable candidates reachable, dramatically improving searchability and recruiter engagement. Think of it in two phases. Phase one cleans up what you already have, and phase two then leverages automation for re-engagement campaigns, asking candidates for fresh details directly.
- Creating intelligent candidate summaries: Recruiters spend precious seconds (four to seven, on average!) scanning CVs to assess fit. This approach risks missing great candidates or pursuing unsuitable ones. With AI, you can create a new data point: a concise candidate summary. This summary, generated by an AI enrichment agent, pulls key information from the CV and other relevant fields to provide a snapshot of a candidate’s strengths and ideal job types. This summary can be prominently displayed at the top of the candidate profile, accelerating candidate review and improving recruiter efficiency. It also provides a pre-built summary for client pitches, further streamlining workflows. This is scalable; the AI runs continuously in the background, summarising every new candidate.
- Optimizing search and match: The biggest blocker to internal database usage is often trust in the data. Search and match technology tackles this head-on by fostering a “database-first” mindset. Here’s how:
- Intelligent search construction: Search and match takes key job information, expands it with synonyms, and builds a complex Boolean search.
- Machine learning ranking: Results are then passed through a machine learning model trained on billions of data points. This model understands historical ideal candidate profiles for specific job types and ranks candidates based on actual outcome-specific data, not just keywords.
- Convenience and efficiency: The top 10 recommended candidates are surfaced directly within the job record, providing instant insights. Recruiters can expand this search to see all matched candidates, ranked for their convenience. Crucially, if they do need to go to external sources for candidates, search and match technology replicates the search across integrated job boards and highlights candidates who already exist in your Bullhorn database, preventing duplication and wasted spend.
Your path to staying ahead of the curve
By embracing robust data hygiene practices, leveraging automation to streamline workflows, and deploying AI to enrich data and optimise matching, you’re not just solving existing challenges – you’re differentiating your business and staying ahead of the curve. It’s about empowering your recruiters, maximising your existing talent pool, and ensuring your business is ready to thrive in the future of recruitment.
To learn more and see these solutions in action, check out the full webinar.