Using Bullhorn to Power a Data-Driven Strategy in Customer Support, Candidate Communications, and Crisis Response

SSi People has been placing highly-specialised consultants in the IT space since 1998. In this time, the team has learned how to serve their market and the importance of technology to underpin their business strategy. In 2017, as SSi People planned for their next phase of growth, they invested in Bullhorn for Salesforce (formerly known as Talent Rover) as the central platform of their operation. As they needed a powerful CRM in addition to ATS capacity and strong data processing and reporting to drive their performance, the Salesforce platform was the obvious choice.

‘Bullhorn has been fantastic for us, it’s given us a lot of insight, intelligence, and transparency into what is going on in the organisation, so we can make informed decisions going forward.’

Ron Seibert CEO & President

The Solution

Since implementing Bullhorn for Salesforce, SSi People has proven to be anything but your average user, taking an innovative approach to the system in what can be considered a best practice for all. Integral to their success is the health of their data as well as automation and smart process design. “Our data quality is very good since we’ve gone over to Bullhorn for Salesforce. I run reports every day for coding mistakes and contacts that are set up as candidates and not clients and vice versa,” shares James (Jim) Selker, Director of Customer Care, Technical Interviewing, and Project Management, as well as the Salesforce mastermind at SSi People.

The Results

This is how the SSi People team uses the system to strengthen relationships with clients and candidates, speed up submission times, and respond to crises.

Predicting client demand for a just-in-time submission model

As competition increased, SSi People realised it needed a change in approach to deliver to the needs of their eight largest clients, so the team began running reports in Bullhorn for Salesforce to track their buying behavior. The insights they discovered have made them change the way they submit candidates to job reqs. Instead of waiting for an open job to come in, they can now predict when they will be released, then pre-qualify candidates, and build out call lists in Bullhorn for Salesforce for matches to the job. When the job arrives, they use Bullhorn Marketplace Partner SMSmagic to push SMS notifications as well as Email to the pre-selected candidates and if they are happy to be submitted for the job, can process the candidates in a matter of minutes. With this approach, SSi People can serve its clients better and provide a truly differentiated service.

”In the old model, you had a week to respond to reqs, but in this market, you only have minutes or hours. Especially when the unemployment rate was zero—you had minutes to get your candidate in there.”
Jim Selker Director of Customer Care, Technical Interviewing, and Project Management

Using reports to mimic MSP scorecards

As well as servicing clients directly, SSi People work with MSPs, which often use scorecards to rate their suppliers and offer more business opportunities to those that score well. To ensure they rate well during the assessment process, SSi People sets up reports in Bullhorn for Salesforce to track the same KPIs that their MSPs rate them on. That way, the team can monitor their performance against those metrics on a continual basis and act on them to ensure they are delivering on them, rather than being surprised by a score at the end of a project. The approach has paid off; “This has been a key factor in our growth with our MSP clients,” says Ron Seibert, CEO and President.

Birthday cards, redeployments and coaching consultants

It’s simple but powerful: SSi People use alerts and notifications to drive activity and build strong consultant relationships. Whether it’s alerting reps that a consultant is coming off of an engagement and it’s time to start the redeployment process, or triggering a birthday card send just in time for a consultant’s birthday—through adopting new technology and processes, SSi People’s NPS score has shot up from 55 to 78. This is a fantastic result for the newly formed Consultant Care Group, which Jim leads.

Another way the SSi People team ensures that they are supporting their consultants is by surveying the client on the consultant’s performance 3 separate times – after onboarding, mid-assignment, and end of assignment. “At Mid assignment, we asked our consultants if they got feedback on the job and 99.9% of the time they said no. So we put a whole process in place—once the consultant is onboarded, we run reports in Bullhorn for Salesforce, then look at who is coming up on their three months and we generate a performance review form and we send it to the clients,” says Jim.

”Companies do performance reviews for their workers, quarterly, annually—we do the same for our workers, where the client will allow it. Everybody wins; the consultant because everybody wants feedback, the client because a happy consultant is a productive consultant, and we win because we get goodwill.”
Jim Selker Director of Customer Care, Technical Interviewing, and Project Management

Responding to the COVID-19 crisis

“Ron came to me and said: ‘We need a COVID-19 dashboard,’” said Jim. “He just said, ‘we need to know what’s happening in the business,’ and within maybe three hours we had spun one up to show senior management all new reqs coming in in real-time, our losses, how many consultants and clients we were losing, the submittals and the trends across all those.” Having access to real-time data within Bullhorn for Salesforce allowed SSi People to make quick decisions when reacting to the unstable situation and pivot to serve its clients better in new ways.

“We have a large recruiting team of 65 recruiters and it became really important to know which customers had slowed down and which ones had picked up. So to be able to load balance our recruiters across the organisation became important and we were able to react very quickly,” said Ron. “We also saw a new trend – our clients were sending reqs late on Friday, so we created a weekend shift to make sure we were working those jobs.”

The Future

“We’re just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of what could be done,” Ron said. SSi People is currently looking into implementing Herefish, Bullhorn’s recruitment-specific automation tool. “The value that we see in Herefish is the blueprint workflows. It takes a long time to gather requirements and work out best practices when designing a process,” Jim said. “With Herefish, all that’s been done for you—someone’s gathered that expertise and designed the process in a way that will drive maximum value.” Bullhorn also works with Herefish clients to define the right configuration for them specifically to make sure they are getting the best out of automation and smart data handling.

As for the partnership? “It’s been a great partnership with Salesforce and Bullhorn,” Jim said, explaining that he’s become friends with employees from Kansas City all the way to Ireland. “You can always say it’s a great team between buyer and seller, but in this case, we really do work hand in hand with this group. The support group has been fantastic!”

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