With recruitment leaders wanting to monetise their “expensive Recruitment CRM” it’s critical to capitalise on your recruitment tech to improve speed and profit. This is a speedy 2 minute read to get you from “bad data” to “big valuable data”.
The Myth of the “30 Second” Recruiter
We see ROI as in the i(nvestment) of the beholder – so what is the average recruitment consultant investing?
The average recruitment consultant is sat with two to four screens (including mobile phones) gathering data from wherever they can, but there’s often no practical or enforced policy in a recruitment business as to where that recruitment data should be going or at what point it should be going onto your recruitment database.
I’ve come across “30 second recruiters” who enter a candidate in their Bullhorn CRM just to place them and board the invoice. I’ve also met top billers who bill the most yet administrate the least, meaning there’s no useful legacy data on the great candidates they’re placing or their potential pipeline. This obviously affects long-term growth as well as the ability to use automation, analytics, and AI.
We don’t see this as a sustainable business model for recruitment businesses.
As a recruitment leader, you should be able to use your recruitment database to predict the conversion rate for your consultants, helping them actively manage and improve their conversion rate – which ultimately improves the pipeline and sustainability of your business.
It makes them more effective, competitive and successful. It makes you more profitable and sane!
Sustainable Recruitment Data is the New Sexy
Most recruitment leaders I work with are not in the market for selling their recruitment firm in the next 12 months – instead a lot of them are looking to the next 3-5 years, trying to pump up the volume on their business with great tech, monetised recruitment data and ultimately process and talent and pipelines of clients.
Doing this will ensure your business becomes a sustainable model and will continue beyond the talent that currently works for you. Market value will increase.
When a business is audited to see how buyable it is, often the KPMGs of this world will look at it and say:
If the top billers left and the business leaders left… what would be left?
So What’s the Solution for Creating a Monetised Recruitment CRM?
Get your recruitment consultants and resourcers engaged with the system and train them on best practice so they understand why great recruitment process is profitable (intuitive recruitment systems that need no training are mythical).
Once they can see and feel the benefits of following the processes (improving performance, profit and ROI for themselves as well as the business) then your CRM can become a business growth tool, rather than an expensive data dump.
4 Steps to Fixing your Bad Recruitment Data Problem
Define and document your process and systems.
Agree what great data looks like and communicate your expectations everyday and everywhere!
Make managers responsible for the hygiene (data health and wealth) of their segment of the recruitment database.
Reward “personal hygiene”. Clean data, sparkling process and effective placements = clean profit.
We deliver training and guidance for recruiters and recruitment businesses to help them create a CRMFirst (AKA Bullhorn1st) culture within their business for sustainable processes, clean data and higher profit!
Bullhorn ATS / Analytics / Automation / AI RoI
We are Bullhorn experts set on helping ambitious recruitment businesses to increase speed and sales.
We help you weaponise your people, data, time, and tech, so you can recruit and sell!
Our Bullhorn Vision and Buddy service helps generate best-in-class processes, adoption, head space, and ROI.
BOOK A FREE BULLHORN ROI CONSULTATION
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Bullhorn Power Webinar ~ BD Campaigns That Sell
Which Bullhorn Automation campaigns win new business, how to power them up, and why good campaigns get cancelled too soon? Free webinar!🏃TL;DRRegister for our free 30-minute webinar for recruitment leaders who need stronger sales:Which recruitment campaigns work?How to power them up.How to not get spooked by complaints - internal and external.REGISTER HEREMost recruitment businesses are sitting on years of Bullhorn data. Client contacts. Past placements. Hiring managers who've used you before. Relationships your team worked hard to build.And yet when the pipeline goes quiet, the go-to move may still be cold calling, buying lead lists or chasing the same handful of clients.But hope is not a strategy!Data rich. Candidate and client poor. Sound familiar?Bullhorn Automation can change that.It turns the client community you already own into new conversations, new roles and new business - and keeps your consultants focused on the right clients at the right time.Done well, it could save you tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of £$€ in advertising and precious time!Plus, you place faster, invoice quicker, and manage your teams easier.‼️But here's the catch - most Bullhorn Automation campaigns never get the chance to really deliver.So we're running a free 30-minute webinar for recruitment leaders who want real ROI from Bullhorn Automation.When: Wednesday 21 October 2026, 3pm BSTHow long: 30 minutesCost: freeREGISTER HEREPart 1: Which campaigns actually win business?We'll talk you through campaigns that activate your Bullhorn data and get clients and prospects talking to you again. The kind that fill diaries with BD meetings, not just inboxes.None of them rely on cold calling.Part 2: Why do most automations just sit there?Building an automation and pressing go isn't a strategy. (Hope rarely is.)We'll share the tips most recruitment businesses never use - the ones that power up an automation so it keeps working long after launch day. And so your recruiters know exactly who to speak to next, and when.Part 3: Why do good campaigns get cancelled?This is the one most leaders don't see coming.Good campaigns get pulled far too early. Not because they failed - because something in the first few days felt like bad news, and someone hit pause.We'll share what we tell our clients before the first send. How to keep the business focused, hold your nerve, and give a campaign the time it needs to pay you back.Who's it for?💸Recruitment leaders using Bullhorn who want more from their data, their community and their Bullhorn Automation investment - and less reliance on cold out reach.🧠30 minutes. Practical and honest, with ideas you can act on the next day.📅21 October, 3pm BSTREGISTER HEREBullhorn ATS / Analytics / Automation / AI ROIWe are Bullhorn experts obsessed with how recruiters can increase sales, reduce costs, speed up sourcing, and improve productivity.We help you optimise your people, data, time, and tech, so you can recruit and sell!Our Bullhorn Vision and Buddy service helps generate best-in-class processes, adoption, head space, and ROI.BOOK A FREE BULLHORN ROI CONSULTATION
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Hold Your Nerve: Activating Your Bullhorn Data Without the Panic
I've seen recruitment leaders kill great automated BD campaigns after one send - here is what you're throwing away if you pause too soon.🏃TL;DRMany Bullhorn Automation campaigns are shut down prematurely after send #1 due to initial knee-jerk reactions (unsubscribes, bounces, annoyed clients). Stopping an automated recruitment campaign early causes you to bear the full cost of data cleanup without ever reaching the ROI phase.Our next free webinar will cover which Bullhorn Automation campaigns win new business, how to power them up, and why good campaigns get cancelled too soon. And we'll tackle how to not get spooked by "bad campaigns"!REGISTER HEREI've seen a few recruitment email campaigns switched off after one send.Not because they didn't work.Because recruiters and recruitment leaders got nervous.Scenario:The Bullhorn Automation campaign goes out to the whole database on a Tuesday.By lunchtime there's a pile of unsubscribes, a load of bounce notifications, and a few grumpy replies from clients who haven't heard from you in a year or more.Someone forward them to a leader.By Thursday the campaign is "paused while we have a think".So what should a recruitment leader expect from an automated email campaign?Firstly, something messier than the benchmarks that you'll find if you Google "give me average recruitment campaign open rates and hard bounce rates".If your recruiters (or recruitment marketing function) have not emailed your Bullhorn database properly for a while (if ever), that first campaign will find everyone who's moved on (and roughly 20-30% of B2B data goes stale every year, so there'll be plenty).On a first send into old data, expect:10-20% hard bounces (the steady-state average is about 2.5%)2-3% unsubscribes (versus around 0.9% normally)open rates that look better than they really are (bots!)That's not the campaign failing - that's your data getting a long overdue health check.Bounces are people who've moved, often to a business you'd love as a client. Re-trace them, add them into Bullhorn as leads, and that "bad" result has just topped up your BD pipeline. (Read more about how to turn hard bounce and unsubscribes into revenue here.)Why are my click rates so high?Bots, mostly. Sorry.Email security tools open messages and click every link within seconds to check they're safe - roughly 30% of clicks from Outlook and 20%+ from Gmail aren't human.You can't stop it, so don't build your reporting on it. Measure what a bot can't do: replies, calls, form fills, meetings booked, jobs on, CVs in. Log those in Bullhorn and you'll know what's working.Will we upset some clients?Probably a few - and I'd rather you heard it from me now. If you've gone quiet on clients for a year or two and then pop up in their inbox, the odd one will be short with you. That says more about the gap than the email.Build a suppression list in Bullhorn before every send (clients mid-negotiation, placed candidates, anyone who's already asked you to stop). Agree who answers the prickly replies before anything goes out. And check every unsubscribe for live clients - then pick up the phone.You won't get unsubscribes to zero. Nobody does.How bad can a mistake really be?One cold database campaign we saw sent the same email twice (it happens). 7,771 contacts, 245 unsubscribes - and only six of those were down to the duplicate. The other 239 would have gone anyway.Plan for both outcomes, then hold your nerveBefore you activate a campaign, agree with your leadership team what success looks like (meetings, jobs on, placements - not opens) and what a wobbly first week looks like. Results come in a J-curve: the heavy lifting on your data comes first, the pipeline comes after. Pause halfway and you've done the hard bit for nothing.Want to talk it through?We love paying it forward!BOOK YOUR FREE CONSULTATIONPlus, we're covering all of this in our free 30-minute Bullhorn Power Webinar: BD Campaigns to Win Business:: Which campaigns win businessWhy Bullhorn Automation stalls after launch dayHow to hold your nerve until it pays back.When: Wednesday 21 October 2026, 3pm BSTHow long: 30 minutesCost: freeREGISTER HERE