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In today's turbulent recruitment market, Business Development (BD) has never been more vital—or more challenging.
With the economy unstable and client attention easily diverted, successful BD can't rely on guesswork or chasing cold leads. It demands:
A deliberate strategy...
Plus, leveraging your existing technology.
In our recent free Bullhorn 4 BD webinar, we discussed how to use your Bullhorn system, automation, and AI not just as separate tools, but as one unified sales engine. Here are the key takeaways you can implement today to make BD easier, quicker, and more rewarding.
WATCH THE BULLHORN 4 BD TIPS WEBINAR
♻️ Convert Candidates to Contacts: Monetise Your Success
We highlighted the single biggest Bullhorn tip for BD: converting placed candidates into sales contacts.
Think about it: you've guided a candidate through interviews, secured them a great offer, and got them their dream job. They think you're fantastic! Why wouldn't they want to work with you when they start hiring in their new role?
This is a 15-second job in Bullhorn (via the Actions menu) and immediately gives you a "warm" BD contact who is already familiar with your value. It’s the easiest way to turn one placement into three.
🧹 Stop Wasting Time: Cleanse Your Data for Profit
While mass mailing and automation are powerful, they are useless with dirty data. Lisa stressed the need to monetise hard bounces and unsubscribes.
Most recruiters simply move on from a hard bounce (email address doesn't exist) or an unsubscribe. This is a missed opportunity!
Investigate Bounces: A hard bounce often means the person has left the company, which signals a potential new BD lead (where did they go?) and a vacancy at their old firm.
Track Unsubscribes: An unsubscribe might not be genuine; it could be a manager clearing out a departed employee’s inbox. Follow the contact to find their new details.
Lisa confirms this works: she builds time into her diary to track the "money" in her bounces and unsubscribes weekly, often resulting in new placements. It’s not about buying more data; it's about making your existing data work harder.
🏃➡️Strategise Your Tech: Are You AI'ing the Process?
When it comes to your Bullhorn investment—including Automation, Analytics, and AI—you must ask: "Are we AI'ing the process, or processing the AI?"
Technology should be implemented as a tool to do specific jobs, not just as a piece of technology you feel obligated to use.
Use AI to Enhance, Not Replace
Bullhorn’s AI Assistant is designed to speed up the mundane, time-consuming parts of BD:
Email Generation: Need to ask a sales contact about hiring plans? The AI can quickly draft the email, setting the tone, length, and language. Crucially, it's a start point, not an end point. You add the relationship grabbers and personalisation.
Candidate Pitches: The AI can generate a candidate pitch based on both the candidate’s profile and the client’s profile, potentially halving the 5–10 minutes it typically takes to craft a strong, tailored email.
If you leverage AI for the baseline work, you free your recruiters to focus on the human element that AI can't replace.
🤖Get Tenacious: Let Automation Forgive the Follow-Up
The data shows that most recruiters give up way too soon—a lack of tenacity that costs the industry millions.
Automation can forgive this common human failing.
Advanced Note Search: Use Bullhorn's advanced search feature to find out who you haven't spoken to in three, six, or 12 months, and specifically search notes for old conversations (e.g., "mentioned hiring in Q4"). This instantly generates a warm call list.
Automated Follow-Up: Use the Follow Up Sales Contact Call automation (which should be built into your system). When a recruiter logs a BD call, the system automatically sends a follow-up email and sets a task reminder for the next touchpoint. This ensures the required 7 touchpoints to make a sale are hit without the recruiter having to track every single one manually.
Stop doing the admin, and start having the right conversations.
💡Next Steps for Recruitment Leaders and Recruiters
We run these free recruiter tips webinar to help leaders, like you, turn the market chaos and distractions into a competitive advantage. If your team needs to shift their mindset and skill set, our programmes focus on Bullhorn ROI, Automation, Analytics, and Recruiter Training.
Let us help you drive growth by focusing on the right strategic investments.
READ MORE ABOUT OUR BULLHORN VISION SERVICE
READ ABOUT OUR AUTOMATION / ANALYTICS BUDDY SERVICE
BOOK YOUR FREE CONSULTATION
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Wayne Barclay
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Stop Automating Chaos: Why You Need a Strategy for Recruitment BD Success
As a recruitment leader, you know the drill: the market shifts, sales feel tough, and the immediate instinct is to buy a new piece of tech or blindly activate every automation feature available in your Bullhorn or CRM.A potential outcome? A flurry of activity, confused recruiters, and ultimately, zero measurable ROI.😱(I saw this with CRM, then Automation, and now AI... history repeating itself.)Automation is a sales engine, but like any powerful machine, it requires a careful, deliberate strategy to run efficiently. Simply turning it on often leads to automating poor processes, resulting in spam, bad data, and wasted money.If you’re ready to turn that engine into a competitive advantage, you need to step back and apply this 9-point strategy to your Business Development (BD) automation.💡My 9-Point Strategy for Automation Success1️⃣ Agree on Your Strategy and PlanBefore you click ‘Activate,’ define your objectives.Are you focused on converting candidates to contacts? Re-engaging lapsed clients? Generating referrals?Your plan must clearly outline the who, what, and when of every automated action to ensure alignment with your overall BD goals.2️⃣ Define OwnershipChaos reigns when responsibility is murky. You must clearly define who owns the data and relationships you are selling.Is it the marketing team, the BD manager, or the individual recruiter?Establishing clear ownership prevents duplicate outreach, inconsistent messaging, and ensures accountability for follow-up.3️⃣ Get Buy-In: Educate Your TeamA great strategy is useless if your recruiters don't trust it. You must actively educate your team on the why behind the change.Show them how automation will take the admin burden away, allowing them to focus on high-value relationship building—the part of BD they actually enjoy. Without genuine buy-in, they will always revert to manual, time-consuming habits.4️⃣ Test and Setup TrialsNever roll out a massive change across the entire firm at once. Setup trials with a small, engaged group first. Test the message cadence, measure the response rate, and iterate quickly. This limits risk and generates early success stories you can use to persuade the rest of the company.5️⃣ PR: Celebrate SuccessesRecruiters are motivated by success.Use your test group’s wins—a faster BD conversion, a higher email open rate, or a cleaner call list—as internal PR. Celebrate these successes openly to generate FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and drive wider adoption.6️⃣ Data Wealth: The Opportunity to CleanseAutomation and data quality are two sides of the same coin.Automating outreach to a dirty database only accelerates your move toward the spam folder. Use the setup phase as an opportunity to cleanse data, confirming emails, purging old contacts, and identifying incomplete records. Clean data is not just healthy; it's profitable.7️⃣ Cadence: Establish Weekly BD SessionsAutomation is a tool, not a replacement for human effort.To embed the strategy, implement weekly BD sessions. Use this dedicated time to review the automated pipeline, address bottlenecks, practice outreach, and ensure the technology is being used correctly to drive human conversation.8️⃣ Score! Set KPIs and GamificationWhat gets measured gets done.Set clear KPIs for your automation success—not just activity, but results (e.g., number of re-engaged clients, contacts moved to the "warm" status). Use Analytics to gamify the process, creating healthy competition that encourages consistent use of the new platform and strategy.9️⃣ Turn No into $£€! Monetise Bounces and UnsubsDon't view hard bounces and unsubscribes as dead ends; view them as sales intelligence and opportunities.Monetise the bounces and unsubs by investigating them. A hard bounce might mean a contact has moved companies—a prime BD opportunity! An unsubscribe could be a flag for a poor sales approach. Use this feedback loop to keep your data fresh and your strategy sharp.Strategise the CashflowBy following these 9️⃣ strategic steps, you ensure:Investment in BD automation delivers maximum return,Saving your recruiters a whopping 64% of their non-selling time...Allowing them to focus on what they do best......Building the relationships that drive placements and profit.Nice! ☎️I'd love to pay it forward to chat with you about your automation / BD strategy.BOOK YOUR FREE CONSULTATION👇Scroll down for a cute graphic of my 9-point strategy.🏃➡️PS. Want to go even further?Check out our "Unlock Bullhorn with Automation" and Optimise Bullhorn for Recruiters webinars here.Automation Buddy / Bullhorn RoIWe are Automation Buddies set on helping ambitious recruitment businesses who want to increase speed and sales.We coach to inspire, and build your automations so you can recruit and sell!Plus, through our Bullhorn Vision service we help generate serious ROI from your Bullhorn, data, and people.READ MORE ABOUT OUR BULLHORN VISION SERVICEREAD ABOUT OUR AUTOMATION BUDDY SERVICEBOOK YOUR FREE CONSULTATIONGrab My 9-Point Strategy for Automation Success Below - Which can you tick off or need to do?
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Lisa Jones
Blog
Recruiter Productivity Series: Optimise Bullhorn Part 6 ~ Easy Candidate Management
Recruiters – do you often think "life would be so much easier without candidates"? 🤔 Do you spend hours sourcing and qualifying talent, but too often lose candidates along the way?Drop outs, counter offers, tricky candidates, and a tough economy, can test even the most patient and organised of recruiters.Part 6 of our free Optimise Bullhorn webinar series will share crucial time-saving and data mining tips on how to manage your candidate data with ease, speed, and joy! REGISTER NOW8️⃣Reasons to Come to our Bullhorn for Candidate Management Webinar Yes, candidates can be tricky, but perhaps your candidate engagement isn’t consistent and you need to work on it.The data around candidate psychology and recruitment shows it clearly:⌚28% of candidates drop out because the process took too long. Delays hurt engagement and result in candidate drop-off. ⌛25% of candidates say they drop out for that same reason — the process is too long. 🚫30% of candidates drop out because the role did not match expectations. Misaligned expectations (role, salary, responsibilities) lead to disengagement. 🤔23% cite poor communication as a reason they disengaged. 💩49% of candidates have turned down a job offer because of a poor hiring experience. Even at the final stage, candidate engagement matters — a bad experience during hiring can sink an offer. 👻45% of candidates are ghosted by recruiters after an initial conversation. 😱27% of UK employers have been ghosted by new recruits on their first day.🙊72% of candidates say the smoothness of the interview process would affect their final decision on whether or not to take the job. (Sources: TotalJobs / HR Hire / CIPD)So, before lose even more candidates and have to work harder at sourcing more, let's get smart at candidate management. 🧠What You’ll Learn in our Bullhorn for Candidate Management Webinar Part 6 of our free "Optimise Bullhorn" webinar series is packed with tips you can use immediately to proactively manage your precious candidates and make your desk, targets, and home-life balance easier! ✅Manage expectations ~ stay in control and protect your pipeline.✅Prevent drop outs / counter offers / ghosting.✅Strengthen your relationships - place quicker, get referrals.✅Move them through the recruitment cycle speedily and with ease.✅An automation to help you manage your candidates whilst you sleep.🤚 Stop wasting time and money sourcing, screening and interviewing, just to lose the candidate down the line (and likely annoy your clients in the process!) 👉 Join our free Bullhorn for Candidate Management webinar and learn how to turn your CRM into a true revenue machine. 🗓️Wednesday 05 November: 13:30 BST REGISTER NOWPS. Want to go even further? Check out our full "Optimise Bullhorn" webinar series.🔍 Engage, nurture, place, and re-place. Watch the recording💬 Source faster and easier. Watch the recording📈 Sell faster and easier. Watch the recording💡 Place faster and easier. Watch the recording🎯 Easy BD ~ 08 October 2025: Register now💪 Easy Candidate Management ~ 05 November. Register NowRecruitment and Bullhorn TrainingWe deliver the best live Bullhorn ROI webinar training, and you'll find other tips and tricks in Recruitment HIIT, our online recruitment training platform.Plus, through our Bullhorn Vision service we help generate serious ROI from your Bullhorn, data, and people.TRY HIIT FREE HEREBOOK YOUR FREE CONSULTATION
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