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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. We 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.
We do this ourselves. We build time into our diaries to track the "money" in 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
>>>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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Lisa Jones
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Wayne Barclay
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