Blog Content
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.
We are constantly chatting to recruitment leaders about how to use Bullhorn, analytics, automation and AI not just as separate tools, but as one unified sales engine. Here are the key insights you can implement today to make BD easier, quicker, and more rewarding.
♻️ 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 recruiters increase sales, reduce costs, speed up sourcing, and improve productivity.
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
Blog
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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Wayne
Blog
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
