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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
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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Lisa Jones
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Lisa Jones
Blog
4 Mistakes You’re Making with Your Recruitment Website
With data sinks, AI, rising recruitment costs, and the world generally feeling like an insane asylum, recruitment leaders are under pressure to build sustainable business models. Consequently, your website has moved front and centre of your marketing strategy. You need it to generate revenue, not simply build "brand" and "clicks."I’ve identified 4 mistakes that almost every recruitment website makes. The good news is, they are easy to rectify. Are you making them?Recruitment Websites Need to Make Money!We regularly help recruiters with the project management of recruitment websites, and what we can the "5-A strategy" (ATS/Analytics/Automation/Adoption/AI). We know that any Finance or Managing Director who has freed up budget for a new site wants more than just an online brochure - they want candidates, clients, colleagues, and cash.But they also need a connected tech stack, driving data health, data wealth, and productive recruiters.Recruitment Website Mistake 1 – "We" EverywhereWith GDPR and AI, the focus on the 3Cs, brand has never been more important. However, the content on many sites is all about you and not the people you support. Your website needs to be a passionate advocate for your sector and a roadmap for how you help your community.📌 Action: Look through your site now. Is it a monologue about your company, or do you have "social proof" from candidates and clients to act as hooks for your ideal audience?Recruitment Website Mistake 2 – Ignoring your 404 PageThis is the page you’d rather people didn't see—the error page they hit when a link is broken or a job has been filled. Why do so many recruitment websites simply go “Doh!” and miss the opportunity to drive the user somewhere useful?Check out this blog about great 404 pages and then check out Barclay Jones’404 page– we loved creating this one for our very own Barclay Jones 404 error page.If someone cares enough to visit your site, don't greet them with a "computer says no" message. Use that space to redirect them to your latest jobs or top resources.📌 Action: Go to a dead page on your website right now. Does your 404 page provide a path back to revenue, or is it a dead end?Recruitment Website Mistake 3 – Your Website is an OutlierIs your website connected to your processes and tech stack, or is it something you simply "post to and pray"? To drive revenue, your site must be integrated. For example:Do you know who signs up for Job Alerts so you can engage them immediately?Do you have trackers telling you who is engaging so you can follow up?Are you sharing blogs to social media with the specific goal of luring your community back to your site?Have you tested your Chatbot recently to ensure it’s actually helpful?📌 Action: Ask where your website "sits" in your business process. What changes do you need to make so that marketers and recruiters are actively mining data from it?Recruitment Website Mistake 4 – Contact Us – Or Rather, Kill the Lead!You spend a fortune in time and emotion getting people to your site. They surf around, and bingo—they want to talk! The "Contact Us" page is arguably the most important page on your site. They are walking into your shop asking for help.Yet, so many contact pages are uninspiring, "templatey," and actually discourage people from reaching out. Your goal is to convert. You want them to "buy" into a job application or, dare we suggest, pick up the phone.📌 Action: Look at your Contact Us page. Is it relevant and engaging, or does it get in the way of a conversation?Let’s Make Recruitment Websites Great AgainI couldn’t resist the "Trumpism." Take a look at your site, figure out which pages you really want people to visit, and ask yourself: Are they working hard enough? Don't be afraid to use a little personality to drive those conversions.Recruitment TakeawaysStop "we-ing" all over your visitors.Capitalise on error pages.Connect your website to your people and processes.Make contacting you the easiest part of their day.Bullhorn ATS / Analytics / Automation RoIWe are Automation and Analytics Buddies set on helping ambitious recruitment businesses who want to increase speed and sales.We coach to inspire, and build your automations and metrics so you can recruit and sell!Plus, through our Bullhorn Vision service we help generate serious ROI from your Bullhorn, data, and people.READ ABOUT OUR AUTOMATION / ANALYTICS BUDDY SERVICEBOOK A FREE BULLHORN ROI CONSULTATION
