Blog Content
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 strategy.
💡My 9-Point Strategy for Automation Success
1️⃣ Agree on Your Strategy and Plan
Before 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 Ownership
Chaos 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 Team
A 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 Trials
Never 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 Successes
Recruiters 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 Cleanse
Automation 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 Sessions
Automation 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 Gamification
What 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 A No into Some $£€! Monetise Bounces and Unsubs
Don'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 Cashflow
By 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.
Bullhorn ATS / Analytics / Automation / AI ROI
We are Bullhorn experts obsessed with how recruiters can 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
Grab My 9-Point Strategy for Automation Success Below - Which can you tick off or need to do?
Extra Content
Blog Image
Extra Content 2
Recruitment Blogs / Tips / Webinars
Read more-
Lisa Jones
Blog
Vodcast: Is AI Recruitment's Superpower, Or Its Blind Spot?
Is Recruitment AI the Superpower Everyone's Raving About? Or Are You Missing Something Obvious?I recently caught up with George Whalley from Bullhorn for the latest in my recruitment leaders' vodcast series. AI, automation, cost reduction, compassionate recruitment, manual work, and dogs, were the topics.George's day job is bringing net new clients onto Bullhorn and then, unusually, staying on as their account manager afterwards. So unlike a lot of people selling you tech, he actually has to live with the consequences of what he sells you. That makes him worth listening to.We had 22 minutes to talk about the reality of AI in recruitment and what recruitment leaders need to factor into growing their businesses with this vital tech.💰 Your data is your superpower, so stop buying more of itHow is AI (and automation) actually impacting recruitment right now?George's answer was basically - not as much as it should be. Why? Because recruiters are only using it for the boring bit (generating text) and ignoring it to help them monetise the data goldmine already sat in their own Bullhorn.Anyone can scrape LinkedIn.Anyone can buy the same 100,000 candidates as their competitor.That's cold data.Anyone can use AI to find and clean data - but don't get blindsided. It's what you do with it that counts!What George calls your actual superpower is the stuff already living in your notes and conversations that never made it into a proper field, that you can use AI to "power up" your pipeline.Recruiters are "crawling over warm data on their Bullhorn to get to cold data outside of Bullhorn". Sounds mad when you say it like that, doesn't it? But that's most agencies right now.What's the fix? (Watch the video to find out!)👇🧠 What can humans actually do that AI can't?This was George's favourite question and I can see why.His answer was blunt - AI can do a LOT to save time and costs, and drive process, but AI can't put a suit on and sit in a room with a client.It can't understand the stuff that actually matters more than the business on paper. We chatted about why 40% of consultants have left the industry in the last 18 months.Not because they were bad at their jobs.Because recruitment stopped needing what they were good at, and started needing something they'd never had to be good at before. Then George said something that's been rattling round my head all week - is AI really dehumanising recruitment, or is it de-manualising it?Humans = manual. Really? Is that as good as it gets?Watch the video 👇for more insights on how to de-manualise your recruitment process and do what only humans can do!🐕 Are you using tech to do what your website says you do?(And what has that got to do with your dog's God complex?)We chatted about the open secret in recruitment: what recruiters say they do - and what they really do - often poles apart. Too much data, and too little process makes for a lack of productivity and ultimately profit.It also makes for a very expensive tech stack, which leaves the average recruitment leader wondering why they need to spend so much money on tech just to stand still.What did George suggest you need to do to manage the threat and opportunity? Watch the video to find out...👇My recruitment leaders' vodcast with George is a cute 22minutes long. Grab a coffee and get watching!Bullhorn 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 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
-
Wayne Barclay
Blog
The One Bullhorn Habit That's Silently Bleeding You of Fees and Sales
While you've moved on from that lost job, your competitor hasn't and it's costing you £$€thousands.Here's the Bullhorn follow-up process most recruitment leaders are missing...I've watched it happen at desk after desk, recruitment business after recruitment business.Lost a job, hung up the phone, and thought "right, next." Never gave it another thought. I see recruiters doing exactly the same thing today.Lost that job?Placed somewhere else?Move on.Exit stage right, never to speak to that client again. It's the most natural reaction in the world. Nobody wants to dwell on a loss. But if you're leading a recruitment business, this reflex is likely costing you money you don't even know you're missing.Are your recruiters tenacious enough to be in the wings for an inevitable rekindling of that sale? 🤔The recruitment stat that stopped me in my tracks One in five candidates are unhappy in their new role within a few months of starting. Think about your own rebate numbers. What's the average in your business?Now think about how many of those unhappy candidates you're still talking to when that unhappiness kicks in. For most recruitment businesses I work with, the answer is "not enough". Somewhere in your Bullhorn database right now, there are candidates who took a job through a competitor, or through the client going direct, and they're already regretting it.The consultant who lost that job has probably moved on too. There's a door sitting wide open. Nobody's walking through it. 🤨 Leaving the sales process to the candidate and client isn't a great strategy Here's the bit people miss. When you lose a job, it doesn't just go to another candidate. Sometimes the client hires through a competitor. Sometimes they go direct. Either way, that placement can go wrong too. So the follow-up process shouldn't stop at the candidate.Building in a reason to check back with the client as well could be a simple trick to re-engaging the lead!Did the hire work out?How's it going?Are they still happy they went that route?(So satisfying when you can think "I told you so!) You're not gloating.You're just staying visible, staying warm, and staying front of mind - that's sales!Because if it hasn't worked out, you want to be the first call they make, not the fifth. Be ready to let them fall straight back into your arms. 🫡This is a leadership problem, not a recruitment consultant problem Here's the bit that matters if you're the one running the business. You can't fix this by hoping your team remembers.You fix it by building a process, and making it part of how your business operates: Close jobs properly. Status set correctly, every time. It's one field, and it's the one that gets left by the wayside. Everything downstream depends on it. Set the cadence, both sides. Know when the successful candidate started, then touch base with the candidate *and* the client at one, three, six and twelve months. Assign ownership. Is this account management or BD? Decide, and make someone accountable. If it belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one. That's a strategy decision. It's not something you leave a busy consultant to remember off the back of a good night's sleep.Hope is not a strategy (or a process!) 💪Bullhorn already has what you need Bullhorn wasn't built to be an admin system. It was built to be a relationship management system, and this is a perfect example of it doing its job properly. Automation can nudge and notify your team the moment a lost job hits a follow-up milestone. Nobody has to remember anything. Analytics can report on lost jobs across the whole business. How many, which clients, whether contact was actually made. What do you have set up currently, and:Is it fit for purpose?Is it actually being used?Do you have full visibility over what it's reporting on and whether or not your team are actually adopting this process and delivering on it? Ask yourself: how watertight is this sales process for your business. Is it delivering results?😇 The relationship didn't end - the job did That's the mindset shift for anyone leading a recruitment team.Losing a job isn't the end of a relationship. It's a trigger telling you exactly when to check back in. Get this nailed at a leadership level, build it into the process rather than hoping it happens, and Bullhorn will quietly hand you rebates and repeat business you'd otherwise never see. --- More BD Tips?This was one of five tips from our Bullhorn Power Series webinar on using your ATS, automation and analytics to drive business development.Catch the other four, and watch the full sessionWATCH THE BULLHORN FOR BD TIPS WEBINARBullhorn 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 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
-
Wayne Barclay
Webinar
Bullhorn Power Series ~ Stop Missing Out on Sales: 5 Tips to Use Your ATS, Automation, and Analytics to Drive BD
-
Wayne Barclay
Webinar
Automation RoI Webinar Series: Unlock Bullhorn Part 6 ~ Data Wealth
-
Lisa Jones
Webinar
Recruiter Productivity Series: Optimise Bullhorn Part 6 ~ Easy Candidate Management
