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Your Bullhorn already holds 95% of the answer, but most agencies just keep buying tools to avoid looking at it.
I recently had the absolute pleasure of sitting down with a true recruitment "myth and legend," Keith Southern.
For those who don't know Keith, he was the seventh person to join Progressive - the company that eventually became the global powerhouse S3.
With a career spanning back to the early 90s, he has seen it all: the highs, the recessions, and the technological revolutions.
Today, Keith leads The Power Hive, a community of over 170 recruitment leaders dedicated to helping agency owners move from just working in their business to working on it.
Over a speedy 19minutes, we dove deep into why the "old school" ways, coupled with data, automation, and AI, might actually be the key to every recruitment leaders' future.
💪Beyond ROI: The Power of "Return on Effort"
We started by discussing a concept close to both of our hearts: Return on Effort (ROE). In an industry obsessed with the next shiny recruitment tech tool, many recruitment leaders are accidentally building what we called "Frankenstein tech stacks" - collections of expensive tools and data that don't talk to each other and often create "integration debt" and more admin than they solve. (I call this "Admin Tax".)
We talked about how many sales floors today are eerily quiet because recruiters are hiding behind CRMs and marketing tech instead of picking up the phone, and Keith's ideas for:
Using recruitment tech to free your consultants up to have more human conversations (and removing the "admin tax").
Auditing your tech stack to see if you’re actually using what you’re paying for, or whether you're actually in "integration debt".
🪙Turning Old Data into Gold
One of the most striking parts of our conversation was about the "gold nuggets" sitting right under our noses. Your "old to gold" could be data, processes, tech, people...
Keith argues that most agencies already have 95% of the data they need in their own CRM, yet they continue to spend a fortune on expensive external job boards and LinkedIn licenses.
We discussed "rehumanising" the process by using technology to lift the heavy weights so that recruiters can focus on building resilience and genuine relationships.
We chatted about how to:
Preventing your recruiters heading straight to LinkedIn / Job Boards to resource instead of looking "back home" at your own database.
Training your recruiters to master the fundamental tasks, like a perfect candidate interview prep, before moving to the next part of the process.
🤔Are You the Recruiter Your Website Says You Are?
We ended with a challenge for the industry. Many agencies claim to be "at the heart of their sector" on their websites, but the reality is often a messy database and a reliance on reactive advertising. Keith’s advice for this year is simple: stop the abdication to technology and start driving your business with strategy again.
This vodcast was a masterclass in recruitment leadership. Watch it to hear more about Keith's "war stories" from the S3 days and how to weaponise the data, systems, and people you already have.
Ready to spend a speedy 19 minutes thinking about your recruitment process and how to keep it human with tech?
Watch the full 19minute vodcast with The Power Hive now.
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
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 itI started by by asking George, a very pertinent question:How 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
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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 BD process most recruitment leaders are missing...In a recent Bullhorn 4 BD webinar Lisa said that this is what she often sees in happening on recruitment desks across the industry:Lost a job, hung up the phone, and thought "right, next." Never gave it another thought. I see this too: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
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Wayne Barclay
Webinar
Bullhorn Power Series ~ Stop Missing Out on Sales: 5 Tips to Use Your ATS, Automation, and Analytics to Drive BD
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Wayne Barclay
Webinar
Automation RoI Webinar Series: Unlock Bullhorn Part 6 ~ Data Wealth
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Lisa Jones
Webinar
Recruiter Productivity Series: Optimise Bullhorn Part 6 ~ Easy Candidate Management
