At Bullhorn, we talk to recruiters and staffing firms every day, and we’re hearing the same things over and over. Recruitment firms are dealing with margin pressure while also trying to differentiate themselves competitively. These are not easy times for anyone, and the day-to-day of recruiting is just harder.
The good news is that most firms are actually bullish on their outlook for the future, with nearly two-thirds predicting a revenue increase. Why?
One major reason is the recent explosion of AI technology. AI has matured to a point where it actually can deliver significant value and help recruiters in ways it couldn’t before. This is why we see firms looking to AI as a way to solve some of the business challenges they’re facing. And we, at Bullhorn, agree — AI is more accessible, more powerful, and more applicable to recruiting use cases than ever before.
Our approach is simple, but significant. Bullhorn is reimagining recruitment with AI infused everywhere. We’re taking a hard look at where and how recruiters spend their time to identify tasks and activities that are well-suited to enhancements from AI, and we’re developing AI capabilities and solutions to specifically target those parts of the recruitment life cycle.
How Bullhorn’s AI will impact the recruitment lifecycle
Today’s recruitment process is still largely manual, with recruiters spending their time selling to clients, sourcing and screening applicants, and submitting their top candidates — all while checking off various administrative tasks and staying on top of their to-do lists.
Manual processes like searching for the ideal candidate, drafting and sending introductory messages, and developing pre-screening questions leave little time for the core people aspect of recruiting – building relationships. AI, when applied correctly, empowers a new way of recruiting by allowing recruiters to expedite manual processes and focus their time and effort on direct interactions.
The new way gives recruiters the ability to widen the funnel to capture more candidates and very, very quickly narrow it back down to only the very best ones. Instead of spending their time and energy trying to find the candidates who are the best fit, they can now spend their time and energy directly with those best candidates.
S.E.A. of data
Now that we know where to apply AI, let’s talk about how. Since AI is only as good as the data that supports it, you need a partner who can leverage the right data to deliver the results you and your users are expecting. Bullhorn is the largest recruitment-specific AI provider and we train our models on a “S.E.A. of data” that is Specific to recruitment, Enormous, and Actionable.
Across our platforms and products, Bullhorn has over 22 billion data points specific to recruiting. These include:
- 800 million candidates
- 121 million jobs
- 453 million submissions
- 60 million placements
I want to call out the number of submissions and the number of placements – these are so critical because without them, you can have 800 million resumes, but you don’t know which resumes resulted in successful outcomes. This outcomes-based data is what helps make our matching models accurate. Bullhorn knows what success looks like at scale.
AI in action
So, what are we actually building to make AI-powered recruitment a reality for you? Bullhorn is developing a number of AI capabilities and AI agents targeted at specific types of tasks and activities across the recruitment life cycle. Here are a few examples of what we’re working on for you today – with even more to come!
Generative AI: We’ll be expanding GenAI everywhere across the application and building a configurable prompt studio. We are also, and very critically, integrating generative content into Automation – this is key for scaling the power of AI.
We are also using an “assistant agent” to make sense of and enrich all the unstructured data in Bullhorn. Remember those 22 billion data points? About 20 billion come from notes and emails, and there is a goldmine of information locked in there. AI helps us extract key information and update fields automatically. For example, imagine pulling out desired salary or location information to add to the candidate record. And tagging data too – imagine tagging notes with themes like compensation discussions and then being able to filter on those themes. It’s a massive shift from how we use – or barely use – unstructured data today.
Search & Match: Search is a fundamental component of the platform and where our customers spend most of their time, as much as 35% of their day! We have a totally new search experience underway that has a reimagined UI, is significantly faster, and has numerous AI capabilities integrated, such as keyword expansion, automatically building searches, using machine learning models trained on the S.E.A. of data to rank candidates and provide recommendations, agents that automatically source in the background, and multi-board searches – all integrated into a single experience.
Screening: Our customers today spend about a quarter of their time qualifying applicants. Manual screening is time consuming, it’s expensive, and you have to train recruiters to do it right (and many still don’t). There is a massive opportunity loss because most applicants aren’t reviewed, high-quality candidates get black-holed, and the talent experience is often painful, with lack of communication and follow up.
This problem can be solved with AI, so we’re building an AI-enabled screening agent that completely automates screenings, decreases the cost per hire, ensures consistent evaluation criteria, and provides a timely, personalized talent experience. With intelligent, dynamic conversation flow, our screening agent uses AI to generate questions based on the job, ask follow-up questions based on candidates’ responses, answer candidates’ questions, and more, all with fully customizable messages.
And today’s talent is ready for more AI in the hiring process. Our GRID 2024 Talent Trends survey revealed that 79% of candidates are happy to work with AI for the screening process if it doesn’t mean sacrificing personalization. Overall, 81% are happy to work with AI recruiting agents if it speeds up the process and 63% of those working with AI now already say it has resulted in faster responses from recruiters.
Let’s go forward together!
We are empowering our customers to unlock a new level of automation and leverage AI across the entire workflow, and we’re orchestrating new capabilities across our powerful, end-to-end platform. Nobody is building the breadth and depth of AI services and capabilities across the whole workflow like Bullhorn is.
Ultimately, we’ll empower recruitment firms to improve both productivity and quality, and achieve greater scale by unlocking the power of AI through automation. We want to uplevel all recruiters to perform like the best recruiters, and we can’t wait to go forward in this AI journey together with you.
Learn more about Bullhorn’s approach to AI.
