At the beginning of February I received an interesting email to test out the beta version of a recruiting application called Bullhorn Reach (from Bullhorn Inc., the US-based staffing & recruiting software company). In their own words Bullhorn Reach “helps hiring managers, employees and recruiters leverage their social network connections and search engines to find great candidates.” This was a timely email, as I just happened to be hiring for a bilingual marketing assistant, so decided to give it a try.
So I signed up at www.bullhornreach.com and the first thing you are prompted to do is connect up to your main social network profiles, those being LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter.
Once your social networks are integrated you have the option to flesh out your profile by adding some information about yourself, skills, experience etc. So how does this application exactly leverage my social networks to help me recruit my marketing assistant? Firstly I can post my job to the Bullhorn Reach (BHR) platform and simultaneously distribute the role to LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter. I can also share the job with my LinkedIn connections and within LinkedIn groups.
Now there is nothing special about being able to simultaneously update multiple social media platforms with jobs, many existing applications have done that for a while now. However BHR also makes use of SEO techniques to help jobs distributed within the system be found organically within external search engines such as Google, Bing etc. I’m not sure of all the ways it does this, but I could see that jobs posted are picked up by aggregator sites such as Trovit. Bill Boorman’s ‘Recruiting Gun’ blog article Just how social is Bullhorn Reach #socialrecruiting goes into a bit more detail via a video from Bullhorn.
The most intriguing aspect of BHR is the “Radar” section. The radar helps you stay up to date with changes in your network. Specifically The radar highlights people who have recently been promoted, made updates to their profiles, recently changed companies and, most significantly, those that are looking for a new job (It says “Looking for a Job” but really this is a suggestive determination).
I really like the concept of the radar and being able to see major changes across my networks at a glance. I think it has several limitations though. From what I could deduce It appears to use an algorithm that looks at the frequency of updates someone in your network is making to their LinkedIn and Facebook profiles such as recommendations, work history etc, over a period of time to suggest they are looking for a job. I did not find the latter list particularly accurate (I suppose only time will tell). Many of the profiles in my list tended to be independent consultants or company directors that are constantly building referrals and keeping their profiles fresh. Also given I was working on a marketing position, it would have been really useful if there was an option to segment my network into different lists to monitor. This way as a recruiter, I could specifically keep an eye on the profiles most relevant to the job I’m working on.
From a European perspective I think it would be great if I had the option to integrate other professional networks such as Viadeo and XING in addition to LinkedIn. Being able to see my key network updates in one place across various professional networks (and being able to segment them) would be useful for EMEA recruiters who recruit across several countries and sometimes use more than one professional network.
Bearing in mind the above criticisms, this is a beta version and no doubt there is additional functionality in the pipeline. Also I may be a hiring manager but I’m not a full time recruiter, so am not best placed to get the maximum long term benefits from the application. There are other features such as being able to share articles with Bullhorn users and adding info on hiring projects you have completed to build up your credibility as a recruiter. Overall I think it’s a slick looking and simple to use recruiting tool. I like the radar idea and the ability to distribute your jobs with SEO incorporated (without having to understand the technicalities) will definitely provide value to recruiters.
Results
BHR was one of several channels I used to help attract candidates for my marketing assistant role, so how did it fair?
BHR automatically provides tracking data regarding the sources your jobs are viewed from. Over the course of a week (the job was only advertised for a week) I received two applications via BHR. Not many, but both were strong candidates and one was short-listed for interview. Twitter & Trovit.com generated over 60% of the views between them for my job. LinkedIn generated 18% of views, Facebook provided the lowest number of views with 1%, and 16% came from unidentifiable sources.
Taking into account all channels used, overall I received 405 applications in 7 days, a breakdown of the campaign is below:
Sources & Applications
- BHR – 2 applications (1 shortlisted for interview)
- VONQ website – 6 applications (1 shortlisted for interview)
- Reed – 122 applications – (1 shortlisted for interview)
- Top Language Jobs – 171 applications (4 shortlisted for interview)
- Totaljobs 104 applications (5 shortlisted for interview)
The candidate I eventually hired came from Totaljobs, a popular site for the type of bilingual graduate position I was recruiting for. I did not make the hire specifically from my BHR trial, but it still added value to the process and I would use it again.
