Why paycards matter – and the benefits they bring

Paycards help recruitment agencies meet the evolving needs of today’s workforce while streamlining payroll operations. For workers, they provide a faster, more flexible alternative to paper checks or traditional bank accounts, especially for unbanked or underbanked workers. Employees can access wages immediately without delays, manage expenses more easily, and use mobile apps to check balances, track transactions, and transfer funds anytime. A gig worker, for example, could receive a paycheck on Friday and instantly pay weekend bills right from their phone.

For agencies, paycards reduce administrative overhead and create a smoother, more unified payment journey. By integrating with the Bullhorn Talent Platform, enrollment can happen directly during onboarding, allowing candidates to move seamlessly from accepting a job to receiving their first paycheck.

Agencies gain flexibility and minimize manual data entry and payroll errors through integrated provider options like:

• Branch: Enrollment automatically flows Bullhorn Talent Platform into the Bullhorn ATS, creating a seamless experience.
• rapid! PayCard: Recruiters can distribute and register cards on demand, offering an efficient solution.

This flexibility allows payroll teams to spend less time on paperwork and more time on higher-value activities.

Offering flexible, fast pay options helps agencies stand out in a competitive market. Candidates notice when an agency goes the extra mile to meet their financial needs, building trust quickly. For many workers, especially those living paycheck to paycheck or managing gig-based schedules, the ability to access funds immediately can be the difference between taking one job over another.

Workers who feel empowered with modern pay solutions are more likely to stay loyal and recommend the agency to their networks. Over time, that translates into higher retention rates, stronger referrals, and a reputation as an agency that genuinely invests in its people.

Why now?

More than half of light industrial staffing firms are actively automating payroll and billing processes, and nearly 90% of candidates report that mobile devices are essential in their job search. Workers today expect speed, convenience, and control over how they are paid, and agencies that deliver on these expectations clearly stand out. Mobile-friendly pay solutions attract top talent and improve retention across the workforce.

What this means for agencies

The adoption of paycards goes beyond operational efficiency. It allows agencies to reduce administrative burdens, provide faster payments, and offer modern, mobile-friendly solutions that meet candidate expectations. Satisfied candidates are more likely to stay with the agency or refer friends. They may even write a positive review or two.  In other words, paycards help agencies attract and retain talent while simultaneously saving them time and resources. 

Hear from one of our customers:

“The Branch Paycard team has been consistently supportive with the setup of our Bullhorn integration, always willing to help and make adjustments as needed. When the process is followed as designed in Bullhorn onboarding, the integration is seamless and requires no additional lift from our internal teams,” said Libby Reyna, Human Resources Generalist at The Liberty Group.

Take the hassle out of payroll today

The launch of paycard partners in the Bullhorn Marketplace is a step toward smarter, faster, and more flexible payroll solutions. By integrating paycards into the Bullhorn Talent Platform and Bullhorn Middle Office, staffing firms can streamline operations, enhance financial wellness for candidates, and gain a competitive advantage in the talent market. 

Discover how paycard partners can simplify payroll instantly and transform the way your agency works today by visiting the Bullhorn Paycards Marketplace.

Email

Reach out in the morning or evening

Early morning and the evening are the clear winners when it comes to candidate response rates. We’d bet that this is because candidates are the least preoccupied with other activities during these two times—say, like being distracted by their current jobs.

Reach out in the middle of the week

When it comes to choosing the right day– not just the right times– to email candidates, a review of 10 recent studies shows the sweet spot for emails that are most likely to catch a candidate’s eye is Thursday, with Tuesday and Wednesday close behind. Thursday consistently tops the charts in open rates and responses from candidates. If you’re reaching out more than once a week, try pairing a Thursday email send with a Tuesday or Wednesday follow-up to start more conversations with the right candidates.

Reach out on Sundays

Did you know that candidates receive one hundred times as many emails during the workweek as they do over the weekend? Two major studies of email open rates found significantly higher response rates from candidates on Saturday and Sunday than the rest of the week. Why? Weak competition is the likely culprit. But that doesn’t mean you should exclusively reach out to candidates on the weekend—every day of the week gets a decent response rate, and every candidate is unique. Plus, depending on the role you’re filling, the traditional weekend might actually be a candidate’s workweek.

Don’t forget

The time you send your email is important, but your content matters even more. Do you have an interesting subject line? Are you hitting the right tone? Are your emails personalised? (Hint: Avoid those notorious “Hello, [NAME]” emails). 

Remember to be flexible and open-minded. While mid-week emails have the highest response rate, largely due to less competition in inboxes, should this change, your email strategy should too.

LinkedIn

Reach out between 9 AM and 10 AM

According to LinkedIn’s own data, not only do InMail messages get a 300% higher response rate than a regular email, but mid-morning InMails get the highest response rates. For more advice on reaching out to candidates on LinkedIn, check out their article on writing compelling InMail subject lines to help you get a response.

Reach out any weekday

While weekdays are the clear winners in terms of garnering a response to your InMail, it seems that all are created equal. There is a clear loser, however: Saturday. InMails sent on this day are 8 percent less likely to get a response.

Don’t forget

Make sure to account for differences in time zones. Your 9:30 AM may be someone else’s 6:30 AM, so always take that into account when sending time-targeted messages.

Additionally, don’t forget to focus on what you have in common. Candidates are more likely to respond to inMails sent by recruiters who share a LinkedIn group, connection, or even alma mater. If you ever worked for the same company as a prospect, make sure to bring it up—it’ll increase the likelihood of receiving a response by a whopping 27 percent. Mutual connections bump that percentage up to 46 percent.

Phone

Reach out between 10 AM and 11 AM

Who says the phone is dead? Probably no one who works in recruiting. Your instinct might be to catch a candidate before they begin their day, but hold off for a few hours. Candidates are nearly twice as likely to pick up the phone at 10 AM as they are two hours earlier. On the flip side, candidates stop answering the phone after 4 PM, so don’t wait until the last minute to get those calls out.

Reach out on Tuesdays

According to a study of over 20,000 calls, Tuesdays have the best connect rate—10 percent—for candidates. Friday is the worst at 8.7 percent. While the difference isn’t earth-shattering, it adds up to a difference in 13 extra candidates per 1000 attempts.

Don’t forget

You’re most likely to reach a candidate the first time you call them, so be prepared. That said, don’t give up too soon. You still have a five percent chance of reaching candidates on your tenth attempt!

Automatically engage candidates via email or text and put your outreach on autopilot. Learn more about how you can provide personalised communication with Bullhorn Automation.

Top-tier staffing software can make all the difference in growing and scaling your business, but implementing it requires time and effort. Every business wants to be efficient with its spending, but when it comes to implementing staffing software, a seemingly “cheap” implementation often comes with hidden costs and substantial risks that can derail long-term success. It’s like building a house without a solid foundation.

So, what exactly goes into a proper software implementation? It’s a multifaceted process that requires expertise, time, and a deep understanding of your unique business.

Let’s dive into what a robust implementation entails, and why putting in the work at the start can save your firm headaches later on.

What to expect from an implementation

Here’s a look at what a robust implementation truly entails:

1. Workflow enablement: This foundational phase is about tailoring your new system to your unique business operations. 
2. Data migration: A successful data migration requires meticulous attention to detail during the pre-sales process to understand all the data sources leveraged by your team. 
3. Integration: Focus on establishing robust connections that keep your front and back office in perfect sync, ensuring data flows smoothly and accurately across your entire ecosystem.
4. Testing: Thorough testing minimizes go-live risks and ensures your business operations continue without a hitch. 
5. Change management and training: Engaging a dedicated internal lead or partnering with change management experts can help shape the right strategies to support your team, encourage adoption, and ease the transition. 

Ultimately, a proper implementation takes time because accuracy and alignment are key. It’s not just about installing software; it’s about building a system that will genuinely work for your light industrial staffing firm, ensuring it’s optimized for efficiency and growth.

When you work with a vendor who has implemented countless clerical and light industrial customers on high-quality software, they’ll not only advise you on best practices but also help you optimize your entire operation.

Why good implementations aren’t cheap (and why that’s a good thing)

It boils down to value. Here’s why investing in a quality implementation is worth every penny:

• Industry expertise costs money: Someone with specialized knowledge of light industrial staffing will provide more informed recommendations – and add more value.
• Avoid costly rework: Cheap implementations often skip critical steps, leading to frustrating and expensive rework down the line. For instance, the right testing ensures workflows are set up properly and working as intended. You save money upfront only to spend more fixing problems.
• Risk mitigation: A thorough implementation ensures compliance, avoids downtime, and guarantees your data is accurate and flowing precisely as it needs to. This proactive approach saves you from potentially devastating operational and legal headaches.
• Tailored to you: A quality implementation is tailored to the nuances of your business, with the right training in place to set your team up for success from day one.

How to spot a risky software implementation quote

Not all quotes are created equal. Be wary if you see:

• Lack of discovery or scoping: If a vendor doesn’t take the time to understand your unique needs, that’s a red flag.
• No training or post-go-live support included: Implementation isn’t over at go-live. Your team needs ongoing support.
• Hidden fees or change orders: What starts as “cheap” can quickly inflate with unexpected charges once the work begins.
• Fast timelines that skip testing or user feedback: Rushing through critical phases is a recipe for disaster.
• Generic software terms: If they don’t show an understanding of light industrial staffing workflows, they likely don’t have the specialized expertise you need.

The pitfalls of going with the lowest quote

Choosing the cheapest option can lead to a cascade of problems, downtime, bugs, or missed features to ensure compliance and safety. Plus, a vendor with limited experience in clerical and light industrial staffing won’t be able to make recommendations to improve your process — or provide additional support beyond go-live at all.

With these issues, your firm risks poor user adoption; if the system isn’t easy to use or tailored to your team’s workflow, recruiters, sales, clients, and candidates simply won’t use it. As Jared Mogan from MAU Workforce Solutions shared, “We had a lot of information stored outside of our system. We were using spreadsheets and Google Docs. We needed to marry up that information with data we had in our ATS, and we couldn’t do that with the tools we had.”

Additionally, a poorly implemented, limited option can stifle your growth. The Director of Operations and IT at Malone noted, “The biggest issue we had was being able to grow our tech stack. When we were in our previous system, it wasn’t truly an open API, so it was a lot harder to integrate any other software that we wanted to use within it.”

A seemingly affordable solution may just end up costing you more in the long run. A robust system that truly supports your light industrial staffing firm’s needs and future growth is worth the investment.

Invest in your future

The quality of your staffing software implementation isn’t just a line item; it’s a foundational investment in your business’s future. Don’t think of an implementation as a one-and-done event. Looking at the full picture includes considering the ongoing training and support you’ll receive long after “go-live.”

Your decision shouldn’t solely hinge on the initial cost or a rushed timeline. An implementation is the means to get you the staffing software that will truly grow your business. So, when talking to tech vendors, make sure you’re asking the right questions. Don’t just ask, “How much does this cost?” Instead, ask: “What’s included? Who’s involved? How will this help us grow?”

Choosing a robust implementation isn’t just about avoiding problems; it’s about setting your firm up for unparalleled success. It’s about empowering your team, streamlining your operations, and building a foundation that can confidently scale with your ambitions. It’s an investment that pays dividends for years to come.

Want to learn more about implementing software for clerical and light industrial firms? Check out our new Bullhorn One implementation playbook.

The economic and political landscape is in constant flux, and with it, the regulatory environment for staffing and recruiting firms. With changing regulations and increasingly commonplace audits, firms need to ensure that they have an accessible digital record of documentation and work authorization for all of their candidates.

But staying compliant isn’t just about avoiding penalties; it’s a fundamental pillar of trust, operational efficiency, and ultimately, your competitive advantage. In this dynamic market, leveraging technology to streamline and fortify your compliance processes is no longer a luxury – it’s a necessity. 

Mitigating risk

Staying compliant is a challenge for any business, but especially so for recruitment agencies. Firms need to stay abreast of changes in labor laws and regulations on the federal, state, and local level to ensure that each and every candidate is compliant. When certain employment authorization documents are updated, even seemingly minor changes in verbiage can have repercussions, requiring firms to update their own verification forms.

Having a centralized platform for managing compliance requirements can help ensure that workers consistently follow the necessary steps for every placement. And because every firm has its own unique processes, features like customizable onboarding workflows allow you to incorporate specific compliance checks relevant to your firm’s roles, industries, and locations. This granular control ensures that no detail is overlooked, reducing the likelihood of non-compliance.

Furthermore, an onboarding platform provides firms with a comprehensive record of all onboarding activities, including document completion dates, electronic signatures, and verification statuses. This detailed documentation is invaluable in the event of an audit, providing clear evidence of your commitment to compliance.

By digitizing these crucial steps, you ensure consistency and adherence to your company’s policies and legal requirements. This not only protects your firm but also fosters a safer and more trustworthy environment for your clients and candidates.

Driving efficiency

For high-volume staffing firms, like those in the clerical and light industrial space, getting workers onboarded and placed quickly is paramount. How can firms streamline the onboarding process, guide candidates through accurate completion, and provide real-time validation? 

The answer lies in automated onboarding. Using automated outreach to collect essential documents, from W-4 forms to state-specific tax documents, ensures that all necessary paperwork is completed and stored securely. This digital approach eliminates the risks associated with lost or misplaced physical documents and provides a clear audit trail, which is crucial for demonstrating compliance. This not only minimizes errors but also accelerates the onboarding timeline, allowing your talent to get started faster.

Elevating the candidate experience

While compliance is paramount, it doesn’t have to come at the expense of the candidate experience. A clunky, paper-based onboarding process can create a negative first impression, potentially impacting candidate engagement and retention. Research consistently shows that a positive onboarding experience significantly impacts a new hire’s commitment and longevity. In Bullhorn’s most recent GRID Talent Trends Report, dissatisfied candidates felt recruiters were too slow (44%), the application process was too long (45%), and forms were too complicated (46%).

A user-friendly, streamlined onboarding platform prevents candidates from needing to navigate the complexities of onboarding forms on their own. Instead, an onboarding platform can ask questions using everyday language to gather the information needed to fill out government forms more easily. This modern approach reflects positively on your firm’s professionalism and efficiency and keeps workers coming back again and again. (Plus, when candidates do come back, all of their information is already in your system, so they don’t need to endlessly repeat the process.)

By streamlining the compliance aspects of onboarding, you free up your recruiters to focus on building relationships and engaging with candidates, ultimately leading to higher satisfaction and retention rates and giving firms a competitive edge.

Future-proofing your compliance strategy

In today’s rapidly evolving economic and regulatory landscape, a proactive and technology-driven approach to compliance is essential for staffing and recruiting firms to thrive.

Ready to take control of your compliance in the shifting economic landscape? Explore how Bullhorn Onboarding tools can empower your firm.

Flash forward to 2025, and automation is now table stakes. Top-performing firms are 57% more likely to be using automation tools, according to Bullhorn’s GRID Industry Trends report. Yet the same research found that only 18% of firms say they’re in the advanced stages of digital transformation. This means that agencies that harness the power of automation stand to gain a competitive edge, even in today’s uncertain recruitment landscape. At this year’s Engage, we sat down with a new panel of automation all-stars who are doing just that. 

LRS Healthcare’s Amy Slager, All Medical Personnel’s Erin Fryar, ManpowerGroup’s Bella Zamborini, and North Highland’s Ryan Gemmill spoke with automation expert Billy Davis to talk more about their journeys with Bullhorn Automation. Their insights provided a roadmap for recruitment professionals looking to transform their operations, enhance candidate experiences, and drive real business growth.

Automation in action

When it comes to automation, the possibilities are endless, which can make getting started daunting. To kick off the conversation, the panelists shared real-world use cases of how they’re putting automation to work every day.

Slager and her team have seen success with automated lead engagement. By filtering out uninterested or retired candidates and nurturing hot leads through targeted campaigns, her team saw 9.7% of clicks convert into new lead distribution – higher than the industry average of 6%. This isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about ensuring no high-potential candidate slips through the cracks.

Fryar delved into the operational side, detailing how automation streamlines VMS (Vendor Management System) orders. Many recruitment professionals know the pain of manually touching up every VMS order. Fryar’s team built an automation that automatically pulled orders, added missing location data, and assigned account and business development managers based on geography or client. The result? Orders arrived at the support team and recruiters as a “much greater shell,” as Fryar put it, ready for faster action. This proactive approach drastically reduced manual effort and accelerated the placement process.

Zamborini shared her personal favorite use case: push notifications through Bullhorn Automation for candidates using their mobile apps. Imagine candidates receiving instant job recommendations and task reminders directly on their phones – a seamless and personalized experience. This not only re-engages candidates but also puts the power of action directly in their hands, reflecting a holistic and forward-thinking approach to candidate engagement. 

Each of these use cases included a common thread: automation empowers recruiters by handling tasks at scale, allowing them to step in at precisely the right moment with the right information. Automation doesn’t replace human touch; it enhances it.

Measuring what matters

The big question with any tech investment is: how do you ensure you’re seeing returns? The panelists showcased a few ways that they’re tracking the impact of automation and measuring success.

Fryar and her team take a multi-faceted approach, looking at efficiency, data hygiene, business process improvement, and marketing. For business processes, Fryar focuses on gains in efficiency, improved data quality (by correcting or preventing incorrect entries), and reducing the number of “touches” required per order. Ultimately, these metrics tie back to the core goal: faster placements and better candidate and client experiences.

Zamborini highlighted the importance of building a business case with both soft and hard benefits. While soft benefits like cleaner data and reduced risk are crucial, justifying ROI during challenging economic times meant focusing on “hard savings,” particularly the ability to sunset in-house tools by purchasing Bullhorn Automation. This approach demonstrates that automation isn’t just about incremental gains; it can drive significant cost savings and operational consolidation.

Slager brought it back to marketing, explicitly citing the success of their “ghosting campaign.” This automation re-engages candidates who have dropped out of contact, ensuring that “hot contacts” with completed profiles don’t fall through the cracks. “We are making sure that we stay re-engaged with those candidates,” Slager said.

Whether your goal is cost savings, more efficient recruitment, or happier candidates, choosing a few key KPIs and working towards those can help ensure that you and your team are getting the most out of your investment.

Charting your course

For those just embarking on their automation journey, the panelists offered crucial advice:

1. Understand the business holistically: Slager stressed the importance of having an automation leader who understands the business from end to end. Automations don’t exist in a vacuum; a change in one area (like lead generation) can impact another (like back office operations). A holistic view ensures that your automations are fully integrated within your workflows and prevents unforeseen conflicts.
2. Master your workflow and data hygiene first: “You need to know what you want to do with automation,” said Gemmill. Get your existing workflows organized and prioritize data hygiene before automating. This foundational work ensures you’re not just automating a flawed process.
3. Document everything, early and often: Gemmill highlighted his team’s meticulous documentation of all of their automations — crucial for troubleshooting, growth, and ensuring continuity as teams evolve. Davis added that doing this upfront is “much, much, much easier than retroactively doing it when you have a hundred automations.”
4. Foster a core stakeholder group: Fryar emphasized creating a core group of key stakeholders from different departments (such as accounting, finance, and marketing) and business lines. This ensures that when one stakeholder proposes a new automation, its impact is discussed across the entire business, fostering collaboration and preventing silos.

Pitfalls to avoid

The panelists also offered candid advice on what not to do:

• Automating without business buy-in: Slager warned against building automations without bringing the business on board, emphasizing the need for a change management process. An automation might seem great to an admin, but if it doesn’t solve a real business problem, it won’t be adopted.
• Creating individual automations for individual people: Davis strongly advised against this, calling it a “red flag.” Individual automations that don’t fit into a whole aren’t scalable and quickly fall apart. Broader AI solutions can offer scalable ways to customize communications without fragmenting your automation strategy.
• Automating everything at once (without prioritization): Zamborini pointed out that once people realize the power of automation, there’s often a “flood of requests.” A demand process is essential to prioritize what gets automated next, ensuring alignment with overarching business goals.
• Overly complex automations: Gemmill suggested that if an automation has “so many branches” that you can’t visualize it, it’s probably better to break it into two or three simpler automations. This makes them easier to catalog, manage, and troubleshoot.
• Setting it and forgetting it: Fryar highlighted the importance of a regular review process. Automations that worked perfectly six months ago might need tweaks, or even be rendered obsolete by new Bullhorn functionality. Regularly revisiting KPIs and functionality ensures your automations remain optimized and valuable.

Automation: The foundation of AI

Automation and AI go hand-in-hand, as Bullhorn’s Matt Fischer and Jason Heilman pointed out in their Vision for Innovation. Without automation, AI wouldn’t be nearly as powerful; automation was “the first foundation to benefiting from AI,” as Gemmill said. Having clean data and well-defined processes – often managed by automation – provides the optimal environment for AI to thrive. 

“The foundation to get optimal AI results is going to be built from a combination of system, process, workflow, and automation, all synergistically working together,” added Davis. He emphasized a “crawl, walk, run” approach to recruitment AI tools like Amplify, encouraging organizations to introduce AI incrementally rather than waiting for “perfect” data – because perfection is an elusive goal.

From streamlining operations and improving data quality to enhancing candidate engagement and informing business decisions, the benefits of automation are vast. For firms looking to gain a competitive edge and build a foundation for AI adoption, automation is a necessity. 

“Start now so that you understand the tool,” said Zamborini. “Amplify is going to expedite everything, and automation is the foundation.”

At its core, Salesforce’s success lies in its adaptability. The platform offers a wealth of tools like the Lightning Design System and Lightning Web Components (LWCs), which empower customers to build compelling, custom solutions tailored to their unique needs through the power of modular design. With a modular design, the platform can be broken down into independent, manageable building blocks – modules – that can be combined and customized to suit specific needs. This ability to customize is a key reason why so many businesses have come to rely on the Salesforce ecosystem.

Here at Bullhorn, our goal is to move away from one-off, client-specific, bespoke customizations that, while powerful, are limited in their application. Instead, we are focused on creating robust, modular tools that can be readily implemented by a wide range of customers to solve their specific business challenges.

The software spectrum: Finding the balance between a custom build and a rigid product

In the world of enterprise software, businesses often face a difficult choice: invest in a heavily customized solution tailored to their exact needs, or adopt a standardized product that promises speed and efficiency. Both paths have their appeal, but they also come with significant trade-offs.

A ground-up custom build can be powerful, but often requires a lengthy implementation and a significant investment in professional services. And over time, you may be locked into tech built for a business model that is no longer relevant. On the other end of the spectrum, a rigid, off-the-shelf product can get you up and running quickly, but may force you to change your workflows to fit its constraints, leaving critical gaps in your process. If those constraints are too limiting, there’s a high potential to get stuck paying for costly customizations or taking on additional complexity to implement third-party solutions.

This presents a challenge: how do you get a solution that is tailored to your unique business needs without the high cost and long wait of a fully custom project?

Putting the right building blocks in place

At Bullhorn, we believe the answer lies in a different approach to product development. Rather than delivering a single, monolithic solution, we focus on building a powerful foundation of core components (or “building blocks”) that can be quickly and easily configured and combined to meet specific business challenges.

This philosophy allows us to handle the heavy lifting — performance, security, and core functionality — while providing our customers with the tools to tailor the user experience and create new capabilities. The goal is to accelerate the implementation process while still allowing for the precise customization that recruitment and exec search agencies need to be competitive.

For example, imagine a recruiter wants to select candidates from an arbitrarily defined collection and send them personalized emails promoting a given client. They could specify criteria for choosing the candidates within a Bullhorn-built candidate management module; generate personalized content using Salesforce Agentforce functionality; and then send the email using a Bullhorn-built email management module. This combines customer-specific requirements with already existing technology from both Bullhorn and Salesforce to create a new capability with the smallest possible effort. This gives customers the flexibility to tailor product functionality, with “no code,” “low code,” or “pro code” based on their own interests.

Designing for a cohesive experience

Beyond a modular architecture, our product philosophy extends to the user experience itself. We intentionally design our components to match the look and feel of native Salesforce elements. By building on the official Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS), we ensure that moving between something standard in Salesforce into a Bullhorn component is a seamless transition. This design consistency is critical; it reduces the cognitive load on users and eliminates the jarring context-switching that can lead to fatigue and slower adoption.

Omnitable example configured for the contact object

Introducing Omnitable

A prime example of this philosophy is Omnitable, our universal table experience for the Bullhorn Recruitment Cloud. Since introducing Omnitable, we’ve seen an 88% performance boost in table load times across our platform.

Omnitable offers a dynamic alternative to traditional static tables, providing users with enhanced flexibility and functionality. With Omnitable, users can:

• Find information faster: Users can run quick filters, column searches, custom sorts, and named filters to quickly locate what they need.
• Work more efficiently: Features like in-line editing, text clipping/wrapping, customizable columns, and adjustable row heights allow for faster data interaction and updates.
• Seamlessly access data: A full-screen view and respect for Salesforce’s “compact” view make it easier to work with large datasets. Similarly, customers can choose to layer in a separate “record preview” component (also called contextual data viewer) to enable quick access to object data without leading the table. 

Omnitable configured with the record preview component 

In addition to UI improvements, Omnitable gives administrators advanced configuration options. Admins can now fully configure which actions are enabled with each and every Omnitable setup. Similarly, admins can now integrate custom actions (such as a custom “update status” action) into workflows and eliminate manual steps. Perhaps most importantly, actions in Omnitable are now wrapped in Salesforce Flows, which allows agencies to build and design their own simple, flow-based logic around Recruitment Cloud packaged actions.

With Omnitable, work in Bullhorn Recruitment Cloud becomes truly seamless. Users experience consistent actions and a familiar layout everywhere they go. The same actions are available whether navigating a specific workflow or working with different record types so that recruiters can move quickly and confidently through tasks, boosting productivity.

Furthermore, because we are continuously adding new functionality with each release, clients get a tool that evolves with the product without requiring a new implementation. This iterative development process is a key advantage of modular design, allowing us to deliver value to our customers more quickly and efficiently. By finding this balance, we can offer the best of both worlds: the speed and stability of a mature product, combined with the flexibility of a custom-built solution.

The future is modular 

Ultimately, this middle path between custom builds and rigid products offers a powerful path forward for software development. It allows companies like Bullhorn to deliver solutions that are both highly customizable and quick to implement. By finding this “sweet spot,” we can empower our customers with the tools they need to tackle their unique business challenges, without the long waits and hefty price tags associated with traditional custom development. This balanced approach allows for precise customization while leveraging the speed and efficiency of a well-designed product.

A meticulous approach to your data, combined with the power of AI and automation, can elevate your business to unprecedented heights. Below, read insights from a conversation between Bullhorn experts Erik Mateev, Kat Lazzaro, and Tom Washington on building a clean database – and the tools you can lean on to keep it that way.

The unseen impact of dirty data

Data hygiene, at its core, is about ensuring your database contains information that is clean, accurately formatted, and complete. It’s about having all the right information exactly where your team needs it to succeed.

Why is this so crucial, especially now?

• Speed and efficiency: Incomplete records cripple your team’s ability to work with data. Searches become less effective, automations stumble, and even your analytics can produce skewed results.
• Trust and adoption: If your recruiters don’t trust the data, they’ll abandon your ATS and resort to external sources – often rediscovering information you already own, leading to wasted time and unnecessary costs.
• Enhanced business processes: Clean, complete profiles enrich your understanding of candidates, clients, and jobs. This improves everything from business development to the core recruitment process, making everyone’s life easier.

The recruitment market is undeniably tough. Our annual GRID Industry Trend Reports have revealed a steady decrease in revenue growth for agencies since 2022. Companies are cautious with hiring, and candidates prioritize job security. Yet, some agencies consistently outperform the market. 

What’s their secret? They’re focused on improving candidate experience, matching talent to jobs more effectively, and drastically reducing time-to-fill. They’re achieving this by upgrading their technology, particularly in automation and AI.

Automation: The engine of clean data

Poor workflows and manual data entry are notorious culprits behind bad data. Recruiters, understandably, prioritize revenue-generating activities over admin tasks. This is where automation becomes your secret weapon.

Consider these game-changing automation use cases:

• Automated status updates: Instead of relying on individual recruiters to manually update candidate or sales contact statuses, build business rules within your automation platform. For instance, if a candidate hasn’t had a note or submission in a set timeframe, their status automatically shifts from ‘active’ to ‘passive.’ This removes subjectivity and ensures consistent data.
• Consolidating candidate skills: Recruiters often input variations of the same skill (e.g., “Java,” “J2EE,” “Javascript”). Automation can standardize these, consolidating them under a singular, uniform skill. This makes searching for talent significantly easier and more accurate.
• Self-service data hygiene: A significant portion of your ATS candidates might be “dead” – their information is outdated, rendering them effectively unreachable. You can leverage automation to build lists of these dormant candidates (e.g., last note date over 24 months ago, no submissions, never placed). Then, launch an automated engagement campaign, sending surveys that prompt candidates to update their resumes or missing contact details. This maximizes your existing investment in candidate acquisition and reactivates valuable talent. Traditionally, uncontactable candidates were archived, but with AI, that’s no longer the only option.

AI: Beyond automation – enriching and optimizing

While automation handles the “how,” AI takes on the “what,” “where,” and “why.” Recruitment AI tools are capable of going beyond simple rule-based actions to intelligent data enrichment and optimized matching.

Here are a few powerful ways AI is transforming data hygiene and recruitment:

• Enriching candidate and job data: Many ATS records are missing critical information (e.g., candidate email, phone number, current employer, or job salary, start date). This data often exists elsewhere in your system, like in a candidate’s CV, but isn’t parsed into the correct fields. An enrichment agent can automatically extract this information from places like the CV and populate the right fields. This instantly makes previously uncontactable candidates reachable, dramatically improving searchability and recruiter engagement. Think of it in two phases. Phase one cleans up what you already have, and phase two then leverages automation for re-engagement campaigns, asking candidates for fresh details directly.
• Creating intelligent candidate summaries: Recruiters spend precious seconds (four to seven, on average!) scanning CVs to assess fit. This approach risks missing great candidates or pursuing unsuitable ones. With AI, you can create a new data point: a concise candidate summary. This summary, generated by an AI enrichment agent, pulls key information from the CV and other relevant fields to provide a snapshot of a candidate’s strengths and ideal job types. This summary can be prominently displayed at the top of the candidate profile, accelerating candidate review and improving recruiter efficiency. It also provides a pre-built summary for client pitches, further streamlining workflows. This is scalable; the AI runs continuously in the background, summarizing every new candidate.
• Optimizing search and match: The biggest blocker to internal database usage is often trust in the data. Search and match technology tackles this head-on by fostering a “database-first” mindset. Here’s how:
  • Intelligent search construction: Search and match takes key job information, expands it with synonyms, and builds a complex Boolean search.
  • Machine learning ranking: Results are then passed through a machine learning model trained on billions of data points. This model understands historical ideal candidate profiles for specific job types and ranks candidates based on actual outcome-specific data, not just keywords.
  • Convenience and efficiency: The top 10 recommended candidates are surfaced directly within the job record, providing instant insights. Recruiters can expand this search to see all matched candidates, ranked for their convenience. Crucially, if they do need to go to external sources for candidates, search and match technology replicates the search across integrated job boards and highlights candidates who already exist in your Bullhorn database, preventing duplication and wasted spend.

Your path to staying ahead of the curve

By embracing robust data hygiene practices, leveraging automation to streamline workflows, and deploying AI to enrich data and optimize matching, you’re not just solving existing challenges – you’re differentiating your business and staying ahead of the curve. It’s about empowering your recruiters, maximizing your existing talent pool, and ensuring your business is ready to thrive in the future of recruitment.

To learn more and see these solutions in action, check out the full webinar.

This blog offers a snapshot of these key releases. For full details and expected dates, please visit the Bullhorn Product Release Portal in Bullhorn Hub and check the Bullhorn Release Calendar. 

Missed the product updates last month? Check out the May 2025 release highlights while you’re here.

Bullhorn Amplify enhancements

Bullhorn Amplify

• Support all fields for AI Assistant: We’ve significantly enhanced the AI Assistant by expanding the fields available for its use. You can now leverage almost every field in your AI Assistant workflow, moving far beyond our previous limited selection. This update includes support for commonly-requested fields such as comments, internal description (job), and custom fields, though confidential fields will continue to remain unavailable. To utilize these new fields, they will need to be added via the Admin Prompt Studio. This expanded capability empowers you to maximize the AI Assistant’s effectiveness and tailor it more precisely to your specific needs.

Bullhorn Automation enhancements

Bullhorn Automation

• Mass mail opt out ATS Sync:  If you have the Update Mass Mail Opt Out feature enabled and a record opts back into mailing in the ATS, that opt-in workflow now syncs back into Bullhorn Automation and updates the record’s subscription status to Mailable.

Updates to Bullhorn ATS & CRM

Bullhorn ATS

• Support for CareerBuilder job board: External Source now supports CareerBuilder. You can enter your credentials to include these job boards in your External Source searches. For customers using these job boards, this enhancement allows you to optimize your workflows by searching for CareerBuilder candidates alongside their other integrated job boards directly within Bullhorn.

Bullhorn Analytics product updates

Bullhorn Analytics

• Support for additional placement entity fields: Our Placement Entity Model in Analytics has been updated to the Generic Entity Model, significantly expanding its capabilities. This enhancement allows you to leverage 80 additional fields (up from 28) for Placement-related metrics, offering greater flexibility for filtering and creating custom metrics within Analytics. This upgrade not only will save you time by reducing your reliance on Support for specific data needs, but also unlocks new analytical possibilities previously unattainable.

Product updates for Bullhorn VMS Sync

Bullhorn VMS Sync

• Draft submittal records add/update ATS submission records: You can now manage your ATS Submission Records directly when saving a Draft Submittal. This action will either create a new ATS Submission or update an existing one associated with the draft. You can also utilize Submittal Status Mapping to assign a specific status to these ATS Submissions.

Updates to Bullhorn Healthcare solutions

Bullhorn Healthcare

• Shift Scheduler configurable cancellation reason:  When canceling a shift directly in the Shift Scheduler, you can now select from configurable cancellation reasons within the Shift Assignment fieldmap value list for reasonCanceled. These specific reasons will only appear as options in the Shift Scheduler itself. Additionally, if a Shift Assignment is linked to the Shift being canceled, that Shift Assignment will also be automatically canceled.

Enhancements to Bullhorn Middle Office

Bullhorn Middle Office

Pay & Bill

• Billable charge invoicing hold status: Users now have enhanced control over their invoicing process by managing the Invoicing Hold Status directly on Billable Charges. This feature allows you to update a Billable Charge’s status to “On Hold,” effectively preventing it from being invoiced, or to release it, allowing it to proceed through the standard invoicing workflow. Additionally, you can configure default Invoice Hold Statuses for charges within Invoice Terms for streamlined management.

Time & Labor engine

• Holiday active/inactive modal – A modal now appears when switching a Holiday to Active or Inactive. This modal helps users understand the impact of making these updates on configured Holidays and is consistent with similar behavior for Time and Labor rules.

Updates to Bullhorn Onboarding solutions

Bullhorn Onboarding

Talent Platform

• Quick Search now supports home phone number lookup: You can now search for candidates in Talent Platform using full or partial home phone numbers. Searches should be entered as numbers only, excluding the “+” sign.  This enhancement makes it easier to quickly find the right profiles using the information you have on hand.

For a complete look at June product updates, please visit the full release notes.

What is Bullhorn Amplify?

Bullhorn Amplify is a new kind of AI solution built exclusively for recruitment firms. It automates sourcing, screening, and submissions—so your team can fill roles faster, hire smarter, and grow your business without increasing headcount. 

Built on Agentforce, Salesforce’s trusted AI infrastructure, Amplify for Recruitment Cloud is designed to be flexible, not one-size-fits-all. Rather than a rigid solution, Amplify delivers a configurable set of AI-powered recruitment agents that can be tailored to your workflows, roles, and verticals—all within your existing Salesforce environment.

Amplify for Recruitment Cloud delivers suites of agents, including relevant skills, actions, and topics purpose-built for four different recruitment sectors: 

• Professional
• Healthcare
• Light industrial
• Executive search

Each agent comes with built-in skills, sector-specific taxonomies, and can be further customized to reflect your firm’s unique processes and client needs.

Out-of-the-box AI skills, built for you

Whether your agency focuses on professional, executive search, healthcare, or light industrial staffing services, Amplify delivers AI skills optimized for your specific workflows. Out of the box, you get:

• Matching: Instantly surface high-quality candidates 
• Screening: Score and shortlist top talent through automated conversational screening
• Outreach: Generate personalized outreach and nurture sequences at scale

These preconfigured skills are designed to work right away—but they’re also fully configurable to your firm’s needs.

In addition, many more skills are in development, including data enrichment, intake, scheduling, and submission.

Flexible by design. Scalable by choice.

Amplify is built to meet you where you are. You can start small—automating just a single task or role—or scale AI across your entire operation. Because these agents are deeply embedded in Salesforce, they operate seamlessly with your existing workflows and data, helping you maintain visibility and control.

Why Bullhorn Amplify?

With Amplify, you can:

• Deploy recruitment agents quickly with starter capabilities like matching and screening already built in
  
• Customize workflows to reflect your firm’s unique processes and sector-specific nuances
  
• Personalize outreach at scale by tailoring prompts and messaging to your tone, vertical, and client expectations
  
• Operate around the clock with AI agents that extend your team’s capacity 24/7
  
• Build on Agentforce, combining Salesforce’s trusted AI infrastructure with Bullhorn’s deep staffing expertise

Start amplifying your team business

Bullhorn Amplify is here to help your recruiters focus on what they do best — building relationships, closing reqs, and driving results. Want to see it in action or learn how to get started?

Contact your account team to learn more.

Missed the product updates last month? Check out the April 2025 release highlights while you’re here.

Bullhorn AI agents and automation enhancements

Bullhorn AI agents and automation

AI Assistant

• AI Assistant on Contact record:  Bullhorn’s AI Assistant is on the Client Contact record. This new entry point to AI Assistant allows users to get the assistance they need while on the Contact record, rather than having to start from a Candidate or Job, helping save them time. Access to prompts on the Contact record is limited to clients with the full AI Assistant (not Starter).

Bullhorn Automation

• New hours interval in date-based automation: This update improves our customers’ ability to provide better interview and appointment reminders for applicants and internal users. 
• Match candidate step now includes default submission source: Customers can now better report on the AI Match activity from Automations that create submissions back into the ATS. 
• New auto-detecting steps out of order service: We now auto-disable Automations that were previously causing issues when steps were out of order, requiring development intervention. This results in better customer self-service and lower internal ticket volume for support and development.

Updates to Bullhorn ATS & CRM

Bullhorn ATS

• Appointment tracking for attendees: An appointment is now created and visible in the Activity tab for Candidates, Contacts, Leads and Opportunities when multiple Attendees are added to it. Previously the Appointment tracked only for the first Attendee listed.This supports visibility of the Appointment including for future operational analysis of sales and recruitment teams. 
• LinkedIn resume parse: CVs/Resumes can now be parsed from LinkedIn Easy Apply workflow and fill out relevant candidate data in Bullhorn. Candidate data will be created if record doesn’t exist in BH or fields will be updated if there is an existing record. This ensures there’s one source of truth.

Bullhorn Analytics product updates

Bullhorn Analytics

• Shift scheduling metrics: Clients using Bullhorn ATS Shift Scheduler and Enterprise Analytics can request the metrics related to shifts be added to their instance to forecast and track shifts fulfillment, helping maximize coverage. 

Updates to Bullhorn Healthcare solutions

Bullhorn Healthcare

• Credential file type flows to candidate credential file attachment view: Available now, a new field called File Type has been added to the Credential entity in fieldmaps to indicate if a Credential’s file attachment will require the Preview Sensitive Certification File Attachment entitlement to view or edit. This information can now be set upstream on the Menu > Credentials page and flow down to the Credential File Attachment view. It saves much time for a Compliance Administrator, as previously this was manually added for each Credential. Enablement requires an admin user for setup. 

Enhancements to Bullhorn Middle Office

Bullhorn Middle Office

Time & Labor engine

• Work from Home (WFH) field available on timesheets: Time and Labor users have the ability to update a timesheet for candidates who work from home to have the correct state needed for overtime calculations. This update allows users to ensure timesheets are evaluated properly for WFH candidates without the need for DBA scripts to fix missing data.
• Purchase order field maps now available in the ATS: Customers can now manage Purchase Order fields in the Field Map section of the ATS. This provides more flexibility to show, hide, and rename Purchase Order fields.

Updates to Bullhorn Onboarding solutions

Bullhorn Onboarding

Onboarding365

• New configuration: candidate country customization of residence selections: We have added a new configuration added to the General Settings tab in Onboarding365. This update allows client customization of countries which may be selected as a country of residence by candidates. Additionally, clients can remove countries in which they do not conduct business to reduce onboarding friction.

Talent Platform

• Branding: Available now, customers can now choose whether to include their logo on the skills checklist. Logos are shown by default, but this flexibility supports vendor-neutral requirements from VMS providers.

For a complete look at May product updates, please visit the full release notes.