Better late than never, Bullhorn recently announced an integration feature with Workopolis, Canada's largest on-line career portal.  Just two weeks later, forward thinking Bullhorn CEO Art Papas announced his company's acquisitions of Canadian competitor MaxHire and St. Louis-based Sen...

Bullhorn, MaxHire and Sendouts offer recruiting (SaaS) software-as-a-service to front offices of the staffing and recruitment industry.  The combined customer base of the three companies represent over 5,000 staffing and recruiting agencies. Prior to the acquisition, Bullhorn boasted more than 100,000 users.  The new combined number of users will be considerably larger.

The Workopolis Bullhorn  Integration 

Until now, smaller Canadian job posters would enter their jobs into Bullhorn then probably log into Workopolis and manually re-type their postings.  It's a time consuming process that systemically allows for all kinds of quality problems including breakdowns in standardized content, spelling errors and outdated job posts. Advertisers using the Workopolis Screening Room feature are then required to log into Workopolis to view the profiles of candidate responses. 

Then what?

Larger advertisers on Workopolis typically develop an auto-integration such as an RSS feed or website HTML wrap that synchronizes Workopolis postings with the agency's website postings once per day.   This "wrap" or "scrape" solution offered by the job board requires a small degree of customized technical integration.   It is a synchronization between an intermediary job list and Workopolis but not a direct integration between Workopolis and Bullhorn.
  
     The new partner integration between Workopolis and Bullhorn will allow customers to post jobs directly from Bullhorn to Workopolis without an intermediary wrap.

It will also allow agencies to:

• Capture applications directly into the agency's candidate database
• Avoid the Workopolis Screening Room step
• Capture response data directly to the respective job order in Bullhorn
• Search the Workopolis resume database directly from within the Bullhorn ATS (Applicant Tracking System) 
• Easily import resumes into the agency's Bullhorn ATS 

If you are a Bullhorn user then you are probably familiar with the "Web Enabled" direct posting feature within the Job Order module and the integration with Bullhorn Reach.  I have not yet test driven the new integration with Workopolis but imagine it will be quite similar to the Reach integration.  Not bad. 

If you are a Workopolis client with an existing daily wrap then this new integration announcement is rather ho-hum.  You already have something that works for posting.

Agencies that are currently entering job posts manually into Workopolis will see this new direct posting feature as a bonus.  But more important is the auto import and parsing of Workopolis candidates directly into the Bullhorn database.  But don't get too excited about what might come to pass.  If Bullhorn or Workopolis live up to their reputations, it will probably be clunky and cost you something more than you expect.
 

Bullhorn Acquires MaxHire Solutions and Sendouts

http://www.bullhorn.com

There are mixed opinions amongst existing staffing industry customers about the double acquisition.  Some Bullhorn customers see this a bold step necessary for them to carve a path to the next generation of recruitment technology.

Satisfied or dissatisfied, Bullhorn is thought to be near the end of it's current platform's potential. As a past user of Bullhorn it seemed like even the smallest feature enhancements were difficult for the company to implement.  They appeared limited in their flexibility and opportunity because of the trappings of their legacy decisions. 

In an article posted on Staffingindustry.com, Andrew Hally, vice president of product and marketing at Bullhorn. addressed the innovation trap by saying "the company is working on a next-generation system that will incorporate innovations from Bullhorn, MaxHire and Sendouts. The new platform could be out in a year or two and customers will have the choice of moving to it or staying with what they have. Customers also have the option of moving to the Bullhorn platform prior to the next generation."

The appointment of MaxHire’s Vancouver based CEO Peter Blitz as Bullhorn’s product innovation officer is a sure sign that Bullhorn and their private equity owners Vista Equity Partners are committed to a new round of technology innovation.

In the Blogshere, existing clients at MaxHire and Sendouts are reacting with a little less enthusiasm.  The general sense is that if they wanted to use Bullhorn, they would have made that decision on their own.  The word is already out that there will be no further product enhancements to Maxhire and Sendouts.  All hands are committed to consolidating the best of all three products under the Bullhorn banner.

If size matters then the new combo company is strengthening its position for the battle with IBM who recently paid $1.3 billion for recruitment software giant Kenexa known for their Brassring recruitment technology.  Brassring boasts:

• 120 Million Candidate Records
• System Users in More Than 120 Countries
• Candidates Processed in Over 190 Countries
• One Million Recruiters and Hiring Managers Per Day
• 80,000 Candidates Per Day

In my opinion, Sendouts is the easiest product to use, MaxHire has the best innovation and technology under the hood and Bullhorn has the leadership, market penetration and innovation discipline to make this a win-win-win-win situation for all three companies and their staffing industry clients. Only time will tell.

Steve Jones - Business Leadership Corp.