We are an agency, a staffing agency, and we use Bullhorn mainly as an ATS, so we use it for reporting, onboarding, and to process our payrolling requests.
Have improved workflows through automation but faced challenges with feature limitations and unclear pricing
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
What I appreciate most about Bullhorn's core functionalities and ATS functionalities is that it is highly customizable, the UI is very user friendly, and it's very easy to train. Currently it's fast and web-based. Ten years ago, being web-based was revolutionary. There's also good support.
The impact of those automation features on our operational efficiency is huge; we have more than 100 automation flows in place, a lot of notifications, candidate communication, engagement, but also preventing mistakes and giving notices to other departments, compliance, back office, and so on. That's the good thing about automation.
What needs improvement?
The impact of those automation features on our operational efficiency is huge; however, what I don't appreciate about it is that it's very limited; it's limited to Bullhorn and, even within Bullhorn, it's limited to the candidate, the placement, the job, and the contact entity. You cannot automate files, notes, or change requests, so it's very limited, and they also don't do any further development in this anymore since AI is on the market.
When it comes to automation in Bullhorn, I would appreciate seeing that automation is possible for integrating files. For example, that you can say, show me all candidates who don't have a file or which have a file that is older than one year, or which have a file type of resume or contract. I would appreciate seeing the possibility to build automations based on change requests, where you can automate according to the status submitted or approved, which is currently not possible, or automation based on notes.
When it comes to the missing features in Bullhorn, I have numerous suggestions. Recently they introduced the AI assistant, which is a chatbot within Bullhorn that can refer to candidate, contact, and job data, which is great. However, the output from your prompt can only be copied to a clipboard and not inserted into a Bullhorn field, meaning you always have to do three, four more clicks to get it over to an email or to the field that publishes the job ad. This functionality has to be developed further because there are other tools that can already do this. The prompting and formatting possibilities within the prompt are very limited as well. Regarding AI, there is no match top candidates functionality that provides results good enough to use. We are already using the Textkernel search, which is the future search Bullhorn will integrate. Additionally, we also work with Bullhorn Onboarding, which is a catastrophe; it's not further developed, and they have not provided a new solution for the German-speaking market in five years. We also use the Canvas reporting tool that lacks further development; there are limitations on what you can build reports on. I would appreciate seeing improvements there, and to close this circle, I would appreciate seeing a kind of avatar that can conduct a first interview with a candidate.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with Bullhorn for more than 10 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I find Bullhorn stable now; they have it under control for the past five years, but before that, it wasn't stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Regarding scalability, I would say Bullhorn does not meet my goals. The limitations compared to other tools on the market are too high.
How are customer service and support?
I would give Bullhorn's technical support or customer service team an eight out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Before Bullhorn, we had a Swiss solution called Umantis, and prior to that, we had Red Rabbit, which I don't think exists anymore, and that was before 2008.
What was our ROI?
Regarding the return on investment from Bullhorn, we have used it for 10 years, so I don't have a comparison to another ATS. Of course, we have a return on investment compared to having no ATS, but that's the only comparison I can provide. From the automation perspective, it has really brought a lot because it prevents us from making mistakes, which is the biggest return on investment we see from automation.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We regularly evaluate other options on the market, and our biggest competitors compared to Bullhorn are Mercury, Zwoof—which has a strong standing in Switzerland—and MySolution, which is Salesforce-based. Recruit CRM is another interesting American-Indian solution, but we conduct regular evaluations to see what can deal with the complexity of our contracting processes, which are quite extensive.
What other advice do I have?
I have utilized automation features in Bullhorn.
Regarding the integration capabilities of Bullhorn, they have the marketplace partners and that works pretty well for them. However, with other partners, we recently tried to integrate Mona AI, and it didn't work out very well.
My assessment of the client and candidate engagement tools within Bullhorn is that they are pretty useless for us; for example, the Pulse feature, which shows how often we've been in touch, is quite useless. We're not using any of these engagement tools.
There are aspects of reporting and analytics in Bullhorn that I would appreciate seeing improved in the future.
The pricing concept for Bullhorn is that you pay per user license, meaning the more you grow, the more expensive the tool gets. They introduce a new tool every year, sometimes just rebranding an old tool, and charge extra for it if you want to use it. Pricing is a huge point; it's very annoying, intransparent, and often new products come out with no pricing, needing another three, four, or five months until they announce it. We are not very happy with the pricing; everything about it is not flexible, and the pricing policy is not transparent or fair.
We decided to stick with Bullhorn from the last evaluation because they really went down with the price at the last minute, so it was a price decision. However, the past two years have brought a lot of disappointments, and we will surely re-evaluate in Q2 next year, as we are open to change. It's important to mention that Bullhorn is not the technological leader in ATS software anymore; it used to be worth the price, but not anymore.
My advice for organizations considering Bullhorn is to conduct a very good cost analysis, projecting a five to ten-year growth aspect to see how much it would cost if you grow as much as you wish. It's also important to consider the limitations Bullhorn has, as you need to buy a lot of software from marketplace partners to address these gaps, which can make it quite expensive. So, thoroughly analyze your requirements and see where your pain points are, only considering Bullhorn if it can offer solutions that meet your needs right now. Often, they promise solutions that still aren't delivered years later.
On a scale of 1-10, I rate Bullhorn a 6.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Other
