Share your experience using Bullhorn

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.

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.

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.

I have been working with Bullhorn for more than 10 years.

I find Bullhorn stable now; they have it under control for the past five years, but before that, it wasn't stable.

Regarding scalability, I would say Bullhorn does not meet my goals. The limitations compared to other tools on the market are too high.

I would give Bullhorn's technical support or customer service team an eight out of ten.

Positive

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have been using Bullhorn for my business over six years, and then a couple of years prior to that.

As part of my use case, I run a professional search recruiting team, and I use it for applicant tracking and candidate interface and just keeping all my touchpoints all in one convenient platform.

Bullhorn is the platform that I have enjoyed more than any other. The UI is great, never goes down, is fast, and accurate.  I started with the Bullhorn and have no intention on leaving the platform.  

What I appreciate best about Bullhorn is its user interface. I enjoy the flexibility that you have with it and how you can customize it to meet your needs. Especially since with some competitors platforms, candidates can only be searched by a specific job, or by keywords only. With Bullhorn, you can search by literally any metric you track; graduation year, major, geogrpahic location (within X miles), etc. It allows you to search the entire candidate pool in your database easily. 

I have tried many other platforms, and work within some of my client's ATS' as well.  Bullhorn just can't be beat. 

I think one thing that could be improved is that it's expensive, and it doesn't push your jobs to other platforms easily, aside from the pay-for-play sites like Indeed and LinkedIn.

If you are considering Bullhorn, know it's it's great for your internal work, but if saturating job boards with your job postings is critical, other platforms have figured out how to post a job to a dozen different job boards at no additional charge. This would be a cool feature if Bullhorn could figure out how to do that as well.

I have been using Bullhorn for my business over six years, and then a couple of years prior to that.

Regarding stability, it's rock solid, and whenever they do updates, I always get notified, and they always do it in the off hours for me, so it's not a crazy complicated thing.

The scalability of Bullhorn is fantastic, as that's actually where it really turns on. I'm a team of one, and I know they don't have a lot of people that have this platform that operate as a team of one just because it's really designed for larger teams, but it just works great, so I don't fuss with it.

I think their customer support team is good, as their platform is pretty rock solid, and I, knock on wood, haven't had any major issues with them at all.

Positive

I have previously used a bunch of different solutions.

The initial setup was complicated, but not for me, as they had people that did all the heavy lifting on their end.

I think it's worth the money to have as a tool. From using Bullhorn, I am as proficient as I possibly can be with this tool, and I have some clients that I work with, and I operate within their applicant tracking systems, and there are some things that are nice versus others, but to boil it down, the cost-benefit analysis is definitely here for this one.

Bullhorn is expensive, and if you are looking to scale your operations, it really shines. 

I have used the integration capabilities; it integrates to Gmail well, and while it also integrates to LinkedIn, I don't like the interface has some issues that still need to be worked out. 

Bullhorn is pretty user-friendly, though I had a little bit of a learning curve when I first got onto it when I worked for a big firm before venturing out on my own. The implementation team is outstanding. They make it really easy. It is not an inexpensive platform, but you get what you pay for.

I would recommend it to other people, and I am just a customer that enjoys the platform. On a scale of 1-10, I rate Bullhorn a 9.