Bullhorn review by Inspector Jones

Bullhorn is a market leader in recruitment software - we recommend the Bullhorn service for both recruiting agencies, and corporate HR departments.

Bullhorn provides an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and Candidate Relationship Management / Client Relationship Management (CRM) system. It provides the functionality to find the right people for the right role - track applicants, manage recruiter activity, manage communication with clients and candidates, track calendars, and advnaced search and sourcing. Bullhorn also includes mobile access to recruitment functionality (using an iPhone, iPad or Android device) as well as time and expense tracking.

Before you choose Bullhorn, here are the key things you need to know.

MARKET POSITION

First, Bullhorn is clearly a market leader, particularly in recruitment agencies. They have a good track record, spanning many years. There are over 200,000 users of the Bullhorn service, and 10,000 customers, with many positive case studies and reference sites available.

FLEXIBILITY

Compared to other solutions in the market, Bullhorn is a particularly flexible solution. For larger, more complex organisations, you’ll find that the service can be tailored to meet your needs. The “Bullhorn Marketplace” provides pre-built or pre-integrated applications and services for specialised functionality. There are apps to help you generate candidates, evaluate candidates, perform back-office operations, automate sales and marketing activities, and more.Bullhorn also has full APIs available, which allow you to integrate the solution with your corporate applications, and customise functionality.

ONGOING CHANGE

We think that Bullhorn is a good organisation to do business with. They show dedication to ongoing improvement, with monthly and quarterly upgrades, and responding to customer demand. Recently, the user experience has been improved, with a new user interface (UI) released earlier this year. The service currently supports Apple and Android devices. Unfortunately, Bullhorn is only fully supported using Internet Explorer at the moment. We’re looking forwards to the update planned for later in 2013, when it will become web-browser-independent.

IMPLEMENTATION

For setting up your implementation, Bullhorn do provide a reasonable level of assistance, with their own professional services. However, be aware that this is mostly done from Bullhorn offices, and not at your place of work. They provide a set of self-service tools to import your own data, and get up and running, and self-directed training. Face-to-face training is also available.

SUPPORT

The Bullhorn support team can be contacted either online or by telephone. We called the support team with some simple questions and they answered quickly (within 30 seconds) and were helpful over the phone. Their support hours are 24x5, with support offices in Australia, USA and UK, and an emergency crew over the weekends. We’re pleased to see that Bullhorn engage their customers well - they are active on social media, and host regular user conferences.

AVAILABILITY

The Bullhorn application has historically had very little downtime. Availability levels are over 99.95%, and the service status is public. We’ve reviewed this history, and it shows that they are responsive at resolving issues. Bullhorn do offer refunds in case of downtime, in line with industry best practice.

ARCHITECTURE

Bullhorn uses a multi-tenant SaaS architecture. They run out of data centers in both the US and EU, and use Akamai’s content delivery netowrk. Each customer has their own database, on clustered application stack. Because of this, you won’t have control over upgrades - all customers using the same instance are upgraded at the same time. Bullhorn have built in solid protection from failures: they have good redundancy and resiliency, with automatic failover for their infrastructure, services (like power and network), email, database, and application servers.

INDEPENDENT ASSESSMENT

We’re really pleased to see that Bullhorn is independently assessed against SSAE 16 SOC 1 Type 2. This standard means that they have good corporate governance and controls, however be aware that it is not a guarantee of security.

YOUR DATA

We recommend that you ask Bullhorn about getting a usable copy of your data, in the event you would like to move to another provider. While Bullhorn do offer customers a copy of quarterly standard database backups, these may be highly technical and you may find it difficult to use the data directly. I recommend that you review access to your own data, to ensure that you can easily migrate to a different provider in the future.

SUMMARY

Bullhorn are a market leader for recruitment software - applicant tracking systems, and candidate relationship management / client relationship management. If you’re looking for a solution in this space, I recommend you put them on your shortlist.