Bullhorn ATS & CRM vs. PDS Vista

Bullhorn served as a very reliable and thorough tracking system for contacts, discovering prospects, and maintaining track of all relevant data. There are many customization options, strong search results, and sensible workflows. Excellent reporting tool. When we needed to find new resumes but all we could find were talents who had previously been discovered, it was less appropriate. Job Boards outperformed Bull Horn in terms of speed and quality.

Incentivized

As Vista HRMS is fully customizable to suit your needs, a company should determine if they have a current employee who can do the work themselves otherwise they will need to consider the additional cost of asking PDS to do the customizations for them. There are additional modules that we aren't currently making use of, but each company should learn about the functionality of each of them as some may be more beneficial than others. When gathering your questions, ask all potential users of the system what they would want to see in an HRMS. We did so before selecting Vista HRMS and we got pages and pages of questions and comments and made sure that each item was addressed beforehand and was something that we would be able to incorporate into the system. You have the option of taking the system in house or being a hosted client. Make sure you figure out what resources your IT department has available. If you have a dedicated administrator who will do all the upgrades and enhancements great, otherwise you may need PDS to help out and having PDS host may be a better option

• It provides the contact details of a candidate relevant to the job. All details are with a user-friendly interface that anyone can use the application.
• The specific details given by Bullhorn ATS & CRM are unbelievable. One place and you can make a decision about hiring or not hiring.
• The messaging automation feature again helps to save our time.

Incentivized

• Vista HRMS is very flexible, it does everything we need for HR, benefits and payroll. It’s user-friendly and intuitive to use, when we roll out new self-service items our employees have no problems and require minimal training or documentation.
• PDS has excellent customer service and support. We get answers to the majority of our questions and problems quickly, within the day that we call. More complex issues that may require PDS’ technical support are usually addressed within a few days. We were upgrading our production servers to Windows 2012 over a weekend and a key person in our organization was on leave. When we checked with PDS to see what cost would be involved if we needed their help, they said it was included in our regular maintenance, no extra cost.
• The PDS User’s Conference is an excellent learning opportunity for training on everything Vista does, including using Crystal Reports for custom reporting. You also get to meet and talk to the executive and development staff and have direct input into the future product development.

• Reporting: out of the box reporting is not very detailed or easy to navigate. In order to get better detailed and specific reports, you either need their Canvas product or pay for a 3rd party vendor.
• Customization: will get better with NOVO Experience update, but many users still don't have it. Right now many fields and order are not customizable
• Many features Bullhorn can do are not apparent to the user, often times you have to call in the figure things out.

Incentivized

• Typical of any system built for the unknown requirements of hundreds or thousands of customers with varying needs, PDS sometimes doesn't fit our processes precisely out of the box. However, this con is far outweighed by the ability to configure and customize the system.
• The most significant pet peeve of our users is the necessity for so many clicks to navigate between different areas or the system or to review applicants. These items are being addressed based on feedback from the user community in an upcoming release.

We have about 2 years left on our current contract; It would take a major change in the ATS marketplace for us to strongly consider opting out of renewal given the time and effort we have dedicated to building our our Bullhorn system. I will take the time to revisit with some of the competition down the road, but Bullhorn acquired our runner up, MaxHire, about a year back and continues to offer a solid product suite for our current and future needs.

Incentivized

I feel so invested in Vista HRMS that I don't really want to try other options. I know we as an organization are not using this product to it's full potential and that is just due to us lacking the resources to be able to invest the time into breaking it apart and making it work to the best ability for us. The system works great as is, but there are a lot of implementations we can put into place to help us out even more. For example, we would love to start using Workflow to create more efficiencies. I personally have a very good relationship with our hosted vendor who supports Vista HRMS and can help me with any issues and concerns, this is a big part of the reason that I would renew with this product and continue to be an advocate for Vista HRMS.

I found Bullhorn ATS & CRM to be extremely user friendly and quick to learn how to navigate it. The integration to Xero is extremely beneficial and really helps us to manage and monitor our recruitment activities and what stage of recruitment we are up to and to ensure we are invoicing our clients accordingly which we do in three stages.

Incentivized

In my line of work, PDS Vista doesn't fit. I recruit and manager talent pipelines, as well as all onboarding aspects of 11 companies. I spend more hours getting data configured and searching for information within this software than I spend with my candidates. Theres an abundance duplication, and there isn't a single stream of information shared across screens. I have to input the SAME details into several screens for them to match up. Nothing is intuitive, and its certainly not end user friendly

Incentivized

It's been a nightmare experience. The initial sales team were brilliant, and the customer service is great from the tech team - they get in touch with you quickly. However; I was often finding workarounds myself, or being advised workarounds instead of having issues resolved (example - The DPA/Non DPA issue - an Excel spreadsheet can do this, yet a CRM cannot?). I was debited on the incorrect date & then when I requested they refund until the due date, I was re-debited again on the correct date. The communication was poor - their billing team are based in the US and there was no acknowledgement of the mistake. My initial consultant chased them down for me, and advised me of their error. Lucky. The product was oversold. For example; I was advised their 'merge docs' feature would allow me to pull data directly from the 'Overview,' 'Work Histories' which later proved to be false. Finally, when I requested to end my contract & transfer my data (I advised a specific date I needed it, when my CRM would be ready) they advised it would take 15 business days & I was to put no further data in my system during that 15 days, and then gave me my data after 3. I now have no CRM for 4 weeks

PDS has excellent customer service and support. We get answers to the
majority of our questions and problems quickly, within the day that we
call. More complex issues that may require PDS’ technical support are
usually addressed within a few days

The resources and online tools that PDS provide are extremely thorough and helpful in our training and learning.

Ask lots of questions, ensure you fully understand the functionality (particularly history records) and train, train, train the users for correct and complete utilization of the system.

Breathe is a great tool for smaller internal recruitment teams and I have previously used an in-house built system similar however Bullhorn is something you can use across larger businesses and growing SME's it works well for international businesses as everything is updated in real-time. The support function is excellent and the training tools for new starters are super helpful for our L&D team. Your account manager is also great for assisting in personalising sections to make them more business specific.

Incentivized

I've used Peoplesoft HCM in the past. The products have some similarities, but they are marketed to different sized companies, so it's a bit of apples to oranges. Peoplesoft was very complex and challenging to manage and support. Vista HRMS should require fewer technical resources and still provide robust features for HR and Payroll. We selected Vista HRMS because it met the majority of our requirements and was priced to enable us to purchase and implement it within our budget. Also, it's an integrated system (although not truly one system when you count Vista Time) which is an improvement over our current state.

Incentivized

• Bullhorn has helped with the standardization of data which allows us to track our high, low and in between individuals. It allows for corporate bench marks to be tracked. It also allows for a closer look at all of the data points to make decisions versus making decisions based on perceptions. The data has definitely helped us make better business decisions because of the reporting capabilities.
• Bullhorn has some great marketplace partners and additional products like VMS Access that help with your VMS clients. This is a real time saver.

• Positive impact would definitely be self-service for both employees and managers to view and update selected data.
• Through some analytics our managers are able to track turnover for their site/department by many criteria (length of service, reason, etc) and can view a number of other analytical reports such as headcount and demographics which help them to make informed decisions about their department.