Not what we expected, unfortunately.
September 08, 2015
Not what we expected, unfortunately.
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Most recent Aug 2015
Overall Satisfaction with Bullhorn Applicant Tracking System
Bullhorn ATS is our main recruiting tool. We use it to keep track of all our day-to-day activity and it also acts as a CRM. Therefore, a lot of our email communication happens via Bullhorn, including client contact, candidate updates and booking interviews etc.
- Cloud system easily accessible
- Quick search facility (to find specific candidates and client contacts)
- Good reporting / analytics features
- Support generally answer the phone quite quickly and are always polite and firendly
- Some key areas of the system are not customizable, including some very basic functions that you would expect to be. The amount of times we are told by support, "this is the default method and it cannot be changed" is quite disappointing.
- The layout / workflow in vacancies is poor and not easy to see where you are at with each vacancy.
- The LinkedIn integration does not work very well. It does not actually cross-reference profiles in LinkedIn & Bullhorn unless a certain link is clicked in every single candidate (even if the email address matches the one in the profile's Linkedin account), so this renders the LinkedIn integration ineffective in many cases. Furthermore, the LinkedIn team information area (aka 'Team activities') in each candidate profile does not populate properly, with information missing or strange text appearing. All in all, it's a poor API.
- The process for booking interviews is arduous. For example, when in a candidate profile and trying to make an appointment for an interview, it does not populate fields you would expect it to. You even have to find/enter the candidate as an attendee when you're already in that candidate profile! (Sending out vacancy details to candidates is just as clunky. Even from within a vacancy you have to search from within all vacancy documents to find the job spec document that you want to send).
- The email editor is shockingly bad. It's all too easy to end up sending out client or candidate emails with mixed-up fonts, because in the editor you cannot see what's going on. Also, when adding candidate notes, it does not keep the formatting such as paragraphs, so you end up with notes that don't read particularly well.
- The 'standard resume' templates are not great and the formatting of CVs can end up looking a bit unprofessional. You are only allowed 2 templates, which is not much good if you have clients that require you to use their own front sheets. We now do all of our CV formatting outside of Bullhorn and then import the finished files into the candidate profile.
- Unfortunately it's had a negative impact on our business, the on-boarding / training was spread out over 6 weeks and the initial transition to Bullhorn was 'painful'. Even now, after 4 months, I would say that we are probably worse off than when using our previous system.
- For a system that is supposed to be one of the best (and we know is used by some very large recruitment companies), we were surprised at how poor some of the features are.
- The support team are all very nice, but they struggle to get some things done as it's the engineering team that actually make most changes. The issue we had with the LinkedIn feature resulted in us being told that the only option was for us to take it up with LinkedIn directly, which is a bit of a joke in my opinion. The LinkedIn feature was one of the reasons we decided to go with Bullhorn, so it has caused us some frustration and annoyance.
- Influence Recruitment
We had the in-house version of Influence (installed on our own server). We could have gone to their cloud system, but chose Bullhorn as we thought the functionality was better. However, this has not proven to be true. Influence wasn't perfect, but it's a fairly robust system and the workflow view is much better than Bullhorn.