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Greg Kihlstrom:
Finding great talent is never easy, but it can be made a lot simpler, straightforward, and ultimately successful by using the right automation and AI-based tools. Instead of manually searching across candidate sources, this is an area where AI can play a role that helps recruiters, hiring managers, and job seekers. Welcome to One Amazing Thing About Bullhorn. I’m your host, Greg Kihlstrom, and I’d like to welcome Jason Heilman, Senior Vice President, Product Automation and AI at Bullhorn. Jason, welcome to the show.
Jason Heilman:
Hey, Greg. Thank you. Excited to be here. Yeah, yeah. Looking forward to this.
Greg Kihlstrom:
Before we take a look at the feature here, why don’t you start by giving a little background about yourself and your role at Bullhorn.
Jason Heilman: Yeah, absolutely. So Bullhorn is a software technology that’s primarily built for the staffing and recruiting industry. So these are people who whenever a company can’t find the right hire, they bring them in to help them to find the best person for the role. Or, of course, there’s the kind of contingent labor where there’s contract employees. And we are a global company. We’re kind of on basically every continent, you know, other than probably Antarctica. But so we’re global. And I came to Bullhorn actually for the second time following an acquisition of a company I founded by the name of Hearfish. So me and just a couple of other people founded the company Hearfish, which is now Bullhorn Automation. And that basically is a system that sits on top of Bullhorn, which is kind of a system that tracks all of the people that apply to jobs and helps recruiters to track all those people through the hiring process. And automation comes in, obviously, to make that experience better for the people you outline for the recruiters, for the hiring managers, and most importantly, for the candidates.
Greg Kihlstrom: Again, kind of who’s the audience and what are some of the challenges that they’re currently running into and why is this important to them?
Jason Heilman: Yeah, absolutely. So really, these challenges are felt by everyone. So I think probably anyone that you and anyone that’s listening can probably understand when you’re looking for a job, What is the thing that happens most often? You apply for a bunch of jobs and you never hear anything back. Whether you’re applying to a staffing agency or a company, that’s a very common concern across people. So we believe that automation AI has the ability to create a better experience for everyone involved. So when you apply for a job, And you should immediately get a message telling you thank you for the application. And what we’re going to show today is not only allowing you to kind of thank the people for the application, but then immediately allow them to take the next step in the process, which is to go through kind of an initial screening. And what that allows people to do is really tell more of the story of who they are than you can put in a resume. So I think, again, just like everybody has the experience of applying and not hearing back, probably everybody kind of feels deeply that there’s no way for a piece of paper to represent who you are and why you’re qualified for a role. And what we’re going to show here kind of helps to expand on who the person is and really let the company see more about the whole person rather than just the piece of paper.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, that’s great. Yeah. And I agree with all everything you just said. So now I’m excited to see it. Let’s let’s take a look.
Jason Heilman: Yeah, absolutely. So just to set the stage a little bit. We’re going to start here. So pretend like you are a candidate. You just saw a job you’re interested in. You hit the apply button. What usually happens is that goes into a system, you and the other 200 people that applied to that job. And at some point throughout the process, the hiring manager or the recruiter goes in and tries to weed through all those responses. And they quickly look at the resume. I’m sure everyone’s heard the stat. You get six seconds or something of how long people look at the resume. Our solution not only helps our customers to better look at the resume and find the people who are a good fit, but what I’m going to show you is that next step of, okay, this person looks like the resume is a good fit for the job. Now let’s let them immediately tell their story. So you’ve just applied for a job. And now I’m in my Gmail and I get this message from Acme. This is the company I applied for in our scenario. So thank you for applying. Our next step is to take a screen. So this is where now as a candidate, I have the ability to do more than just apply. So for the recruiter, someone who goes through this process is showing that they’re willing to do a little bit more effort. Because the other side, so everyone probably listening has been a candidate before. But the other side is that a lot of unqualified candidates apply for jobs. And people apply for jobs that they actually aren’t even really interested in. So what this allows us to do is understand if someone’s qualified and have a little bit of effort in proving that you’re interested in the role. So what is happening here is our AI is going to ask a few very basic questions, which you don’t really need to have a conversation to understand. if someone’s authorized to work, if the comp is right, and then what kind of roles they’re interested in. And as they go through the process, now we offer them, and this is kind of a shortened version of it, but now someone can go ahead and begin now a voice screening. So that first step, pretty standard stuff. Everybody’s probably interacted with the chat bot, but now you’ve got the ability to actually now have a voice discussion with a virtual recruiter.
Alice the AI Agent: Hello, this is Alice, an AI agent for Bullhorn. I am going to interview you for the product support manager position. Are you ready to begin the interview?
Jason Heilman: Hello, Alice. Yes, I am ready. Thank you.
Alice the AI Agent: Can you tell me about why you are interested in working at Bullhorn?
Jason Heilman: Absolutely. I think Bullhorn is a very exciting company. They build really cool products like this voice AI agent, and they do a great job of making sure their customers are happy. So as you can imagine, you would go through, it’s showing what you’ve answered, and now it’s going to ask a number of pre-qualified questions. So we won’t continue. It’s just going to be more of what everyone knows a screening looks like. The interesting part is it’s going to ask intelligent follow-ups. It’s going to, if someone isn’t avoiding the question, it’s going to make sure that they kind of push them to answer it. And then it’s going to wrap all of that up into a nice summary report that as a recruiter, I can go in and see how well someone answered the questions that are specific to that role. That’s kind of the one thing.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, no, that’s that’s great. And I mean, to your point, I think it it does get around the that idea that, you know, a resume only says so, you know, it does say some information, but it doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t give a full picture. So yeah, that’s, that’s, it’s an interesting way to get a deeper level, not only of information, but also, you know, the other thing you were saying about seeing if someone’s actually engaged enough to take the next step, right?
Jason Heilman: Yeah, you know, we’ll learn over time. So These voice agents will likely become more prevalent in people’s world. And today, of all the screens we’ve done, we’ve done a few thousand screens now, and people rate the experience very highly. We recently did a grid survey which said 81% of candidates are happy to interact with AI if it helps to accelerate the hiring process because that’s the biggest complaint that candidates have. They’re looking to get a job and it takes way too long. It takes usually like three months at least and they want 20 days is kind of the delta that we’re trying to help fill. So yeah, so we think so far it’s been a really great experience for candidates. And we’ve seen that on the other side, they definitely appreciate it as well and are finding people that they would have previously missed, which to me is the most exciting thing. It’s that if you just look at someone’s resume, it’s really easy to miss people who might be great. But this really just exposes more of the whole person.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, that’s great. I love that. Well, Jason, thanks so much for joining today. I know we only looked at, you know, one part of this product. I want to give you a chance to, you know, two things. I mean, one, you know, how do people find out more information about it? And also, you know, what’s a question they should ask in a follow up to get some more information?
Jason Heilman: Yeah, so it’s just bullhorn.com and we really do focus on the staffing and recruiting industry. So if you’re interested in that industry, hopefully you’ve heard of us before. And I think the question to ask is just really given the tough time that everyone’s having in this kind of current market condition, What are the things that I can do to help my business and how can I create a great experience for candidates? That I think is the important question.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. Love that. Well, again, I’d like to thank Jason Heilman, Senior Vice President, Product Automation and AI at Bullhorn for joining the show. You can learn more about Jason and Bullhorn by following the links in the show notes.
