Last week Bullhorn bought Talent Rover and Jobscience – two significant players in the recruitment CRM market over here in the UK. By some measure this probably makes Bullhorn the biggest recruitment CRM provider in the UK.
Peter Linas has been with Bullhorn for nine years and is EVP of Corporate Development and International. Peter joined Bullhorn in 2009 and was responsible for its highly successful UK launch and continued expansion internationally. I caught up with Peter earlier today and asked him about the deal.
So give me a quick overview of the deal…
Bullhorn’s recent acquisition of Talent Rover and Jobscience demonstrates our commitment to offering greater customer choice. It represents a long-term decision to serve companies that have committed to the Salesforce ecosystem, building on our successful acquisition of Connexys, a Dutch provider of Salesforce-based recruitment software, back in September last year.
Talent Rover is a leading provider of global recruitment software powered by the Salesforce platform, with a number of marquee enterprise customers – including Adecco. It’s headquartered in Chicago, with offices in San Francisco, Redwood City, London, Dublin, Sydney, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Hyderabad.
Jobscience is also a leading provider of global recruitment software built on the Salesforce platform. It has more than 500 customers worldwide and was the originator of recruiting software on the Salesforce platform. Jobscience is also the Salesforce market leader for recruiting software in terms of customers, awards, and investment on the platform. It’s headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in London and Melbourne.
The additional resources afforded by the acquisitions will help us to accelerate delivery of our global Salesforce offering, as well as our front office and Workforce and Revenue Cloud solutions. It’s certainly an exciting time to join the Bullhorn family, as we accelerate development and innovation of front and middle office capabilities for leading staffing and recruitment firms around the world.
And why did you acquire Talent Rover and Jobscience in particular?
Quite simply, it made good business sense. Many large staffing firms are embracing the Salesforce platform and ecosystem at enterprise level across multiple brands or geographies. We’ve seen strong market demand in mainland Europe for the Salesforce-based Connexys product, and these most recent acquisitions expand the range of options available to customers in the North America, UK and Ireland, and Asia Pacific regions.
Thanks to these acquisitions, we are now able to bring together a world-class development team for staffing applications built on the Salesforce platform. We will be able to deliver innovations and advancements that will impact a broader range of Salesforce-based customers much faster, and more efficiently. And as a result, a wider audience of Salesforce-based staffing customers will get the “best of all worlds”, with innovations that will help them improve their operations and productivity.
This is the fourth purchase in the last twelve months (with the acquisition of Connexys last September and PeopleNet in November), what’s the growth objective here?
Our experience with Connexys has demonstrated the opportunity to partner with Salesforce, as we look to serve companies embracing the Salesforce platform and ecosystem. We’ve always offered an open ecosystem approach to help customers grow their businesses: we hold the largest staffing-centric Marketplace with more than 100 pre-integrated partners.
Now that we have a full range of Salesforce offerings, we want to expand the options we offer customers, to improve their business operations. Over time, Bullhorn will deliver new and expanded capabilities as part of these offerings, including best-of-breed VMS integration and middle office solutions.
PeopleNet, while not a Salesforce company, has allowed us to accelerate our cloud-based strategy for staffing and recruitment firms with time, attendance, and expense management solutions. The product greatly simplifies and automates time and expense collection, so that firms can increase operating efficiency, as well as improve accuracy for compliance and approvals.
As we continue to be the global leader in CRM and operations software for the recruitment industry, these elements will be fundamental.
Bringing four companies into the fold must have its challenges into terms of culture and your employer brand. How are you managing that?
We’ve certainly matured as a company over the past five or so years, and having now completed a series of acquisitions, we’re confident that we have the right processes in place to ensure that any new colleagues feel part of the Bullhorn family from the get-go.
Culture is a key priority for us, so with any growth or acquisition, we target companies that share our customer-focused values.
Beyond this, by focusing strictly on the customer, we ensure that our employees are all rowing in the same direction, towards the common goal of delivering an incredible customer experience. Each and every employee recognises the important role they play within this.
We have plenty of initiatives geared towards driving employee advocacy and leadership training. These initiatives are fully supported by our leadership team, and we seek to reproduce them for our teams in different geographies. At the end of the day, we’re a collaboration-focused business.
What benefits do these acquisitions have to existing Bullhorn customers?
Bullhorn has always offered an open ecosystem approach to help our customers grow their business, evidenced by the largest staffing-centric Marketplace with more than 100 pre-integrated partners. Now, with Salesforce offerings serving customers around the globe, we will expand the options customers have for improving business operations. Over time, Bullhorn will deliver new and expanded capabilities as part of the company’s Salesforce offerings, including best-of-breed VMS integration and middle office solutions. Specifically, these acquisitions will offer Bullhorn customers:
- Accelerated development of our middle office solution, the previously announced Workforce and Revenue Cloud.
- Additional support resources through our newly-acquired global offices in Dublin (Ireland) and Londonderry, New Hampshire (United States).
- Even greater development resources to invest in solutions and services to help power the end-to-end contingent workforce management lifecycle.
I guess Jobscience and Talent Rover customers might be wondering where this leaves them. What plans do you have for these two products?
Talent Rover and Jobscience customers will benefit from Bullhorn’s proven experiences with successful acquisitions, where we have retained the products and best practices that acquired companies brought to the table, while also increasing service levels. These customers will also greatly benefit from Bullhorn’s 19 years of staffing and recruiting experience, supporting more than 8,000 customers with more than 700 staff worldwide, being able to leverage best practices and significant resources that will help to deliver incredible customer experiences. In addition, Bullhorn brings extensive security expertise and financial stability, to ensure that all of its customers have a continually positive experience.
In any acquisition, customers are justifiably concerned about the future of the products they are actively using today. Bullhorn is committed to not only supporting but also actively enhancing Talent Rover and Jobscience products and customers into the future.
Will there ever be just one uber-Bullhorn product or will you always have separate offerings for different types of agencies?
Our offerings deliberately support two platforms: Bullhorn and Salesforce. And we deliver front, middle, and back office solutions within each. The interconnectedness of our recruitment technology ecosystem means we can serve recruitment firms of different sizes and kind – and cater to their differing needs.
Are there specific trends in the global staffing industry that you are seeing develop which these acquisitions prepare you for?
Fundamentally, recruitment companies around the world want choice. These acquisitions allow us to provide them with choices and options for how they wish to run their business, starting most significantly, with their choice of platform.
There is a growing number of enterprise recruitment companies that need to scale their operations rapidly and ensure productivity and high levels of collaboration between disparate geographies, and we need to be able to support that growth. Recruiters needs technology that will allow them to adapt to changing candidate preferences and customer needs quickly. They need to accelerate candidate-to-cash business processes and need technology options for the entire recruitment lifecycle. Our recent acquisitions mean that Bullhorn is now in an even better position to deliver against these requirements.
What about the in-house recruitment market. Is that next for you?
While our legacy and DNA are within the agency model, by the nature of our business and recently acquired companies, we support the corporate HR market. It is an important market, and one we will continue to support.
If you want to know more about Bullhorn you can chat with them yourself at our technology showcase event on 20th June in London.
