Bullhorn®, the cloud computing company that helps staffing and recruiting organisations transform their businesses, today announced that Jason Heilman will lead the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) business unit as Senior Vice President, Product - Automation and AI. Heilman was founder and CEO of Herefish, a staffing business process automation provider that was acquired by Bullhorn in January of 2020. Herefish, a former Bullhorn Marketplace partner, has become one of the fastest-growing candidate experience automation solutions in Bullhorn’s ecosystem.
The staffing industry is currently in a period of significant change, exacerbated by the unprecedented demands uncovered by the global COVID-19 pandemic. Digital transformation, once a desirable goal of forward-looking businesses seeking to solidify their competitive advantage, has become all but mandatory as a means of helping staffing firms to navigate major experiential shifts. These include 1) candidates' need for simplicity and responsiveness, and their desire to embrace platforms that help them find work but maintain a human touch; 2) grappling with increasingly challenging demands from clients, including the need for time savings, cost efficiency, and access to flexible talent pools at scale; and 3) a new industry landscape defined by a rise in mixed labour models (involving a combination of W2 and 1099 workers, sometimes simultaneously), broad-scale economic uncertainty favouring contingent work, and an increasingly distributed workforce.
Contending with such complicated market dynamics, how can staffing firms compete to win and improve their client and candidate relationships? The answer lies in automation - automating the mundane processes that slow recruiters down in order to elevate human relationships that they are uniquely capable of profitably cultivating - to facilitate experience-centred staffing, which treats all stakeholders as though they were customers desiring white-glove service.
Bullhorn has always viewed automation and artificial intelligence as a necessary precursor to high-quality and scalable candidate experience. Herefish allows recruiters to focus on value-adding and rapport-building interactions instead of getting bogged down by monotonous tasks that require speed and accuracy but little else. Given Jason Heilman’s extensive expertise building Herefish into a leading provider of staffing business process automation and an authority on candidate experience management, he is especially well-suited to help Bullhorn’s customers turn the often abstract notion of artificial intelligence into a reality for staffing firms as they proceed on their digital transformation journey, leveraging machine learning as a means of solving the problem of how to adopt an experience-centred staffing model for their businesses.
“We asked our recruiters about the aspects of their jobs they liked doing the least and they all had the same response - reaching out to candidates to schedule interviews, following up with emails and texts - all the basics that we need to do quickly every day to do our jobs well and that are necessary to earn the trust of our candidates,” said Brian Cunningham, Managing Director of Allen Recruitment Consulting. “We purchased Herefish and now we have automated literally all of the mundane tasks freeing our recruiters to focus on what matters – having more time to talk to candidates who are interested in our jobs and are available to talk to us. The solution that Jason and team built is such a great example of the power of technology to augment and amplify human productivity. It is the same promise that AI offers on a larger scale. I can’t wait to see how Jason works his magic to transform the customer and candidate experience in staffing intelligently using the power of AI!”
“We want to help firms drive an amazing experience for their candidates and customers,
with the increased focus on a distributed workforce and technology as a means of enhancing productivity, now is an important time to introduce artificial intelligence to the staffing market.” said Jason Heilman. “When delivered together, automation and AI will provide the tools needed for firms to quickly react to both short-term adjustments and long-term shifts in the market. We’ve got our eyes on solving many longstanding problems the staffing industry faces that will ensure our customers will be the market leaders of the future.”
“Jason Heilman joined Bullhorn after building a business that fundamentally rethought what a great candidate experience could look like - that’s his sweet spot,” said Matt Fischer, Bullhorn’s president and CTO. “We realise that in order for AI to be actually successful and adopted on a large scale, our customers need for it to be built on a foundation of automation and data hygiene. We brought Herefish into the Bullhorn family in January and it has proven incredibly popular, radically accelerating businesses’ ability to transform digitally, and now we’re ready to help our customers tackle the next step in their transformation journey.”
About Bullhorn
Bullhorn is the global leader in software for the staffing and recruitment industry. More than 10,000 companies rely on Bullhorn’s cloud-based platform to power their recruitment processes from start to finish. With offices around the world, Bullhorn is founder-led and employs more than 1,000 people globally. To learn more, visit www.bullhorn.com or follow @Bullhorn on Twitter.
