The Importance of Data Integrity with Rade from Rowben Consulting
The emergence of specialised recruitment software within the staffing industry has seen dramatic changes in how recruiters pursue their daily tasks. Gone are the days of writing paper notes and pinning them on a corkboard by your desk. Never again will recruiters need to file away dusty paper records into sheet metal cabinets. Today, tech-savvy recruitment professionals do their record keeping from the reliability and convenience of the cloud. As recruitment software makes record keeping increasingly intuitive, recruiters have been able to work faster and dedicate more of their mental focus towards making placements. However this convenience comes with a caveat: modern recruiters tend to rely heavily on their systems, yet often overlook the importance of record integrity and adopting best practices in data entry.
Rowben Consulting experienced this issue firsthand. Having used Bullhorn’s market-leading CRM for over a year and a half, staff at Rowben Consulting began to notice that the search functionality and reliability of data within the system had lost integrity. Consultants soon became frustrated and Senior Technology Sourcing Specialist Rade Manojlovic was appointed to find a solution. He was tasked with finding the core issues behind the company’s apparently ineffective CRM system and to aid in recommending alternative software solutions.
Rade began by tracing back the data within Rowben Consulting’s instance of Bullhorn. During his research, he soon found that Bullhorn was actually a highly adept recruitment system. Problems were actually arising from the processes through which data was being inputted. With full confidence in his findings, Rade began to work alongside Bullhorn’s dedicated project management team to de-clutter Rowben Consulting’s records and streamline processes, and this effort was a resounding success. Bullhorn has asked Rade to share his story in an effort to spread awareness about recruitment data integrity and to offer advice to companies that want to get the most out of their recruitment software.
“My initial appointment as Senior Technology Sourcing Specialist for Rowben Consulting saw me tasked with cleaning up a system that was, by all accounts, dysfunctional at the time. It was unorganised with multiple duplicate entries, a lack of candidate divisions, and outdated records – in simple words, a real mess. Our consultants at Rowben Consulting had become fed up and weren’t able to accurately search candidates from within the database. They had actually given up altogether and reverted to using other less effective methods to source opportunities and candidates. Needless to say, this wasn’t at all ideal for our workflow and our opinion of Bullhorn at the time wasn’t great. The general sentiment was ‘Bullhorn doesn’t work.’
While I spent time monitoring the data flow from the team through the system, management weighed up alternative software providers. It took me a short time to come to the realisation that Bullhorn wasn’t a dysfunctional system at all – we simply weren’t using our database effectively. Bullhorn also has a very public reputation for being a quality provider, so I decided to advise against going out to market for an alternative provider. I was determined that we could find a way to make Bullhorn work, and going back out to market and searching for a new software solution would likely skew our data further during the migration. Instead, I called upon the project management team at Bullhorn and sought to begin a project that would see us tackle the root cause of our problem: data integrity.
I went back to the drawing board and was able to trace our problems to their origins. I found that the data originally migrated into Bullhorn from our previous system was very poor, and this likely played a part in the quality of the records we had at the time. With the assistance of Khanh from the Bullhorn project management team, we worked to systematically clean all our data and develop new practices that would assure longevity for the future. The process was full of discoveries. I found ingenious customisations and quick fixes that helped to reassure both me and our management that we had made the right decision.
In a relatively short time, we were able to clean up our existing records and ensure that all future data would be fool-proof by taking advantage of custom and forced fields within the Bullhorn CRM. This process was also an interesting journey within Bullhorn. It had me learn the software inside out and has given me a real appreciation for Bullhorn and the importance of data integrity in general. Now that I’ve seen the potential of our software platform, it seems reckless to have considered replacing it.
When I originally advised against getting a new provider and recommended we stay with Bullhorn, there was some very real pushback from our recruitment consultants. They weren’t happy, to say the least. Fast forward to today, though, and everyone loves it! When the project began, the recruitment team had basically given up on using the system and we were in a downward data spiral. Now all our data is optimised, spotless, and right where it needs to be within our database, and the results are drastic. We now have immediate response times and great tearsheets, and we’re placing most of our candidates as a direct result of our comprehensive database.
Recruitment is a fast-paced industry and recruitment consultants can often be impatient. There’s a very real ‘either I get a result now or I move on’ mindset. I think this process has really helped us see the value of focusing on our core processes as a team. Today we make sure that we host monthly meetings to talk about this very topic: our database and the quality of our processes. All new consultants at Rowben Consulting now also get a full-day Bullhorn training session with me, as well as guidance from Bullhorn’s dedicated training team. Everyone on board is now determined to ensure that we never face the same problems again and make the most of our software.
If I had to give advice to companies questioning their instances of Bullhorn, I would tell them to trace the data and find the root cause of their problems. Going through this discovery process has really taught me that clean data is of the utmost importance to not only your records, but also your team’s workflow and sanity! Bad input will always create bad output, so making sure you’re following the right processes is key. Bullhorn is a great piece of software to accomplish this because of its innate customisability, allowing you to make sure that anything going into the system will produce the right results for you and your team.”
Rade Manojlovic
Senior Sourcing Specialist | Digital and Information Technology
Rowben Consulting
