In our survey of over 2,000 recruitment professionals, one thing was clear: winning new clients is the top priority, and the focus on new business will not likely go away any time soon. Between tight talent pools, even tighter margins, and increasing economic uncertainty, how can recruitment agencies place more emphasis on new business and client relationships while still accomplishing the rest of their business goals?

The answer may surprise you. It’s not about cold calling tons of new clients or hiring more recruiters. It’s about doubling down on the technology you already have. There is a goldmine of information and insights in your ATS and across your tech stack that can make the difference between you landing a new client or that client taking their business elsewhere. 

We asked three Bullhorn experts from our Customer Success team – Monica Sidhu, Allan Tucker, and Zelda Savage – to share how the Bullhorn ATS/CRM and other Bullhorn solutions can help you win more business.

Read on for their tips across three key playbooks: understanding top clients, identifying quick wins, and then, of course, winning new business.

Understanding top clients

Before you can go out and win new business, you first should understand who the top clients in your ATS/CRM are.

Understanding client activity based on Return on Effort

“Did you know that, on average, 75% of your placements come from 40% of your submission effort? This means the other 25% requires 60% of your submission effort, giving those clients a significantly lower return on effort,” Zelda shared.

So, how can you figure out who your top clients are? Are your top clients the ones bringing in the most placements, or are they the ones who engage the most frequently?

Bullhorn Analytics provides insights into top clients based on the number of placements with those clients, conversion ratios, fill rate, and more.

Higher ratios indicate waste, meaning more candidates screened, more submissions, more interviews arranged, and more of your team’s time wasted on jobs less likely to close.

Driving behavioral change

To truly maximise ROI, recruiters must shift their focus from traditional, gut-feel decision-making to a data-driven approach. By prioritizing jobs based on ROE and implementing regular client reviews, agencies can encourage a culture of performance optimisation. 

This involves setting clear targets and using the actionable insights from Bullhorn Analytics to guide teams toward higher-value client relationships.

Identifying quick wins

Finding quick wins doesn’t mean taking the easy road. It’s about using the least effort for the highest return. It’s about uncovering an easier path to success using your existing knowledge, data, and relationships.

Dormant client actionable insight

One of the best places to start with business development is to reach out to customers you have already worked with and perhaps even made a placement with. You know their business, you have built positive relationships with the right contacts, and you have a good idea about their requirements.

Using Bullhorn Analytics, you can identify these previous placements and base your search around a timeframe and other activity (or inactivity) parameters to dive in further.

Automate outreach as a safety net

Once you have discovered who your dormant or inactive clients are, you may wish to reach out to all those clients to remind them of the service you have previously provided.

Try building your list and using Bullhorn Automation to make initial re-introductions via email. This will save time and manual admin work to potentially re-ignite communications between you and those dormant clients.

If those clients don’t contact you directly, you can use Automation to create notes, follow-up reminders, and tasks in your Bullhorn ATS/CRM.

SourceBot your dormant client leads

In addition to Analytics and Automation tools, we also now have the power of AI in our SourceBreaker by Bullhorn solution. 

SourceBot can search your existing ATS/CRM data and a wider range of accessible data related to your search criteria. Here, you can find helpful information about any dormant clients to improve the likelihood that you can continue working with them. For example, you can see if they have had any recent open roles that match your current candidates’ skills.

Winning new business

Winning new business is as much about candidates as it is about clients. You need a solid community of candidates to present to clients a competitive advantage.

Candidate redeployment

With an ever-present talent shortage, recruitment agencies need to shift their focus away from constantly looking for new candidates to redeploying the ones they already have.

Did you know that submissions made of candidates you’ve already placed have a 76% higher chance of proceeding to placement than candidates who you haven’t? According to Monica Sidhu, redeployment is still one of the biggest missed opportunities in the global recruitment market.

The most effective way to win new business is to market a superstar candidate to a prospective client who is hiring for that person’s profile, helping you win new business and increase the redeployment rate.

Using Analytics and Automation, you can identify these candidates early, allowing you to quickly communicate with them or schedule automatic communications at a regular cadence.

Keep finishers engaged before the assignment end date by automating touchpoints

Keeping finishers engaged before their assignment end date is ideal, but with so many candidates in process, candidates coming off of assignment can sometimes fall through the cracks.

Bullhorn Automation makes it easy to ensure none of those opportunities are missed. If you reach out too close to a placement’s finish date, it’s harder to reengage them because they are likely already looking for other opportunities and potentially speaking to your competition. Using Automation can ensure you’re reaching out early enough and keeping them engaged before their assignment end date.

Start by reaching out to the candidate to let them know that you are already looking to get them redeployed into a new role as soon as their current one ends. That means that those candidates now have a call to action to come back to you, and it means that your consultants will be up-to-date with their candidate’s status, helping to prevent those candidates from being placed elsewhere by someone else.

Search for new vacancy leads

In addition to setting up searches in SourceBreaker to find job leads from your existing client base, you can broaden those searches to find jobs anywhere.

Thinking of candidate redeployment, this could be a search around a specific placement or finisher. For example, you have a Java developer you’re looking to redeploy, so you set your search up around that. Or, this could be for your target market – you only work on Java developer roles – so this search will help you stay on top of the market and see every available job for all of those upcoming finishers you will have.

Company profiling and finding key people 

Using SourceBreaker, you can conduct comprehensive company profiling to understand job openings, organisational structure, and key decision-makers. This enables targeted outreach and more strategic engagement. Instead of sending multiple messages to individuals who may not be connected to hiring decisions, you can use this data to make more informed decisions about who to contact, improving your chances of making a connection.

See who is receiving funding in real-time

Funding information often gets forgotten, but it can be a key indicator that a business is ready to grow or has new hiring needs. Use SourceBreaker to set alerts for a target company list to ensure you are up-to-date on any changes in your market. This is especially helpful if you are selling into a new market to stay informed about key players and movers.

You can also layer in automation here to ensure you never miss out on any of those new companies that are coming into the market or into the industry that you could be and should be working with.

For more tips on the smarter way to win business, check out our comprehensive guide.