Eliassen Group integrates Middle Office with Bullhorn for Salesforce to create an advanced front-to-back solution
In today’s fast-paced staffing industry, firms can’t afford to be slowed down managing their pay and bill challenges. The middle office, a key component of staffing operations, is often bogged down by manual processes and time-consuming customization needs. But candidates don’t want excuses; they want to get paid on time.
Bullhorn recently introduced an end-to-end solution for enterprise-level staffing firms that drives operational efficiency while reducing overhead. This powerful offering combines Bullhorn for Salesforce with Bullhorn Middle Office, delivering innovative tools that streamline processes from talent sourcing to client billing and beyond.
Eliassen Group, an IT services organization based in Reading, MA, is among the first Bullhorn for Salesforce customers to integrate Bullhorn Middle Office. Their recent implementation involved migrating over 4,000 placements with virtually no disruption, while automating payroll for thousands of workers, showcasing Bullhorn’s capacity to meet the evolving needs of enterprise staffing firms and support strategic growth and innovation.
We had the opportunity to sit down with Rob Waddell, EVP and CIO at Eliassen Group, to discuss Eliassen’s implementation experience and why the team decided to invest in Bullhorn’s newest product offering.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Can you tell us about your tech stack prior to this integration?
Rob Waddell: When I joined Eliassen as the CIO two years ago, I did an assessment of the team’s tech stack. It was pretty obvious that the legacy tech stack was disparate, heavily customized, and aging. Despite having automation, the complex integrations we had in place left the workforce doing a lot of manual work. More importantly, the company needed a better understanding of its business goals and the right technology to align to those goals. So, the first order of business was to have a rapid business and technology alignment session.
Through that six-week session, we discovered the company needed a solution that would allow data sharing (Account, Contacts, Activities, etc) and foster cross-selling across all of our business lines. The theme became one core solution that supports all of our LOBs and supports them as they expand outside the US.
We knew we could be faster and more efficient. And after learning more about the solutions Bullhorn was offering, it became very clear that Bullhorn for Salesforce, along with a Middle Office Solution, was going to be the right solution for us.
Why did your team decide to integrate Bullhorn’s Middle Office with the Salesforce platform?
Waddell: Bullhorn has been supplying me with technology for over 16 years now. Connecting the Bullhorn for Salesforce [ATS] solution to Bullhorn Middle Office was compelling to me because I was going to be able to work with one organization across both platforms. Working with the engineering team, early on, it was pretty obvious that Bullhorn was bullish on being able to integrate Bullhorn for Salesforce with the Middle Office solution.
I found that very attractive because I come from a world where we do a lot of heavy integrations that are complex coding, and it’s just not as clean as when you can have it in the same supplier solution. So that really caught my attention, and given Eliassen’s strong relationship with Bullhorn, we felt that the gains far outweighed the risks of going down this path.
How was your implementation experience?
The implementation experience was excellent. We’re the first enterprise client to integrate Bullhorn Middle Office with Bullhorn for Salesforce. There was a heavy focus on the risk that posed, for both organizations. So, I just think it went so well because everybody was on point throughout the whole thing.
The project management was just as important as the engineering team in doing the implementation. We ran into some issues here and there, which is common in these complex integrations, and they were always knocked down very quickly. The team at Bullhorn made sure they were taken care of so that we could go live on [time].
What do you find most valuable about the integration of Bullhorn Middle Office with Bullhorn for Salesforce?
Waddell: The scale required to be successful means you need a middle office that handles all the complexity with pay and billing and seamlessly for staffing and professional services. Handling things like multiple end clients with different invoicing needs, the same employees working at multiple jobs during a week with different rates and tax implications, etc.
The implementation went so well because we had such a great relationship with Bullhorn’s engineering team. We established consistent check-ins, starting when we did a rapid business and technology exercise. Bullhorn was involved through all of that, so everybody got the vision from the top down on both sides of the organizations.
That critical collaboration wasn’t specific to Bullhorn Middle Office, but carried across Bullhorn for Salesforce and Bullhorn Middle Office. So literally for 18 months, from project start through hypercare, we had the right people at the table. That made a big difference in our success.
What has the response been from your back office team?
Waddell: Before the integration of Bullhorn Middle Office with Bullhorn for Salesforce, our pay bill, accounting, and finance teams were doing a lot of manual work. Even though we had customized solutions for pay bill commissions and integrations downstream systems, it took a lot of coding maintenance to make changes. In a lot of cases, we had to maintain that code ourselves, and it took a while.
We have to get time integrated into our system from the VMS for over 50% of our clients. So, the VMS exchange in Bullhorn Middle Office was really an important feature, and it has already proven to be a very effective solution for our back office team. That’s been a big win with Bullhorn Middle Office.
How has the integration improved your team’s operational efficiency?
Waddell: We’re a small team, and when we worked with the legacy system, we found that it was difficult for us to chase all of their integrations and keep up with the complex code changes. With the integration of Bullhorn for Salesforce and Bullhorn Middle Office, we were paired with Bullhorn’s engineering team that was intimately familiar with our implementation.They know it like the back of their hand.
I would say that our accounting team has really benefited from the relationship and resources at Bullhorn, because Bullhorn is very experienced in accounting, pay and bill, and time collection, and all these functions that are really important to the back office.
Also, Bullhorn is coming out with more and more AI capabilities that are inherently embedded in the system, and we’re going to just take advantage of them. We’re not going to have to invent them. Although Eliassen does practice in AI and bootstraps AI for our clients, we’re looking forward to using the power of Bullhorn and its ingenuity to continue to just stay on the front lines of AI. We’re excited to use Bullhorn’s AI to help us generate communications, metrics, and information for our candidates and clients that will help them to be loyal to Eliassen.
You’ve mentioned that your partnership with Bullhorn gives you a platform to embrace innovation. What technology innovations do you feel have the greatest potential to transform recruitment?
Waddell: I think AI is obviously front and center. We need to continue to take advantage of Search and Match right now. The Bullhorn platform has come so far over the years, and AI is embedded there now. The ability to use technology to identify the right candidate for a particular role is really important.
We want to be able to understand a little bit more about the patterns of our clients and what they might be needing, not only now but in the future. And with this rich data provided by the Bullhorn ecosystem, we get to inherit the benefits of all that data and to become more predictive. Proficiency with predictive analytics and AI is where we win the game.
What advice can you offer staffing organizations that have been hesitant to take the leap into automation and AI?
Waddell: If you don’t adopt AI, you’re going to get behind, and you’re going to get behind quickly. It’s happening very fast and we see it in our client-facing AI practice. We’re out there helping a lot of middle-tier companies understand AI and use it to their advantage, and there’s advancement every day. So, the longer you wait to embrace this, the further and further you get behind.
For example, in our business we’re looking for efficiency and speed to market. Every at-scale advancement in our Bullhorn for Salesforce solution and data allows us to further employ AI extensions to give us more automation for our consultants and our clients. With front and back office data in the Salesforce ecosystem, automated agents become possible across the entire business.
What would be some advice that you’d give to Bullhorn for Salesforce customers who are considering using Middle Office?
Waddell: A lot of these big implementations go awry because the company doesn’t completely understand what they’re actually getting into, what they’re buying, and what their goals are before implementing it. I’d recommend you do your due diligence on your business. Really understand what you’re trying to achieve with the implementation, and document it well before you begin. Once it’s implemented, you want to be able to go back and measure whether those goals have been met.
Make sure you have the right people running the project in both organizations. I can’t overstate enough how important it is to get the project management of the project in place with the right people and to get in a regular cadence of measuring where you are with respect to the implementation and then quickly knocking down those hurdles that are in your way and it was really important for us to do that on this implementation, given the risk we took on. The success we’ve seen has proven why it’s important to have such a strong team going into an implementation.