Open Systems Technologies Saves Big with Bullhorn

Before turning to recruitment CRM vendor Bullhorn, New York-based staffing firm Open Systems Technologies faced significant challenges: The organization lacked comprehensive reporting capabilities, missed out on job placements due to manual processes, and had a vendor management system (VMS) process that was too slow to keep pace with the competition.

But the firm was able to overcome these obstacles thanks to two of the vendor’s solutions, Bullhorn Canvas and VMS Access. Bullhorn Canvas is a business intelligence and recruitment analytics tool for staffing businesses that allows users to build unique reports; share reports across teams, offices, and regions; and discover new insights across accounts. Bullhorn VMS Access provides VMS integration with an eye on improving service levels, business, and productivity.

According to Radhika Arora, director of sourcing and recruiting operations at Open Systems Technologies, Bullhorn’s ability to customize differentiated it from competitors.

“If we want a field that we internally use in our processes, we can easily create it, and we can create it without going to Bullhorn. I can do it as an admin,” she says.

“That customizability, on top of a strong foundation, is why we stay with Bullhorn; it just really allows us to adapt Bullhorn to us,” she explains. “Bullhorn, even though they aren’t coding something especially for us, made it so that our Bullhorn instance probably looks very different than someone else’s because of that semi-customizable way of doing things.”

The Bullhorn solutions have yielded tangible results for Open Systems Technologies. With Bullhorn Canvas, the organization saves up to $3,000 annually on its clean-up reports (ensuring that the information in its system is up to date), a process that used to take several hours but can now be completed in seconds.

Arora notes that Canvas, along with a data uploader created by Bullhorn to help Open Systems Technologies edit multiple fields at once, has allowed the company to easily identify incorrect or duplicate data, like when there are more trouble tickets submitted than jobs listed in the system. “We can just run a quick Canvas report and see that data and see if it’s incorrect,” she says.

Arora adds that Canvas has also allowed Open Systems Technologies to automate processes around prioritization. “This means that the jobs we think are fillable are actually getting worked on because people can quickly find them,” she states.

With Bullhorn VMS Access, Open Systems Technologies is saving up to $5,000 annually by automating its VMS workflows. VMS Access is “an API integration between our Bullhorn instance and the VMS software that a lot of our clients use. It’s an automatic pull from those systems to update our information, and it creates new jobs, changes the status to on-hold, or it closes them,” Arora explains.

That is extremely helpful since Open Systems isn’t allowed to download VMS data because it technically belongs to the client. Instead of requiring someone to manually input and update data, VMS Access does it automatically. “It’s a huge time saver, especially when you think of VMSs that do contract-based work. Sometimes they’ll close a job and then reopen it or put it on hold and then reopen it, and it was a lot of time just ensuring that data was accurate,” Arora says. 

The Payoff

Since implementing Bullhorn Canvas and VMS Access, Open Systems Technologies has seen the following results:

• savings of up to $3,000 annually on its clean-up reports, a process that has gone from several hours to several seconds; and
• savings of up to $5,000 annually by automating its VMS workflow.