5 Mins With: Jason Heilman, SVP, Bullhorn

Bullhorn is the global leader in software for the staffing industry, providing customer relationship management, applicant tracking system and operations software for the staffing industry. More than 10,000 companies rely on Bullhorn’s cloud-based platform to power their staffing processes from start to finish. Headquartered in Boston, with offices around the world, Bullhorn is founder-led and employs more than 1,200 people globally.

As SVP of Automation & AI, Jason Heilman is responsible for developing solutions to help Bullhorn customers achieve digital transformation. With 15 years of staffing industry experience, he has worked with thousands of recruiters, salespeople, owners, and leaders of recruitment agencies to understand their challenges and develop innovative solutions to accelerate growth. Jason was previously the co-founder and CEO of Herefish, which currently helps Bullhorn customers automate over half a billion actions per year. 

So Jason - why is finding a job or new hire today so fraught with friction?

Its slow, overly manual and requires too much duplicative work from all sides. Businesses and their recruitment partners have spent years curating deep talent pools, however, the process of identifying the right subset of candidates to speak to about an opportunity can be very time-consuming.

How does AI play a role in recruitment?

One of the most fundamental uses of AI in the recruitment process is to quickly and intelligently match jobs to candidates and candidates to jobs. Finding a new job is one of the most important and potentially life-changing decisions someone can make and although it is deeply personal, not every step requires human interaction. Artificial intelligence can transform recruitment software by removing those steps, reducing bias, and creating a more efficient and enjoyable experience for everyone involved.

What other benefits does AI bring besides the core challenge of finding candidates?

It is also a touchstone to unlock many other use cases such as pre-screening, succession management, and creating fully optimised talent pools. In addition to matching and classification, using AI with large industry-specific data sets can help recruiters to make other inferences throughout a person's interaction with the recruitment system, such as the best time and medium to communicate, engagement and lead scoring, and forecasting. Concretely, AI has significantly impacted a host of KPIs that are important to recruiters, including time-to-hire, fill rates, candidate experience, and other productivity metrics, not to mention overall competitiveness. 

Is AI the solution to all of HR's hiring problems?

It's important to recognise that there isn't a single silver bullet from AI that will enable us to transform the hiring process. First and foremost, a strong foundation of automation is vital to ensuring the success of AI. Then, over time, we will see AI gradually integrated throughout different stages of the hiring process, initially to smooth out rough edges and accelerate time-consuming tasks.  

Eventually, the way people find work will look nothing like it does today. As we continue down this path, with AI being more and more influential, we will likely see the role of the recruiter itself change. We think professional recruitment agencies will continue to play a pivotal role in workforce management, but will be able to use automation and AI scale their internal resources much more effectively while creating a great experience for their customers and candidates.