The Challenge
A 50-seat recruitment firm had been running on Bullhorn for four years, but the platform had grown around the team rather than being designed for them. Pipelines were inconsistent, data was duplicated, and the leadership team had no reliable view of consultant performance. Billing forecasting was done in a shared spreadsheet updated on Monday mornings.
The business was hitting a growth ceiling — it couldn't scale consultant capacity without losing commercial visibility. The MD needed to know, in real time, which consultants were performing, where the pipeline was healthy, and what the billing forecast looked like for the quarter.
The Approach
- 01
Audited the entire Bullhorn instance — pipeline stages, custom fields, data quality, and user behaviour — to establish the baseline
- 02
Redesigned the pipeline architecture to reflect the actual sales and fulfilment process, with mandatory stage criteria and automated progression rules
- 03
Cleaned and deduplicated the candidate and client database (reducing records by 34%)
- 04
Built a consultant performance dashboard in Power BI — live activity metrics, pipeline value, billing conversion, and margin per placement
- 05
Implemented an automated outreach sequence for warm candidates using Bullhorn's automation module, reducing manual follow-up by 8 hours per consultant per week
“The dashboard told us which consultants to double-down on and which pipelines were silently dying. That's a different kind of management.”