Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Gordon, thanks so much for joining us.
Gordon Burnes, Bullhorn
Hey, thanks a lot Keith
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
I'm excited to talk about Bullhorn because it's a product that I know really well. I previously ran a recruitment firm and we were Bullhorn users, which it did exactly what you hope software will do. It ran our business and made my life easier. So talk about Bullhorn and what the company does.
Gordon Burnes, Bullhorn
Yeah, that's awesome. Um, so Bullhorn provides CRM and operation software for staffing firms. And we have about 10,000 customers. One thing about staffing firms that people don't know is that staffing firms provide w2’s to their employees. So it's a very different thing than just a, say, the recruitment division in your in your company. So we have both the front office side of things, which is, you know, for all the recruiters handles the candidates and the clients. And then we also have a back office piece, which handles the time and the payment for all the candidates once they're on the job. So it's you can sort of think about it as ERP for staffing companies.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Yeah, no in the back offices. I mean, obviously, this, the front end, the CRM piece is super important. Because if you're not getting jobs and filling those with candidates, that's not going to be good for your business. But the back office is definitely a massive undertaking for especially for staffing firms that are at massive scale where they have, you know, thousands, if not 10s of thousands or more of contractors out there that are working on behalf of the company.
Gordon Burnes, Bullhorn
Yeah, totally. And we have, you know, some of the largest staffing firms in the world using bullhorn and so we have to scale to literally 10s of thousands of Pay ease, you know, per week. And so we have a super extensible system that allows us to accommodate the unique, you know, characteristics for each of these different firms.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Now talk about the history of the company.
Gordon Burnes, Bullhorn
Yeah, the company was founded by Art Pappas and a couple other folks in actually 99, believe it or not, so we've been around for a while. It was originally started out as a sort of online talent marketplace, much like an Upwork today. But that market, obviously has taken a while to sort of develop and early on Art found a customer that said, Hey, why don't you put my recruitment database online, because they had a couple different offices, they needed to share candidates across the offices. And that's where the original idea came from. And, and so they've been growing ever since. And, you know, we're over 1000 people now. And, as I mentioned before, we've got a lot of customers.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
And it's obviously the dominant player in this space. And it's just an interesting space, because it's one of those, you know, it's a strategy where you can go very deep and broad within a specific vertical.
Gordon Burnes, Bullhorn
Exactly. I think also, there are lots of different niches within the overall category. So if you're serving healthcare, it's a very different operation than if you're serving the IT services space. And if you're in, say, the Netherlands, Netherlands, it's very different than if you're in the US. So over time, we've built the capability to support the different requirements for these different markets. But it's one of the reasons why it's actually a pretty hard market to serve. But it's, you know, in some ways, it's a classic vertical market, where you have to get super specific to meet the needs of the customers in the market.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Now, Gordon, you're the CMO of Bullhorn. So talk about your professional background prior.
Gordon Burnes, Bullhorn
Yeah, great. I've had a lot of product, sales, marketing, business development experience, sort of everything on the go to market side of companies. I came from IBM where I ran the worldwide marketing team for risk analytics was a really interesting experience gigantic companies, you know. But one thing that was interesting there was they had this principle on the marketing side of the marketing and sales side, which is country first. And the idea was that in each individual country, the people in the field know best. And so as we've scaled here, globally, we've sort of adopted that approach where we have sort of local marketing folks that represent, you know, the particular needs of the customers in that market and really drive the programs. And I think that that's been super helpful. And I got IBM from a startup, you know, open pages. Interesting company. I think the big thing I learned there is you got to be flexible and, and, and pivot when the market pivots. We had a pretty big pivot from financial controls management into operational and financial risk management, which was interesting. And before that, you know, I've had a variety of software and hardware based jobs. It's been good.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Well, let's talk about Bullhorn, a little bit deeper. So you already gave a glimpse of in terms of the size of employees, but what like what's the current state of the company?
Gordon Burnes, Bullhorn
Yeah. Well, recently, we had a, an additional investment from Stone Point Capital, which is really cool. They came on as a lead investor, which we announced a couple weeks ago, hope the deal closes here next couple weeks. And they have a couple other investments in the staffing industry. And they have expertise in human capital management in the financial services sector. And as we sort of expand our product portfolio into serving more of the back office capabilities and more around payroll, I think there'll be super helpful for that. We, you know, it's interesting, I think, we managed to continue to grow, despite the fact that, you know, we are reaching sort of 10,000 customers. And I think it really is a testament to our sort of innovation and serving new market niches, and also serving different customer needs. An example is sort of extending from the front office into the back office.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Now, as far as growth for the coming Look, what do you expect in terms of, you know, hiring at born is that across all functional areas are?
Gordon Burnes, Bullhorn
We are hiring across almost all functional areas right now, I would say, in development, professional services, support, sales, marketing, I need to hire a WordPress developer. So anyone out there is a WordPress developer and is interested, come to our website and apply there. We are, you know, we continue to grow pretty quickly. And right now, because of COVID. We're hiring remotely and a lot of cases. So we're sort of relaxing the geographical requirements associated with our previous hiring. And I think that'll allow us to grow even faster to find the talent that we need to fill the jobs that we have.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So what's it like working at bullhorn? What's the day to day culture like?
Gordon Burnes, Bullhorn
Yeah, it's definitely the reason why I've been there, you know, for so long, I think we have an awesome culture, it's a great place to work, people are really smart, they work fast, they're caring, they laugh. You know, we have a set of core values that that people really live by, that sort of provide some guideposts for how to operate. And, you know, if you walk into our lobby, the first thing you'll see is a big huge neon sign that says our mission is to deliver an incredible customer experience. So people really do live that, you know, one of our core values is ownership, which is to solve problems. Also, speed and agility and service, which really gets to solving those problems quickly, don't make people wait. And, and, and really get to the core of the problem. And if you can't solve it, then hand it off to someone, but you know, make sure they have it and make sure we can get it done. Another core value, which I think is really key is to be human. In the end, you have to build relationships, you know, you have to have fun, you have to laugh, you know, we have to be authentic. So and I think that's, that's a very real thing at bullhorn, which is cool.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So if someone is considering joining the team at bullhorn, like why is now the ideal time to join the company.
Gordon Burnes, Bullhorn
We have a tremendous opportunity across a variety of dimensions right now in the business. As I mentioned before, we're expanding our product portfolio on the back office side of our capabilities. We are also growing in new regions. So we're growing in, in Europe, and we're actually growing pretty strongly in the US as well. And the other thing I would say is that, you know, because we're growing and because we're 1000 people, there's a great opportunity for career growth at Bullhorn. So people tend to move around when they when there are opportunities that open up. So there's lots of great opportunity to sort of gather different kinds of skills at the company. And, you know, it's a lot of people have really been able to blossom into real executives. I mean, pretty interesting, but we've had, you know, we've got two people on the management team that have been with Art over 10 years and started out at sort of interest level positions, which is awesome.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Well, if you are in some exploring opportunities at Bullhorn you can check out all their job listings on VentureFizz go to their company page, which is venturefizz.com/bullhorn, and you'll see all their listings there. Gordon, thanks so much for taking the time to give us all the details on what's happening at Bullhorn.
Gordon Burnes, Bullhorn
Yeah, that's great. Thanks so much, Keith.
