The company's issues are too extensive to summarize briefly. This review is long, but for those considering a job at Bullhorn, it's worth your attention.
True to the title of the review, Bullhorn functions like a corporate meat grinder. New employees are hired with enthusiasm, then worked to exhaustion, and are subsequently discarded, usually within the span of 3-5 years.
There is a pronounced dissonance between the company's branding and its culture. From their first day, employees are encouraged to champion values like "humanity" and "ownership" - which sound admirable to young college graduates, the people who make up the majority of Bullhorn's pool of candidates. But behind closed doors, management suppress individuality, deflect accountability, and pass responsibility for mistakes between different departments in a never-ending game of hot potato. Leadership seem determined to pit employees against one another, competing for spots on the KPI leaderboard, while positive social interaction is punished as a waste of time. The environment is not just unhealthy; it is toxic.
Let's talk a little more about these so-called core values and how Bullhorn upholds them (not):
1. OWNERSHIP.
Mistakes are not "admitted quickly". The lowest-level employees on the front line are burdened with them and with any subsequent backlash.
The phrase "operate above the line" is also routinely abused to place unreasonable expectations on employees. Members of support are told to manage inhumane caseloads without complaint, because they're supposed to love their job. If you ask too frequently to reassign some of your work to a colleague with more capacity, you're put under watch for poor performance.
2. SERVICE.
I admit that when I first joined Bullhorn, I thought its customer service was admirable. This is no longer the case, thanks to layoffs, botched restructurings of customer-facing departments, and the irresponsible implementation of generative AI.
Clients are now expected to consult a robot before they speak to a human being. When they ask us a question, we are told to send them a link to the same article they already tried to find their answer on.
Engaging with our user base is now seen as a waste of time. If we speak to our clients instead of sending them away with a URL, we are not working efficiently enough.
3. ENERGY.
Bullhorn's workforce is chronically burnt-out. Nobody has the energy to do what is asked of them and maintain a healthy lifestyle outside of work.
The daily routine for a support analyst is monotonous and soul-crushing. You login in the morning, you close support cases, you log off.
Employees on the phone lines are under constant stress; they have to justify the length of every bathroom break, which shows up as a deduction to their availability KPI. The telephone calls answer themselves. You will receive Slack messages from your manager and approximately three different members of support operations every time you spend longer than a few minutes wrapping up after a phone call, asking what the delay is for. When I confessed to my manager that I was nearing burn-out, she told me to consider permanently reducing my hours.
4. AGILITY
This is the one core value Bullhorn really does live by, yet this is not a good thing. Agility seems to be the only thing that matters to management. Close as many cases as possible, get the quickest response times possible, resolve every case during the first phone call, don't ask too many questions because it's a waste of time, don't write thorough responses because it's a waste of time.
Yes, Bullhorn is excellent at being fast, but this comes at the cost of service quality and employee happiness.
5. BE HUMAN.
This core value brings to mind a particular all-company Town Hall meeting, which I attended after the launch of Bullhorn's product support AI assistant, 'KnowBull', which was to replace support analysts as the first point of contact for our clients.
The Q and A session addressed one anonymous question: "How can we justify this as a company that values humanity?"
Art Papas delivered a stunningly nonsensical answer, which was that the implementation of the AI assistant somehow improved our person-to-person connection with clients. He did not explain the logic behind this statement, and dismissed further questions about the topic.
It is clear that Art knows his actions as a business owner do not align with the brand he has created. Instead of adjusting his business strategy or opening a conversation with his colleagues to address others' concerns, he takes the immature approach of insisting that these decisions serve Bullhorn's mission in a mysterious way that subordinate employees are not privy to. All the while, the company's marketing department clutches to these core values. It is a great display of dishonesty.
Bullhorn's racism and general behavioral problems also cannot be ignored. I have sat through countless meetings with colleagues in HR who insisted that they would take action against teammates of mine who acted out of line, only for nothing to change. I have listened to white colleagues joke about bombing Jamaica, and I have seen American colleagues point their home defense firearms at the webcam during our weekly Zoom meeting. I watched a white colleague laugh at another white colleague's use of a racial slur. I watched all of these people receive promotions the same year, while very little was offered to their colleagues of color.
People frequently criticize Bullhorn's "clique culture". There is only one clique in Bullhorn, and if you aren't in it, you aren't getting anywhere with your career. It becomes apparent early on if a new hire is going to be in the clique; they'll be embellished with cross-product training opportunities, access to new digital tools, volunteering gigs, bonuses, raises, and promotions. Bullhorn's favorite people believe that this is how the company rewards good work. These are the 'raving fan employees' they kept talking about - the ones who know all the buzzwords, who laugh at all the Harry Potter jokes made in poor taste in the all-company meetings.
It seems rarer that women, people of color, neurodivergent, or LGBT+ people make it into this clique. If you aren't in the clique, you are expected to stay relatively invisible, and if you make yourself visible, you are treated like a problem. You have to ask for training opportunities if you want to develop your career skills, and are frequently met with, "Great! We'll get to putting together a training program for you soon!" And then the training program never happens. You ask again, and get the same answer.
Then there's the pay. It was a great starting salary, and then the cost of living went up, and we weren't getting raises. Art announced that bonuses would be cut, which reduced pay for every employee meeting performance targets. He announced that promotions wouldn't be offered as frequently going forwards. PTO policies were not being honored across departments, meaning that favored employees who rose to mid-level positions could take time off at will while those in front-line support had to fight over available holiday hours.
When I asked my manager about career progression, they pressured me into applying to a CloudOps role that I was not comfortable with interviewing for. The interviewers belittled and insulted me, and accused me of misrepresenting myself and my talents by applying for the role.
Towards the end of my employment with Bullhorn, I admittedly was placed on a PIP because of my progressively worsening performance. I found it emotionally challenging to login for work every morning, knowing that I would spend 8-11 hours doing grueling and uninteresting work in complete isolation, fixing a chronically broken and poorly optimized product for clients who have no intent to treat me like a human. My mental health suffered because of the way my colleagues spoke to me, and because of the unreasonable and ever-increasing demand placed on me as an employee. My expected weekly caseload rose from 35 to 50, but the company was laying off my teammates. We were expected to close a new case in thirty minutes or less, but we weren't allowed to ask our supervisors a quick question; we had to fill in a form for that now. Of course my performance was suffering. I was the most burned-out I have ever been - more so than in my final weeks of my master's degree. Just from doing my day job.
In the end, I resigned. I didn't bother to give the full notice period - I just signed out and didn't sign back in. I found another job and I'm doing great. Bullhorn feels like a distant, nightmarish memory now.
