Recruiters will soon be able to run applications from different vendors through the Bullhorn platform, thanks to the on-demand software developer opening up its application programming interface (API) to development partners.

Called Rain Forest, the move brings recruiting in the cloud a step closer for UK recruiters and will reduce their dependence on single suppliers.

Bullhorn president and founder Barry Hinckley told Recruiter that it will provide its clients with far more options. “Traditionally, clients are tied to the development road map of their vendor,” he said. “Project Rain Forest aggregates the communal intelligence of the market, giving Bullhorn clients a vast selection of features and point solutions.”

The US company, which launched its front office software-as-a-service (SaaS) recruitment software earlier this year, has been in talks with a number of developers which specialise in different areas of recruitment such as artificial intelligence, background checking, job board posting, parsing, and search and matching. Hinckley said customer developments of iPhone apps will be out in the new year.

UK sales director Peter Linas told Recruiter that another benefit is that it will allow companies to integrate back and front office systems easily. “And if you’ve got a bespoke system for one segment of the process, you can also build that into Bullhorn.”

Henry Massey was one of the early adoptors of Bullhorn when a director of Circle Executive Search and is now a partner of BlueSilicon, which he runs with its founder Natasha Jeary. He recently implemented Bullhorn at the consultancy, which specialises in recruitment and support services for the IT and rail industry. He told Recruiter: “By making the APIs available, it gives users the ability to plug-in enhancements to the software that Bullhorn might not have thought about.”

Bullhorn potentially offers smaller developers a route to market for their application, and this could include recruiters like BlueSilicon. “We have someone developing specialist import apps for us and Rain Forest will allow us to not only run these on the system but make them available to others and so help us to cover our development costs,” said Massey. “The whole world is moving towards cloud computing and Bullhorn is right there, with everyone else having to play catch-up.”

• Bullhorn is interested in finding firms developing recruitment solutions. Rain Forest launches at the American Staffing Association (ASA) annual convention in Orlando on 22 October.

Cloud computing is the term which encompasses hosted services delivered over the internet, such as SaaS and platform-as-a-service (PaaS).

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