Last week's Bullhorn outage took me on an unexpected trip down memory lane.

Early in my career, when I was building my reputation as a top-producing healthcare recruiter, the agency I worked for had its own homegrown applicant tracking system. And sometimes that system went down. Power outages, server issues, you name it. When you are running your own ATS out of your own building, there are a lot of ways for it to stop working.

We were recruiters, and recruiters find a way

When it did, we didn't have the luxury of sitting around waiting for someone to bring it back online. We had jobs to fill, travelers to place, and facilities counting on us.

So do you know what we did?

We pulled out the phone books and printed spreadsheets. Actual phone books.

We started calling healthcare facilities, asking if they had travelers working there, finding out who managed their staffing needs, and looking for opportunities. It wasn't efficient and it certainly wasn't sophisticated, but we found a way to stay productive.

Fast forward to 2026

Last week brought all of that back, and it also made me wonder what an outage like this looks like for a staffing agency today.

Think about how dependent our industry has become on technology. Our candidates live in our ATS. Our jobs flow through integrations. Our recruiters rely on automated processes to know what opportunities are available, what's new, and where to focus their attention. When that central system goes down, nobody is reaching for a phone book.

So what actually happens? Do recruiters stop recruiting? Do they lose visibility into the jobs their clients desperately need filled, and spend the day refreshing screens while they wait for someone else to fix it?

Here is the question I keep coming back to. How much productivity does an agency lose when its technology becomes a single point of failure?

This is exactly why we built Jobifi differently

When we designed Jobifi, one of our priorities was making sure agencies could reach their VMS job opportunities independently of their ATS.

Jobifi doesn't depend on Bullhorn to collect and organize VMS job orders. We do our own syncing, connecting directly to VMS platforms and continuously bringing jobs into Jobifi, where recruiters can search opportunities, identify new openings, and receive job-matching alerts.

That last part is the one I would underline. A sync tool that feeds jobs into your ATS is only as available as your ATS, because when the destination is down, there is nowhere for a recruiter to go and look. Jobifi is its own place to look. The jobs are there whether or not anything else is.

Last week, that architectural decision mattered. While Bullhorn was unavailable, our customers still had access to their VMS jobs and their job-matching alerts, and their recruiters could keep identifying opportunities and reviewing job details.

I want to be precise about what that did and didn't mean. Their normal ATS workflows were not available, and submissions still happen in the ATS. An outage of that size creates real disruption no matter what else you have in place. But their ability to see the jobs and keep working the market didn't disappear along with it.

That's a significant difference.

Business continuity shouldn't be an afterthought

I don't believe any technology platform can promise it will never go down. Technology fails and systems break, including ours.

Integration is important. Independence is equally important.

What I do believe is that staffing agencies should be asking harder questions about where their infrastructure concentrates risk. When your ATS isn't available, can your recruiters still see your open jobs? Can they still identify new opportunities and take meaningful action for your clients and candidates? Or does the entire recruiting operation come to a halt?

For years our industry has focused on making staffing technology more connected and more automated. That work is important, and I have spent my career on it. But I'm not sure we've spent enough time asking whether we've also made agencies too dependent on any one system.

From phone books to Jobifi

I never imagined that pulling out phone books to keep recruiting would end up shaping how I thought about building a technology company. But here we are.

The tools have changed dramatically, the expectations are higher, and the speed of our industry is almost unrecognizable compared to when I started. One thing hasn't changed: recruiters need to be able to recruit, even when technology doesn't cooperate.

Last week reinforced something I've believed since we started building Jobifi. The best technology doesn't just make your team more productive when everything is working. It protects their productivity when something isn't.

If last week left your recruiters without a way to keep working, I'd like to have a conversation. Not because we can keep your ATS online. Because we can help make sure that when it goes down, your recruiters still have a way forward.

Let's talk about what business continuity could look like for your agency.