Executive Search
i-Pharm Consulting is a specialist life sciences recruiting firm operating under the IPA Talent Group — a multi-brand recruitment operation that also runs Parallel Consulting in IT and Apollo Solutions in banking, audit and risk. With consultants across all three brands conducting high volumes of calls daily, the data being generated in those conversations was valuable. Most of it was disappearing.
"The CoRecruit solution was the most comprehensive. It ticked the boxes in terms of the integration into Bullhorn and it ticked the boxes in terms of the customisation. We knew the data was reliably being put onto Bullhorn, but as importantly, we knew it was being put on in a format that we wanted it to be." — Simon Burns, Executive Director / EVP, i-Pharm Consulting
Across three brands and multiple specialist practice areas, i-Pharm Consulting's consultants were doing what most recruiters do: taking handwritten notes during calls and hoping they'd find time to type them up later. Most of the time, they didn't. Or they did, but only partially.
The problem was friction. Logging notes into Bullhorn after a full day of calls is slow, repetitive work. One senior consultant on the US-facing contract team had a standing Friday ritual: 4:30pm, sit down, spend 90 minutes to two hours typing up the week's handwritten notes. An hour and a half in, by his own admission, the will to be thorough was gone.
The second challenge was customisation. i-Pharm Consulting doesn't run one type of call. They run pre-screens, business development calls, job qualification calls, and client pitches — each requiring a different kind of summary.
"Those handwritten notes were literally just evaporating. We wanted to get a much more secure and reliable solution. And the customisation piece was really important — when a consultant does a call, they can select what type it was, so that summary is relevant to the type of call rather than just a general note." — Simon Burns, Executive Director / EVP, i-Pharm Consulting
i-Pharm Consulting adopted CoRecruit after Simon and his colleague Leo ran a full evaluation of the notetaking tools on the market. CoRecruit won on two criteria: Bullhorn integration and customisation.
Every call now flows directly into Bullhorn the moment it ends. Consultants select the call type beforehand, and the summary that comes back reflects that — a candidate pre-screen looks different to a job qualification call, and both are structured in the format the team actually uses. The manual logging step is gone. The data is in Bullhorn, in the right format, without anyone having to think about it.
"We've got no idea how much data we lost over the years, but we now know it is going on. Every call is now going onto Bullhorn, whereas previously every set of notes might go on — or might not." — Simon Burns, Executive Director / EVP, i-Pharm Consulting
Every call is now in Bullhorn. All of it.
The most immediate win was measurable and simple. Before CoRecruit, data capture was inconsistent. Now it's complete. Every pre-screen, every BD call, every qualification call lands in Bullhorn automatically. The data that used to evaporate is now a growing, searchable knowledge base.
Friday afternoon admin is gone
The senior consultant who used to spend 90 minutes every Friday typing up notes no longer does. That time is back. And the notes that do go in are more complete than anything produced manually at the end of a long week.
Managers can coach without listening to every call
One delivery manager inherited a team of new hires running high call volumes. Listening to every call wasn't practical. Reading 15 call summaries instead of listening to 15 calls is. He now cherry-picks summaries, spots patterns, identifies training needs and goes through recordings only when needed.
i-Pharm Consulting wasn't losing data because their consultants were careless. They were losing it because the system required a manual step that was genuinely painful to complete consistently. Typing notes into Bullhorn at the end of a long day, for every call, is the kind of task that gets done properly on a good week and not at all on a bad one.
CoRecruit removed the step. The data that was always generated in those conversations now goes where it needs to go, automatically, in the format that makes it useful. The knowledge base that Simon's team is building inside Bullhorn today is one that would have taken years to accumulate any other way.
"When we're preparing an offer or speaking to clients to prepare offers, we can go back over that transcript and interrogate it. What did this candidate say about location? What did they say about stock options? It means we can guide clients to make sure the offer is as appealing as possible." — Simon Burns, Executive Director / EVP, i-Pharm Consulting
i-Pharm Consulting is already thinking beyond note capture. Simon's team is exploring connecting CoRecruit to Microsoft Copilot via MCP to build an automated scorecarding system — one where a manager can ask an AI agent to review a consultant's last ten pre-screen calls, grade them against a training framework, and surface the best and worst examples without manually pulling anything.
It's not fully live yet. But the foundation is there because the data is there. Every call captured, every summary structured, every transcript searchable. That's what makes the next layer possible.
"A manager should be able to go in and say, 'Go and check this consultant's pre-screen call against the training material we have.' Get them to do a scorecarding. That's definitely the potential future use of an MCP direct into Copilot." — Simon Burns, Executive Director / EVP, i-Pharm Consulting
Simon and his colleague Leo ran a full market comparison before committing. The shortlist was long. CoRecruit came out on top because it was the only tool that solved both problems at once: reliable Bullhorn integration and meaningful customisation by call type. Other tools handled one or the other. CoRecruit handled both.
"I have recommended CoRecruit, and there are a couple of people who signed up on the back of my recommendations. For me and my colleague, CoRecruit was the most comprehensive solution after we did a full beauty parade of note-takers." — Simon Burns, Executive Director / EVP, i-Pharm Consulting
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