Choosing a plugin
The questions that actually decide it
You can find a dozen comparison tables that all conclude the vendor who wrote them wins. This is not one. It is what the alternatives publish about themselves, one decision we have made differently from a competitor and why, the questions we would ask if we were buying, and the places where we would tell you not to choose us.
What the alternatives publish, what we chose differently, and why.
Read before you buy
What the alternatives say about themselves
You do not need to install a plugin to find out what it claims. Its own website says so, in public, and a vendor who will not publish a feature list is telling you something too. So here is what the two WordPress plugins in this market publish about themselves, with the date each page was last changed, and what that evidence can and cannot tell you.
What a published feature list proves is what a vendor advertises. It does not prove how well any of it works, and absence from a list is weak evidence — one of these vendors says on its own features page that keeping it current is hard. Where we make a comparison below, it is between stated positions, not between our guesses about somebody else’s code.
The landscape
The other two plugins, from their own pages
Checked 22 October 2026. Their sites, their words.
| A UK vendor selling a Bullhorn WordPress plugin | Publishes a long feature list: applications into Bullhorn, candidate registration, a candidate portal, client areas showing applications, search and filtering, Google for Jobs, shortcodes, and page-builder support covering Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, Composer and Gutenberg. Says it is used by companies with more than 50,000 jobs, and offers support from 8am to midnight GMT. Its headline commercial difference is a ONE-OFF PAYMENT rather than a renewal. Feature page last changed November 2024; the product page October 2026. |
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| An open-source plugin with a paid edition | The free edition on wordpress.org displays jobs with job-specific SEO aimed at Google for Jobs; taking applications and turning them into Bullhorn candidates requires the paid edition. Its changelog shows active work against Bullhorn API changes through 2026. wordpress.org currently shows its own automated notice on the free edition: not tested with the latest three major WordPress releases. |
Closed jobs
One disagreement worth understanding before you choose
It is not a feature either of us is missing. It is a decision we have each made differently, in public.
When a role closes, what should its page do? The open-source plugin’s own release notes argue that a removed job posting should return “HTTP 410 GONE or HTTP 404 NOT FOUND”, on the grounds that this is what search engines and aggregators want. That is a defensible reading of the guidance, and they are explicit about it.
We concluded the opposite, and wrote down why. A closed role keeps its address and returns normally, says plainly that it is no longer accepting applications, carries a past expiry date in its structured data, and leaves the listing and the sitemap. The reasoning is that job links are shared — in emails, on LinkedIn, in a consultant’s own messages — and a 410 turns every one of those into a dead end for a candidate who might suit three other live roles. Closures in recruitment are also frequently temporary, and a URL that is gone on Monday and back on Wednesday teaches crawlers to distrust it.
Both positions keep the posting out of the index. Ours keeps the candidate. If you disagree with our reading, that is a real reason to prefer the other approach, and we would rather you knew about the choice than discovered it after a migration.
The decision underneath
Where does the candidate end up?
Almost every difference that matters follows from this one question. A candidate who applies on your domain builds something you own: search traffic, a board with equity in it, a brand experience you control. A candidate who is handed to somebody else’s domain builds that for them.
Somebody else’s domain
The applicant leaves your site
- Search traffic lands on a domain you do not own
- The journey changes brand halfway through
- Your board is worth nothing when you leave the vendor
- Page speed and accessibility are not yours to fix
Your own domain
The applicant stays with you
- Every role is a page that earns traffic for you
- One brand, start to finish
- The board is an asset you keep
- You control the markup, the speed and the accessibility
Approaches
The four ways of doing this
Pick the approach before you pick the product. Three of these are reasonable answers for somebody.
Bullhorn’s own career portal
Fastest to stand up and nothing extra to maintain, because it is part of what you already pay for. The cost is that roles live on a portal rather than on pages of your own, so the search traffic and the brand experience are not yours. Right if a careers page is a box to tick rather than a source of candidates.An embedded widget on your page
A block of someone else’s content inside your layout. Quick, and it looks like your site at a glance. But a role inside a widget usually has no address of its own, which means it is not a page search engines can rank, and the apply step frequently hands the candidate off anyway.A plugin that builds pages on your site
Each role becomes a real page on your domain, with its own address, your theme and your application form. More to configure than a portal, and you are now responsible for a board. This is what we build, so treat our enthusiasm accordingly. Approach 4A custom build against the Bullhorn API
Exactly what you want, and you own it. You also own the authentication, the rate limits, the retries, the structured data, the consent record, and whoever maintains it when Bullhorn changes the API. Sensible at real scale with a real development team; expensive and fragile without one.Questions
The questions to ask any vendor
Including us. Ten questions, each with a verifiable answer, and ours beside them.
| 1. Does each role get its own address on my domain? | If not, search engines have nothing to rank. Ours: yes, one address per role, assigned once and never regenerated. |
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| 2. What happens to that address when a role closes? | A 404 kills every link shared by email and on LinkedIn. Ours: the page stays, says the role has closed, leaves the listing and the sitemap, and is marked expired for search engines. Closure is reversible. |
| 3. If Bullhorn is unavailable for an hour, what happens to an application? | This is the question that separates serious answers from brochures. Ours: the application is stored on your own site before the candidate is told it worked, then queued and retried, so nothing is lost. |
| 4. Is candidate data held on my website, or is Bullhorn the record? | A second candidate database on your site is a liability you did not ask for. Ours: Bullhorn is the record; CVs are held privately and not in the media library. |
| 5. Who owns the consent wording, and is it recorded? | You own the wording, and you need it recorded with a timestamp or you cannot show later what was agreed. Ours: your wording, stored with the submission. |
| 6. How many Bullhorn API calls does a sync cost? | Ask for numbers. An integration that re-reads your whole catalogue every run will hit your account limits, and those limits are shared with everything else you connect. Ours, measured: one call for a cycle with nothing to do, three for a walk over a thousand roles. |
| 7. Can a confidential client name be kept off the public page? | Agencies need this constantly and it is often an afterthought. Ours: a field reaches the page only if you enable it, and the check is repeated when the page renders. |
| 8. What happens when my licence lapses? | Ask explicitly whether the board keeps working. Ours: job pages, sync and applications keep working; what stops is new versions and support. |
| 9. What happens to my existing job URLs if I migrate? | Years of accumulated search position can be thrown away by a migration that does not redirect. Ours: old addresses can be pointed at the new pages. |
| 10. Can I read the documentation before I buy? | If the answer is "our team will walk you through it", you are being asked to buy something you cannot inspect. Ours is public, including the developer reference. |
Do this before you commit to anyone
How to test a shortlist in an afternoon
Every plugin in this market demos well. What separates them shows up in an hour of poking, and any vendor worth buying from will let you do it on a staging site with your own Bullhorn data.
- Publish a role, then close it, and see what its URL does
- Submit an application with the Bullhorn connection deliberately broken
- Run a page through Google’s Rich Results Test and look for job data
- Open a job page on a phone and time it
- Ask to see the run history after a sync, not a screenshot of it
| Started | Trigger | Duration | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 09:14:02 | WP-Cron | 6.2s | 34 changes |
| 09:09:01 | WP-Cron | 5.4s | No changes |
| 09:04:00 | WP-CLI | 2.1s | 3 submissions |
| 08:59:02 | WP-Cron | 1.3s | 1 skipped |
Being straight about it
Where we would tell you not to choose us
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You want a careers page, not a job board
If nobody is going to maintain it and the roles are a formality, Bullhorn’s own portal is the right answer and costs you nothing extra. We would rather say that than sell you a board that goes stale.
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You need it live next week
A board built properly takes longer than embedding a widget. If the deadline is immovable and the standard is "something is there", we are the wrong shape of answer.
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You want one dashboard across many client sites
Each site connects directly to its own Bullhorn with its own credentials and is administered on its own. That is deliberate, and it is a real trade for an agency running a portfolio.
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Your requirement is genuinely bespoke
If you need something the Bullhorn API allows but no plugin models, a custom build against the API may be the honest answer. Our developer reference exists partly so you can judge that for yourself.
W3Bullhorn is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Bullhorn, Inc. Bullhorn is a trademark of its owner.
FAQ
Questions about choosing
Short answers here. Anything else, ask us directly.