Understanding Bullhorn Record Duplicate Checking

Learn how Bullhorn checks for duplicate records when you add a new candidate, contact, lead, or company.

When you add a new candidate, contact, lead, or company, Bullhorn checks whether a record for that person or company already exists.

If Bullhorn finds any possible duplicates, it shows a warning with a list of matching records.

If the record already exists, click Cancel, then add any new information to the existing record instead.
If it's not a duplicate, click Continue And Add.

If you accidentally add a duplicate record, see Merging Duplicate Records to combine it with the existing one.

Bullhorn checks against archived records, but not against deleted records or records you don't have access to view — depending on your permissions, this may limit duplicate checking to records you own or records within your department.

Duplicate Checking for Leads, Candidates, and Contacts

For leads, candidates, and contacts, Bullhorn compares:

Last name
First two letters of the first name
Primary email address (Email 1)

If the last name and first two letters of the first name match an existing record — or the primary email address alone matches — Bullhorn shows a duplicate warning with a list of matching records.

Duplicate Checking for Companies

For company names, the duplicate checker:

Ignores periods.

Ignores the following common business words and characters:

the
company
corporation
limited
incorporated
inc
chartered
partnership
partners
associates
association

holdings
solutions
group
industries
of
corp
co
ltd
LLC
chtd
GMBH

Compares what's left against existing company names, and flags a match if all remaining words appear in an existing name.

Bullhorn also checks whether the phone number entered already exists on another company record.