Bullpen Review

Bullpen Overview

Bullpen is a San Francisco-based commercial real estate recruiting firm launched in 2018 by Tyler Kastelberg, a former investment banker and real estate investor. The company’s goal is to partner with real estate investment, development, and lending companies as their internal talent team, providing similar services as a recruiter but at a far lower cost to the business. With a team comprised of commercial real estate experts, Bullpen owns the entire recruiting process, vetting and placing freelancers and headhunting full-time talent. Bullpen also produces in-depth reports and guides that provide helpful insights into industry trends, hiring topics, and strategies.

Pros Explained

Lower fees: Bullpen’s pricing model collects a much lower fee than the average percentage fee most recruitment and talent firms require. Typically, when a company hires a recruiting agency and they fill the position, the agency will ask for a fee equal to 30% of the new hire’s total annual compensation. Bullpen’s partnership model is designed to cost less than 12% of your annual new-hire compensation.

Specialized focus: Bullpen only works within the commercial real estate market, providing a higher level of expertise than competing firms that offer recruiting services across a wide array of industry sectors. Bullpen’s founder and team members all have experience in the commercial real estate industry and have extensive knowledge of the market.

Full-service: Unlike typical retained and contingent recruiting models, Bullpen operates an embedded recruiting model. Account executives and recruiters at the firm feel and act like internal talent team members, providing a holistic talent solution.

Bullpen’s offering includes regular communication with their client’s leadership, which allows them to own the entire recruiting process from soup to nuts: job post, marketing, sourcing, candidate management, and onboarding. It’s designed and priced to mirror an internal talent acquisition team, the opposite of how other recruiting agencies operate today.

Cons Explained

Shorter track record: Launched only six years ago, Bullpen is a relatively young firm, lacking the decades of experience in the recruitment arena that some competing firms offer to potential clients. However, Bullpen’s founder and team members all have industry experience and knowledge and rigorously vet the real estate talent they work with. 

No contingent recruitment offering: Contingent recruiting is considered low risk by employers as payment is only earned after a candidate joins your team. Bullpen does not offer contingent recruiting, which means they require payment before services are rendered. This is akin to a retained or RPO recruiting model. 

Bullpen Product Offerings

Bullpen is a service for commercial real estate companies looking for vetted, high-quality talent. The company places talented real estate professionals with companies seeking individuals for full-time, freelance, one-time projects, or other fractional work, like hourly consulting. 

Employer Intake

Companies looking to partner with Bullpen are first taken through a questionnaire form on Bullpen’s website, with options to choose what kind of hiring they are looking to do—freelance, full-time, etc.—what field within commercial real estate the position falls under, and how many employees are needed.

After submitting the questionnaire, Bullpen’s website takes employers to a page where they can easily book a call with a Bullpen team member. The sales process starts there.

Talent vetting process

On the freelance side of their business, Bullpen team members pre-interview all individuals who apply on the talent side, including queries about technical skills, which could mean actually testing a person’s abilities.

For example, those in acquisitions or development may be given a financial modeling case study exercise. Bullpen’s success rate with its freelance placements is more than 98%. The company defines success as placements that have happy outcomes and positive feedback from employers.

Full-service offering

For employers looking for talent, after being paired with an account executive on Bullpen’s team, everything is effectively handled on the employer’s behalf.

For those seeking full-time placements, Bullpen owns the job post, marketing, sourcing, and candidate management for the role. For freelance placements, Bullpen handpicks a vetted professional for the role, coordinates an introduction with the client, and manages the kickoff. For freelance placements, Bullpen also handles all the back-end work, like invoicing, payments, and complying with labor laws across the U.S.

Reports, guides & case studies

Bullpen offers several different free resources on its website, including a free weekly newsletter that delves into growth strategies commercial real estate firms use to scale their organizations, reports on hourly consultant rates for commercial real estate consultants, and a guide to hiring commercial real estate experts. Bullpen also has case studies of some of the firms it has worked with and client testimonials.

Customer Support

Bullpen’s customer support is embedded in its relationships between account managers and clients. If any issues arise, the account executive paired with a client is the primary contact and problem solver.

Pricing

Bullpen works with clients on one-off recruiting assignments and embedded, programmatic hiring programs. Its goal is to serve customers at or below the cost of hiring internal recruiters, and It aims to cost less than 12% of new hire compensation at scale.

Bullpen does not publicly display its prices or pricing model but will provide detailed service options during the proposal stage, ensuring that every client’s unique recruiting needs are addressed.

Competitors

Upwork

Silicon Valley-based Upwork was founded in 2013 and is a platform for freelancers to connect with businesses looking to fill positions. The company was formed more than a decade ago after a merger between Elance Inc. and oDesk Corp. and later rebranded as Upwork in 2015. Upwork is free to join and has an extensive database of job and talent listings. The company charges a 10% fee on all earnings made by freelancers.

Crown Advisors

Founded in 1996, Crown Advisors is a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based recruiting firm focused on management and executive positions in the commercial real estate and construction industries. The firm has several regional offices throughout the U.S.

Keller Augusta

Keller Augusta is a commercial real estate recruiting firm that was founded in 2001 and is headquartered in Boston, MA. The firm has multiple offices around the country and has worked with major commercial real estate companies and investment firms.

RETS

Founded in 2002, RETS Associates is an executive search firm specializing in the recruitment and placement of permanent and executive positions in the commercial real estate industry. RETS’ clients include REITs, developers, investors, pension fund advisors, operating companies, real estate private equity firms, family offices, corporate real estate departments, homebuilders, financial services, and third-party real estate services firms.

How We Evaluated Bullpen

When evaluating Bullpen, we looked at several factors, including:

• Service offerings: Bullpen provides a full-stack talent offering in the commercial real estate industry that can partner with a company from conception to maturity. The company can help from the early days, when a new firm may only need freelancers, to years later, when the company has blossomed into a full-fledged operation and is looking for full-time individuals. Bullpen’s team members own the entire process of vetting, interviewing, hiring, and placing talent, staying in constant contact every step of the way.
• Talent vetting: Real estate professionals looking to join Bullpen are thoroughly vetted through interviews, case studies, and testing. Among the company’s talent network, 65% have a master’s degree and average 10 or more years of experience in the industry.
• Ease of use: Bullpen’s website is clean and easy to navigate for both employers and commercial real estate professionals. The company provides important statistics on the talent it works with, including the percentage with a master’s degree, the number of commercial real estate experts in its network, and the average years of experience in the business. Clients with whom Bullpen has worked are listed on the site, and they offer more information on some of its clients through multiple case studies and testimonials.
• Customer support: Bullpen’s customer support is integrated into its business model. Account executives work one-on-one with clients and are also the primary contact for support.
• Pricing and transparency: Bullpen’s pricing model is structured to replicate the cost of hiring an internal recruiting team and offers lower-than-average fees for placements. While the average fee recruiting agencies collect for placing talent is 30% of the new hire’s compensation, Bullpen’s fee structure averages 12% of new hire compensation in their embedded recruiting offering. Typical of most recruiting firms, pricing tiers and models are not publicly available on the company’s website.

Summary of Bullpen Review

Bullpen’s mission is to offer all the quality of an outsourced recruiting agency—including higher-quality recruiting tools and automation—at the same price as an internal talent acquisition team. Though the firm has a much shorter track record than many competitors, it has completed more than 800 placements with a 98% success rate. 

The company has worked with high-profile clients like Round Hill Capital, FivePoint, CF Capital, and Oliver Properties and prides itself on its customer testimonials, lower placement fees, industry expertise, and quick placement timelines. A big part of Bullpen’s core mission is to prove that the old-world recruiting agency model isn’t effective anymore and that it’s possible to operate as an outsourced talent acquisition arm of a business at the same cost as an actual internal team. 

Employers and real estate professionals interested in Bullpen may find that their website has less publicly available information detailing the firm’s process than rival firms’, but the website makes it easy to quickly connect with a Bullpen team member who can provide that information. 

Overall, Bullpen’s platform is easy to navigate, and the all-in-one services, industry expertise, and lower fees provided to clients help the company stand out from the competition. 

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