Reflecting on 2025: Growth, Innovation, and Impact at Coral Starfish
As 2025 draws to a close, it’s the perfect time to reflect on what has been an exciting year for Coral Starfish. From partnerships and product innovations to client successes and thought leadership, this year has reinforced our mission: to help recruitment teams work smarter, not harder.
It has been a year of innovation across our Bullhorn, Invenias and Salesforce Chrome Extensions, helping our clients to solve every day challenges, save time and simplify hiring and networking processes to improve productivity.
Expanding Our Partnerships
Partnership with TRN
One of the year’s standout moments was our partnership with The Recruitment Network (TRN). This collaboration has enabled us to connect with more recruitment professionals across the industry, helping them leverage our tools to streamline workflows, improve data accuracy, and ultimately place top talent faster.
Altrata (BoardEx) Integration Partnership
We also deepened our capabilities in 2025 through our BoardEx integration, giving us access to rich, verified executive- and board-level intelligence. With over 1.7 million executive profiles and powerful relationship mapping, BoardEx helps search teams uncover connections, make warmer intros, and build leadership pipelines more strategically.
By integrating with a broader network, we’ve been able to learn more about the day-to-day challenges recruiters face and tailor our solutions to solve real-world problems — from saving time on CRM updates to simplifying candidate outreach.
Product Enhancements Across Bullhorn, Invenias & Salesforce
This year also brought a wave of powerful feature updates across Bullhorn, Invenias, and Salesforce, all designed to make recruiter workflows more intuitive and efficient –
Invenias Developments
For Invenias customers, a major update recently landed, allowing the platform to run seamlessly across multiple browser tabs — perfect for easier multitasking. Alongside this, several new enhancements were introduced, including improved location parsing, new reports for system administrators, greater visibility of Invenias remuneration data, and additional user-friendly settings.
Bullhorn Developments
On the Bullhorn side, we saw significant enhancements that tightened the connection between the CRM and day-to-day sourcing. Features like smoother record updating, enriched Chrome extension capabilities, and better visibility of candidate information helped teams move faster and work more accurately. Recruiters can now update records, check history, and add notes without jumping between systems — saving hours every week.
Introducing Salesforce
As part of our business growth in 2025, Coral Starfish launched the Salesforce Chrome extension — a tool designed to make accessing and managing client and candidate data faster and easier. This launch strengthens our service offering, streamlines workflows for our clients, and supports our continued mission to help businesses grow smarter and more efficiently. Since launching we have upgraded the tool to allow teams to be able edit contact details on existing records – directly within LinkedIn!
The impact has been tangible. Clients report reducing CRM entry times by up to 75%, allowing researchers and consultants to focus on high-value activities such as sourcing, relationship-building, and strategic decision-making.
These improvements aren’t just about saving time — they’re about creating smarter workflows and empowering recruitment teams to focus on what really matters.
Thought Leadership: Sharing Insights on the Future of Recruitment
This year, we’ve also focused on sharing knowledge and insights about the evolving recruitment landscape. From discussing the role of AI in executive search to exploring how automation can complement human expertise, we’ve aimed to help recruiters navigate a rapidly changing industry.
Some key themes from our thought leadership this year include:
- AI is an enabler, not a replacement — technology helps recruiters work faster and smarter, but human insight remains essential.
- Data-driven recruitment improves decision-making and outcomes — cleaner, real-time CRM data supports better candidate and client engagement.
- Efficiency matters more than ever — recruiters who can minimize admin and focus on strategic work have a competitive advantage.
You might like to read and digest our article on The Future of Recruitment: How AI Automation Will Transform the Industry by 2026.
Involvement in Key Industry Events
2025 was a big year for industry events, and being on the ground at places like Bullhorn Engage, RecExpo, and the Recruitment Agency Expo proved just how essential these gatherings are.
Events like these bring the industry together — tech leaders, recruiters, founders, and innovators — creating space for conversations you simply can’t replicate online. Whether it was exploring how AI continues to reshape recruitment, discovering new tools, or sharing real-world challenges with peers, attending these events helped us stay close to the pulse of the industry.
They’re where ideas are exchanged, partnerships begin, and future opportunities take shape. Being present isn’t just beneficial — it’s a competitive advantage.
The Real Impact: Saving Time, Improving Outcomes
The ultimate measure of success for Coral Starfish is the impact on our clients. By automating repetitive tasks and simplifying workflows, we’ve helped teams:
- Spend less time on administrative tasks.
- Maintain cleaner, more accurate CRM data.
- Increase engagement with their systems because updating the CRM is quick and intuitive.
- Focus on building relationships, sourcing top candidates, and closing placements faster.
In short, our tools help recruiters do more with their time, improving productivity, outcomes, and overall satisfaction.
Expanding the Coral Starfish Team
2025 was also a landmark year for team growth at Coral Starfish.
We welcomed new talent across technical leadership, customer experience, and business support — each person bringing fresh expertise and energy to our mission. From adding a highly experienced technical lead to expanding our support function with a dedicated virtual assistant, our growth reflects the increasing demand for time-saving automation across the recruitment industry.
Strengthening our team has allowed us to innovate faster, improve our platform, and support more clients than ever before. Every new team member has played a vital role in elevating Coral Starfish to the next stage of growth.
Looking Ahead to 2026
As we head into 2026, we’re excited to continue building on the momentum of this year. Key areas of focus will include:
- Further enhancements to our Chrome Extensions and CRM integrations.
- Expanding thought leadership initiatives to help recruitment teams stay ahead of trends.
- Supporting recruiters in leveraging automation and AI while keeping human insight at the heart of every process.
We believe that technology should enable talent professionals, not replace them — and our mission remains to give teams the tools and insights they need to succeed in an increasingly competitive landscape.
