I was lucky enough to attend this Tuesday’s #TChat (which you should attend if you are on Twitter) and there was a great conversation on “Best Practices Evaluating, Purchasing & Implementing HR/Recruiting Tech & Software”.  Long title, but a pretty interesting conversation between HR / Recruiting professionals with a few vendor opinions mixed in.  I encourage you to read the recap on the TalentCulture website as I agree with many of the key points Kevin highlights in the post.

Evaluating & Purchasing Recruitment Technology for your organization can be a difficult task.  Not only do you have sort through the sheer vastness of products & services that are available but you need to take stock of your own internal processes and solutions and how any new technology would fit into that.  Not to mention dealing with a specified budget and different internal stakeholders.

In dealing with customers going through this process, day in and day out, here are a few things to think about that can help you in your process:

Focus on Problems, not Solutions: While you need to have an idea of the solution you would want, I would focus more on the problems in your recruiting organization that you need to solve.  Are you not getting enough (qualified) applicants?  Are you spending too much time sorting through resumes?  Are you unable to track the performance of your job ads and need some type of recruiting metrics?  Talk to your recruiting team and internal stakeholders and narrow down the key problems you would like solved.  Any good vendor will be able to take these problems and show you how technology can come up with solutions for them.

References are Key: Kevin mentions this in his Recap but I think it bears repeating.  You should ask every vendor for multiple references as well as reach out to other recruiting organizations that you know are using their software / product.  Vendors will always point you to clients that will show them in a positive light, however, make sure to have pointed questions for them that are important to your organization and how you would use the product.

Also, ask for a client that is relatively new (less than 6 months).  These clients have recently been through the process of integrating and implementing the product into their existing tools (so it’s at the top of their minds).  This will give you a great indication of the responsiveness and integration process with the vendor.

Integration: Since we’re already talking about it, integration with your existing recruiting tools and systems is key.  Make sure to ask and be shown how the product is / can be integrated with the current solutions you have in house.  There’s nothing worse than getting a shiny new technology and not be able to use it effectively because it doesn’t fit into your existing framework and processes.

Get your Internal Stakeholders Involved: No matter what recruitment technology you buy, you are buying it for a specific group within your company to use.  Get these stakeholders involved in the process early from defining the key problems in your process to sitting in on the demos for the product.  They are the ones that will be using it so getting their buy-in is very important.

Scenario-Based Demo: It’s fine to let vendors show their practiced demo for the 1st one but as you get farther into the process, make sure to have the demos be more scenario based.   Identify 10-20 different scenarios that you would actually want to use the product or service for and ask the vendor to show you how they would do it in their system.  All the bells & wistles and interactive presentations are great but in the end you want a product that is functional and provides easy ways to complete the tasks / scenarios you need done day in and day out.

Buying new recruitment marketing technology can be a tough process.  The key is understanding first what your organization wants to accomplish (i.e. what problems you want to solve?) by bringing in new technology and then identifying the best vendor that can provide this for your organization through talking to references, asking pointed questions and getting input from your internal stakeholders.

I hope this is helpful and happy hunting!

Originally posted on the SmashFly Recruitment Technology Blog.