For any recruitment technology, there comes a point when they need to decide how they are going to expand and innovate their platform.  Do they build in-house or do they look for partnerships with white label technology providers?

There are positives and negatives of both strategies, however, let’s take a look specifically at white label technologies and the value it provides to technology solutions.  White Label technology providers create and innovate solutions that are designed to be used in other technology.  These solutions usually are “integrated” into the platform and usually can be re-branded by the final technology provider, hence the term “white label”.

White Label solutions provide a number of benefits and limitations for technology providers and I will be going over them below:

Benefits

Development Cost: As the development of white label solutions is covered by the company who created the solution, companies can cheaply partner with these solutions to add functionality to their platform without the need for development resources to be in house.

Availability: Building a solution from scratch will obviously take longer than partnering with an existing white label solution.  Through a partnership, you can get to market faster and provide your customers with a solution it needs.

Product Experts: Depending on the specific solutions importance to your technology platform, having a white label solution may be a great way to keep this part of your solution fresh and innovative.  The company that built this solution should continuously update the solution with the most important features available.

Limitations

Product Vision: When choosing White Label technologies, you need to know your own Product Vision and makse sure the white label technology matches where you expect your product to be 5 years from now.  Will these White Label technologies innovate and remain useful in your product?  Since you have little control on what your partner does with the product, you need to make sure it’s a good fit.  If it isn’t, you’ll want to build in-house.

Lack of Control: As the solution is not yours, you have little to no control over it.  When bugs arise, new features are requested or you update your platform, you will need to effectively communicate with your partners to make these changes.  This can be aggravating from a client’s point of view as well, as any problems they have with the solution will need to be run up the flagpole twice and in most cases will take longer to solve.

Integration (for Metrics): The key when bringing white label solutions into your platform is to make sure that they are integrated seamlessly into your solution.   This not only means that they can be easily used by clients in your system but more importantly that you can track and report any and all activity that happens through the white label solution.  Centralized reporting and metrics are extremely important and is a key to any integration.

There’s a time and place to use White Label technology to strengthen your technology platform but you don’t want to go overboard with it.  The key is to make sure that you fully integrate these solutions in order to take advantage of essential recruiting metrics & reporting that integration provides.  A great technology platform cannot just be a bunch of white label solutions cobbled together by a few band-aids.  A successful product will have a core of the product that is built in-house specifically to solve the needs & problems of your customer with ancillary white label solutions that provide value toward this goal.

This is something you should consider and ask about when you are looking to purchase recruitment marketing technology.  Ask how they’ve built their solutions and how they expect to expand them.  This will tell you a lot about whether the vendor is a technology company or a sales & marketing company.