How to Pick Your Next Recruitment Technology: 10 Questions to Ask

It doesn’t have to be a perfect list. It might even be a little messy — and that’s good! Highlight the points that frustrate you and your team the most and have that list on hand in a discovery call or demo with a potential vendor. A good vendor will be transparent and upfront about the relevance of your pain points to what they do.

Then focus on what your business defines as a great recruitment investment. This will keep you aligned on business goals even as you go down the rabbit hole of an extensive product demo. A great demo might show you more than what you intended the tool to do. If any additional features have the potential to help your team go above and beyond to meet goals, you can open up the door for some additional investment to get long-term returns.

Vet the responsibilities of each team member and show them how a new tool would impact their bottom line goals. This gives you a clearer idea of what your team wants to achieve and the tools they feel most comfortable with to get there. You can also think about additional resources that may be needed to maximize the usage of a new tool. 

For example, would it be necessary to bring on a person or a team who focuses on operational tasks with vendors? Building out your recruitment operations is one way to have a great framework in place for assessing all aspects of tool adoption, such as buy-in, bandwidth, and more.

Review your team’s priorities and major deadlines to align them with broader goals from your leadership team. In any initial touch point with a vendor, let them know your timeline and ask if they would be able to meet it. Suppose you’re adopting a robust talent system that affects all members of a particular team. In that case, you should allocate a few months to account for a thorough implementation process that covers all important grounds.

Everyone’s definition of easy-to-use is different. A recruiter-friendly tool to one team may be a behemoth of features to another. This is why it’s so important to participate in product demos and try a tool out for yourself. If you still find yourself struggling to make sense of a system even after several tries, relay that feedback to the vendor you’re speaking with too. 

hireEZ values this transparency because it gives us an opportunity to show teams different approaches to a problem that they may not be aware of. But even if the partnership doesn’t work out, it helps us make our product better for recruiters in the future — feedback drives some of our biggest updates, such as our diversity sourcing, email engagement capabilities, and ATS integrations. 

Involve your entire team and get stakeholders to contribute to the competitive analysis process. Sit through product demos of all your options and center your conversation on those primary hiring objectives for a more objective comparison. You can also let your vendors know about the tools you’re currently assessing. This gives you more visibility into unique differentiators about each tool that you may not have known about before.

Ask your technology vendor about the ROI they’ve provided to others and how the partnership can best give you visibility into performance within the system. hireEZ’s Customer Success Managers work closely with teams to continuously show them how they’re using the tool and the results they’ve obtained thus far. Our built-in reports within the platform also give teams a self-service way to keep themselves accountable and track activity.

Ask your vendors about the extent of their customer support system. Who will your point of contact be in the case of any technical bugs? How should you relay feedback if there’s an update that impedes your workflow and makes your experience more difficult? What is the average time taken for customer support to respond to your questions? 

Another important aspect of support is how you as a customer can impact the future roadmap of the technology you invest in. You can hear more about this on Coffee with hireEZ, where we speak to Director of Talent, Noah Wisnia, about how he has built a consultative partnership with hireEZ over the years. If your vendor values you as a consultative partner to the product, then you’ll play a more active role in shaping your ideal customer experience.