Before You Drop $100K on HR Tech, Ask This First
Three things worth slowing down for before you swap or buy, and the lens a mentor once gave me for evaluating any system.
I remember complaining to a mentor once about a system that felt like it was missing every bell and whistle I wanted. He let me get it all out, and then he asked me one question: what is the problem you are trying to solve?
I did not have a clean answer. That question is still the lens I reach for every time I am evaluating a new HR tech stack. What has stayed with me since is simple: great tech does not save us from undefined problems. It just turns up the volume on them.
HR professionals are told that the right system will solve all their problems, and the sales decks are built to make us believe it. We get enamored with the possibilities, the long term vision, and the conversation moves to procurement before the question of what we are actually solving has been asked. I have been there too. 🫣
Three things worth slowing down for before you swap or buy.
Define the problem you are actually trying to solve. Not the problem the sales team named for you. Not the problem your peer at another company is fixing. Yours, in the language of your team, your company, and your work. If you cannot describe it, or the problem description changes from week to week, the system will not solve it for you.
Once you identify the problem, focus on the solutions to that problem. The bells and whistles are the fun part. They will be there waiting in eighteen months if you grow into them. They will also pull your evaluation off course if you let them. Buy for the problem you have today, not the version of the ecosystem you are hoping to become. Otherwise your newly purchased $100k tool may be sitting on a shelf, unused.
Before you replace, ask questions of what you already have. Sometimes the system has not failed. It has just gone stale because other priorities took the oxygen for a while. Is an upgrade available? Are there features you never turned on? Is there a workflow tweak that solves 80 percent of what is frustrating you? Ask your vendor for a subject matter expert to run an optimization review, too. If you do not ask, the vendor may have no idea you have a problem, or that a change is even on the table.
I have seen companies move to a new tool and shortly want to go back to their old one. Implementations are not for the faint of heart. There should be a mandatory recovery period after each one. 😴
Tech is a tool, not a rescue. The clarity has to come first.
To help with that first step, I put together a one-page checklist of questions worth asking before you buy or swap any HR tech: the HR Tech Assessment One-Pager. This one comes with a small milestone attached... it’s the first checklist I’ve published as a Claude artifact, and I am excited to finally share it!
For my PDF lovers, this one is for you. Save it, sit with it, bring it into your next vendor conversation
With gratitude,
Cristal
Founder, Clahrity | getclahrity.com