I love my job. I get to check out the latest and greatest in the HR tech market from all over the world. The vast array of tech on offer in the HR and recruitment landscape is awesome and overwhelming all at the same time.
Whether you’re looking to be on the bleeding edge of delivering state of the art experiences for your candidates and employees, or just looking to automate some time consuming manual processes, there’s a thousand and one options for you out there.
One of the ways we try and help end users to select tech that works for them, is by presenting integrated solutions in the marketplaces we serve up. The confidence of knowing that it will all work together is one big hurdle immediately conquered, and it massively reduces the number of options you need to assess when finding the right solution for your organisation.
One of the consistent challenges I see for HR and Recruitment leaders searching for their preferred technology, is finding the budget to pay for it. So I thought I’d share some of the ways I help clients find the money to continue to evolve their tech stack to improve their business outcomes:
1. Tie it to a business strategy outside of HR – Is there a sales, marketing or brand strategy that you could align with and enhance? Perfect for newer market facing technologies like candidate assistants or recruitment CRMs that can engage your untapped database and build brand loyalty and reputation. Demonstrate how this initiative could put your company on the map and help your colleagues in other departments or your CEO achieve their overall business strategy
2. Work out what it already costs the business to do it manually – This is an easy one. Figure out how many hours a week are spent on this process and break down the wage costs of the people that do the process as an average and multiply the hourly wage costs by the number of hours spent. It’s crude, but it will give you a rough idea of what the business is spending today. This is awesome for those workflow products that automate time consuming and more transactional activities – you’ll be surprised what you’re already spending. Make sure you think about what value adding activities will be picked up in the newly created time, or if the team are under pressure, how it will reduce staff turnover costs by retaining your good people who might otherwise leave. Savings on all fronts!
3. Identify a burning platform – Have a new site opening or a large scale project that is going to create a short term need? Or perhaps an event that will draw large amounts of attention to your business? This is your lucky day. Make or break moments are a great opportunity to show how you not only embrace the challenge but how much you’re willing to take it to the next level. Use this opportunity to show how freeing up resources in your team through automation could increase productivity or release someone to work on a project. Creating an amazing visitor experience to your website could generate some publicity or give you great quality candidate attraction and conversion so you are getting the best possible talent in the market.
Sometimes you can use all 3 tactics together. Think about the stakeholders that will ultimately make the decision and what their pressures and goals are and try and shape your business case to read in a way that shows you have thought not just about your goals, but theirs too.
New to writing a simple business case? Make sure you include the following statements and information:
- Explain the problem or opportunity
- What are the benefits (make sure you think about each of the stakeholders here and include something for everyone)
- What are the potential risks
- What are the likely solutions (make sure you have reviewed more than one piece of software and have documented the requirements and the fit if you have more technical stakeholders)
- What are the costs, including human capital, to implement (this is a good place to include any existing costings for current state processes and offset any new spend with savings made – show your workings)
- Timeframe to execute
- What will the change mean to operations post implementation?
Ask your vendors to help you put together a compelling case with supporting documentation, case studies, ROI calculators or customer testimonials and add them as an appendix.
Go forth and procure!
