Your employees are swamped with manual tasks and desperate for some relief. Your team is approaching a growth period that requires automation or reporting to be successful. You’ve recently been audited and realize that a technology solution will help you stay compliant. Or maybe your old technology just isn’t cutting it anymore. Whatever the case may be, you’re ready to explore every option HR technology has to offer.
Some companies embarking on a search for new tech are confronted with a choice between two paths forward: a “best-of-breed” solution or a “unified solution” (also known as an HRIS or all-in-one). To ease your research process, we’ve explained the two “purchasing packages” paired with the upsides and pitfalls for each.
Assess Your Needs
Determining which option you may require is extremely specific to your company’s structure and your departmental goals. We’ve structured this section to help you clarify what technology your team may require to bolster your talent management success plan. If you need to make a case to executive management, hold a meeting with all members of your HR team to work on this assessment before you build out your pitch.
Before contemplating any HR technology you need to consider the following factors in your current strategies to better understand your needs and wants:
- Budget
- Employee training
- Benefits packages and how they relate to each employee (organizational)
- Feedback processes
- Average monthly/annual hiring volume
- Internal communication needs
- Team size and individual responsibilities
- Candidate assessments
- Approach to sourcing applicants
- Candidate experience (current or desired)
- Candidate referral process
- Current application process
- Performance goals and management
- New hire resources and paperwork
- Background checks
- Formal onboarding process
- Centralized database with comprehensive employee information
Take a look at each of these bullets and write down what you currently have in place for each and how you’d like to improve it this year. For teams who may have not yet explored HR technology implementation, some of these processes might be performed manually in spreadsheets, leading to error or double data entry. Here’s where technology can help keep everything organized and in one place.
What is Best-of-Breed?
Best-of-breed is a term we use for those who are interested in a “custom” approach to their hr processes from talent management to training and beyond. For example, after you and your team assess your needs, you come to find you really only need a solution for applicant tracking and onboarding at the moment. Best-of-Breed allows you the option to only select those systems you need and integrate them to payroll. This method of shopping around and integrating offers teams a more robust functionality. Individual solutions typically have more functionality than end-to-end solutions and provide a custom approach to solving business needs.
A highly customized and functioning system is certainly appealing, but there are a few cons to consider in Best-of-Breed solutions:
- Integrations: Studies by Bersin by Deloitte show 33% of companies have 10 or more HR systems in place to help automate all their administrative work. Before you consider welcoming new vendors into your wheelhouse, make sure to ask if their solutions will integrate with the ones your team currently uses (if you have any in place). Incompatibility would duplicate data entry of employee data across several systems, which could complicate workflows and time spent on tasks.
- Employee Training: Multiple solutions means multiple training sessions with employees who will be using the systems.
- IT Bandwidth: If you don’t have one already, consider hiring an IT team to help maintain several systems and databases for extra security. Before incorporating any new systems to your army of solutions, ask your IT team if they have the bandwidth to maintain all the systems you’re looking to include.
If you’re looking for a few solutions to help fill the gaps and automate some of your business’ administrative work, best-of-breed is a fine choice for your team.
If you don’t have any solutions in place yet or you’re looking for a vendor who can offer you everything in one fell swoop, read more about what a unified solution can offer you.
What is a Unified Solution?
A “unified” solution is exactly as it sounds, a combined platform including features that work together to streamline your complete HR workflow under one roof. An “HR Solution” gives HR teams one place to work in multiple tools, and organize all company and employee data in one unified spot. This greatly reduces multiple data entry errors and repetitive tasks — reducing time spent on fixing errors or duplicating work and making company reporting far simpler for teams of all sizes.
While all inclusive solutions sound like the best choice right off the bat, there are a few small cons to weigh:
- Reduced functionality: Solution, according to HRLabs, typically focus on quantity over quality. When vendors work on building out a solution en masse, the custom functionality gets lost and becomes more generic.
- Difficulty customizing: Similar to the generic functionality, solutions are generally less capable of tailoring features to specific buyer needs. This could be problematic when reporting.
- Implementation: Implementing an All-in-One can be a huge undertaking, sometimes becoming a full time job. Before moving forward, make sure you have the resources in place to manage a large implementation.
- Support: With so many modules and areas of expertise, it can be difficult to find a fast solution to a question or problem you may have within the software.
Ultimately, solutions give companies the option to streamline HR workflows in one step, reducing the need to thread multiple platforms and vendors together and risk multiple data entry errors, lost information or hiring teams to maintain multiple systems.
Simplify Your Hiring Strategy.
In an effort to unify all the technology, 47% of companies replace their collection of systems for a unified platform to consolidate vendors and excess cost.
A unified system is the rising trend, but it’s important to remember that no technology system can completely solve your business problems. Work with a technology system that makes it easy to work with your team, processes and goals.
This article was originally published on the ClearCompany Blog by Andre Lavoie.
About Sara Pollock:
As the head of the Marketing department, Sara makes sure that ClearCompany’s message, products and best practices reach and assist as many HR practitioners as possible.
