HCM Suite vs Recruitment Platform

The big decision any Talent Acquisition departement needs to make is to accept (read: tolerate) the recruitment module part of the HCM (Human Capital Management) Suite / HRIS or move to a recruitment platform. I hope to share some of my experiences working together with customers and help you to make the right technology decision.

What is a Suite and What is a Platform?

The Suite idea comes from legacy ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) vendors like SAP or Oracle that offer an integrated solution to their Enterprise customers: Finance/Procurement/Sales/Marketing/HR.

They are typically closed systems and have history of buying different applications to complete their Suite offering ("spaghetti integration"). Other vendors do code all the applications in-house or when buying an application, rewriting the code, but this is delaying new product releases and innovation in general.

I used to work for such an ERP vendor (Oracle) and my experience was that when a solution is bought, that product loses a lot of its innovative edge. The people that made the product great move to new adventures. Often customers of those acquired products are left in the dark.

A platform on the other hand embraces innovation with a depth of functionality. You can see it as a system with building blocks: you start with the core product and easily extend to modules that are relevant for your organization. The fundamental idea is that the platform is open (while respecting security). Platforms often have a marketplace where partners can showcase their apps.

I hope I could give a good overview and I will tackle each subject on the relevance for recruitment departments.

User Experience

The pitch you often hear from legacy vendors is that it's important to have one look and feel for both Recruitment, Talent Management, core HR and payroll. But let's be critical: does it really matter? Just looking at myself, I have so many different applications that I use every single day - all with a different look and feel. These are my productivity applications:

• LinkedIn - Social Selling
• Twitter - Social Selling
• Evernote - idea drafting
• Instagram - Social Selling
• Slack - internal & external collaboration
• Office 365 (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
• iTunes / Apple Music - I need music in order to be productive :-)
• Salesforce - lead & opportunity follow up / CRM
• Waze - driving to a customer
• Etc

It all works out for me because they are all integrated in my iOS and OS X ecosystem. I'm always very careful when a vendor is advertising a magical "all-in-one" solution because the trade-off is that you lose a lot of functionality that makes your work life easy.

Same goes for recruiters and hiring managers. The most important element is that the core design of the recruitment solution is easy to use and don't require any training to get up to speed. A user design from a payroll point of view, on the other hand, is completely different than that of a talent acquisition point of view. Recruiters nowadays are on the go (events, networking, etc) so the user experience needs to be modern and responsive. An example, take a photo during events of paper CV with iPhone and let that CV automatically be parsed in the backend. Such design principles are less important for payroll specialists that are more working behind a desktop in the office.

Marketplace, Integration and Analytics

Trends in Talent Acquisition change so fast because it's becoming harder and harder to attract top talent. In order to answer to those trends, it's crucial to work with partners. Recruiters can pick and chose the right apps that they find relevant. It really is impossible to keep on reinventing the wheel and developing apps in house when you consider the fast pace in Talent Acquisition.

We live in a technology landscape where it's very easy to connect new solutions to a platform (provided that the platform has an open design philosophy with an awesome product & channel team). All these solutions talk with each other, so you can drive reporting and analytics on the full platform. The biggest argument you hear from legacy vendors is that integration is important for reporting and analytics, but they don't realize that such things are also possible with good platforms. Via a data mart, the analytics solution can collect data from all the platforms: Talent Acquisition, Talent Management and even going beyond by combining it with Sales & Marketing platforms to have an executive overview.

Business Case

I know many recruitment contacts that are formulating a strong business case against their current HRIS/HCM. Some very facts and figures oriented.. others very emotional: threatening to quit the organization if no changes are made. I fully understand this: as Sales person I would never work for an organization that has an awful technology stack. Really.. when I was working for Oracle, we were all using Excel to follow up on our leads and opportunities instead of Oracle Fusion. We used to joke around that it was more confusion than fusion.

It really comes down to user adoption and meaningful data. If the users aren't using the system then you can't have any visibility in what's happening in your recruitment processes. It's no secret that many recruiters work outside their HRIS, which results in wrong executive decisions being made because of bad data.

Technology Trend Conclusion

My experiences in working with many SMB (0 - 1.000 employees), Mid Market (1.000 - 5.000 employees) and Enterprise (> 5.000 employees) customers is that the Mid & Enterprise market are transforming towards Recruitment Platforms.

I still believe there's a place for "all-in-one" ERP solutions, but more on SMB level. These companies aren't complex and don't require depth of functionality. However, there's no case to make when those companies grow to Mid or Enterprise size. Those Suites are so limited when you look at the standalone modules, especially Talent Acquisition.