101 Questions to Ask Your HRMS Vendor – Recruitment Technology

Recruitment has always been one of those HR functions that has benefitted the most (or at least the earliest) from technological advances. With social recruitment techniques and pundits talking about Recruitment 4.0, any software vendor should be keeping up with the changes.

Recruitment Vendor Question 1 – Does your product have the functionality we need?

Of course this requires you to be very clear about what features you’re looking for, that’s probably the harder question. But once you have answered it, this fundamental issue will serve as your initial filter to reduce your vendor list. Possible recruitment software features you may need are: posting ads to major web-based job boards, auto-entry of applicant data into the applicant tracking system or ATS; automatic applicant email notifications when setting up interviews, assessments, calls, etc and bulk messaging (including SMS) capabilities amongst many other features.

Recruitment Vendor Questions 2 – What social media features can you offer?

With social recruitment really taking off in the last year or so, no new recruitment technology package should lack this capability. Whether it’s linking to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, gamifying the initial selection processes, or tapping into existing employees’ social networks, any vendor worth their salt should be social-savvy.

Recruitment Vendor Questions 3 – Can it cope with volume?

In a sense this is a question of scalability. A nice cosy software demo is one thing but can the system cope with large numbers of simultaneous users logging in? Similarly, it links into the previous question regarding social recruitment: when your social media job-filling strategy really hits its stride, it’s not unusual to have thousands of applicants for a single position. Can the recruitment technology cope? And not only stay operational but actually filter, sift, record, and respond, etc.

Recruitment Vendor Questions 4 – Talk to me about web optimization

This is a separate but similar issue to social media recruitment. Job boards are still out there and they remain for many applicants the number one method for job hunting. Your vendor should be able to demonstrate interfacing and publishing capabilities with online job boards and the search engine optimization of the content in your job ads all within the recruitment technology.

Recruitment Vendor Questions 5 – How will you successfully import the data from my old system?

This is important for any HR-related system, but especially recruitment technology. Candidate databases and recruiter notes represent critical data that must be migrated cleanly for a new system to hit the ground running. The key here is to understand exactly what the vendor will do and what they expect you, as the owner of the data, to do – don’t underestimate the work involved with integration!

Recruitment Vendor Questions 6 – How will your product keep pace with future recruitment trends?

Put simply, can the offered system handle the HRMS requirements of tomorrow? As the customer, you may not be entirely sure of what you’ll need in 3-5 years’ time technology-wise; but your recruitment technology vendor should certainly be up to speed on where recruitment technology is headed and be able to talk you through both your options and their strategy.