3 HR Stakeholders Often Missing from the HRMS Selection Process

HR software selection is a complex topic with many parties maintaining an interest in the process. As a high cost item which will impact your organization for many years to come, it’s not one you can afford to take lightly. Make sure that you’re poised for the best possible HRMS selection outcome by ensuring that these, often ignored, stakeholders have a voice in *your HRMS selection process.

1. Your Current Support Team

While you wouldn’t want to cloud your judgment of future state, especially if you’re planning massive changes from your current system and way of doing business, you can’t afford to ignore your current HRMS support team. Often these front line HR stakeholders can provide a great deal of insight into the challenges of current HRMS use which you wouldn’t want to replicate in your ‘to be’ model. As such, it’s helpful to bring in these employees once you’ve narrowed the field to a few HRMS products, and in particular to let these folks loose on the sales teams as they’ll be able to present real life use cases and business-specific problems that shouldn’t be repeated.

2. Your Managers

How often do we, as HR or IT leadership, sit through sales presentations and marvel at manager self-service functionality only to be severely disappointed later when managers don’t take to the product. We are expecting managers to complete more and more HR transactions in the HRMS, so it’s only natural to give them a voice as HR stakeholders in the HRMS selection process. As long as you have managers who are supportive of HR work, this is an ideal group to bring along as they can present a fresh perspective and an outsider’s view of the HRMS so that you can avoid usability issues later.

3. Your Security and Compliance Team

HRMS technology has established itself in the cloud and we are now able to engage managers and employees in HRMS transactions on mobile devices. Before these changes to HR technology, your security and compliance team did not have much skin in the game, beyond asking for a SAS 70 audit report for a hosted solution. Nowadays though, there are brand new challenges in putting HR data in the cloud and you may find that your audit and compliance teams become key HR stakeholders because of it. It’s beneficial if you’re going to the cloud or a hosted route to involve these teams once you’ve created your short list, as potentially they have the power to pull the plug on an implementation if an HRMS vendor’s security standards are not sufficient for your organization’s requirements.