Here’s What Your HR Tech Partner Wants You to Know 

Implementing HR tech projects can be a daunting task. Naturally, throughout the project life cycle (PLC), there will be several – expected and unexpected – challenges that you run into. 

In all these years of being in the industry, sometimes on the HR tech partner side and other times on the buyer side, I have witnessed a perpetual tug-of-war of sorts between organizations and vendor partners during the PLC. 

One of the main problems – and I can say this now that I’ve been on both sides – is the lack of understanding of each other’s challenges. 

As organizations and buyers of HR tech products, you have a lot to deal with in terms of resistance to change, budgets, alignment with business goals, and so on. Similarly, your vendor partners have endless challenges in terms of aligning the product to your requirements, enabling customizations, providing the right support, meeting timelines, and more.

As an HR tech consultant now, working with both parties and sometimes in my capacity as a mediator between the two, I see that invariably, companies (the buyers) do have the upper hand; after all, you are paying for the services and the products. 

However, that said, your HR tech partners cannot run the show on their own. They will run into limitations without a great level of support, guidance, and information-sharing from your side. 

Enabling your tech partners to deliver their best falls on your shoulders. You could do that by yourself and in cases where you are hard-pressed for time, you can also hire HR tech consultancies like Nuest to do the job for you.

But coming back to, what is this support that your HR tech partners need from you? 

Let’s find out.

This is What Your HR Tech Partner Wants You to Know (& may not be vocally saying yet!)

1. Immediately after the vendor partner is onboarded

The technology that your vendor partner may have pitched to you is a standard one. For it to suit your business objectives and fit into your existing tech environment, a lot more customization work will need to be done. For that, they’ll need visibility into your business environment. As external partners, they’ll be hand-tied on this front until you share these details with them. 

The details can look like:

• Gathering requirements from diverse stakeholders.

• Ensuring alignment with organizational goals and strategies.

• Securing necessary resources and stakeholder buy-in.
• Mapping the as-is and to-be processes ensuring they meet all stakeholders’ expectations.

2. During the project planning phase

Both, you and the vendor partner must work together to agree on an execution timeline with key milestones to define progress. One thing that you must be particularly aware of at this point is to have honest conversations around bottlenecks both on the vendor partners and your side. 

Bottlenecks on your side can look like this:

• Inadequate time is given for  project planning, testing and review

• Delay in sharing approvals & clearances

• Inability to develop a comprehensive project schedule because of internal politics or lack of clarity between stakeholders

• Resistance to cope with scope changes, especially with last-minute requests from multiple sources.

• Inability to balance competing priorities and stakeholder interests

3. During the execution of the project

Even with an optimized scope of work and planning, things can go awry during execution like, 

• Potential data migration challenges, including data quality, integrity, and security

• Dependencies on third-party APIs and services, which may introduce reliability and compatibility issues

• Issues customizing efforts with regulatory compliance requirements, such as GDPR or HIPAA

• Confusion around balancing the need for innovation with maintaining the stability and reliability of the HR tech solution

4. During user adoption

Once the project is executed, it is time to get the end users to learn and adopt the new tool. An effective introduction is necessary at this stage. Over and above the efficacy of the product, adoption plays a key role in its success.

And that’s why, you’ll need to:

• Manage change resistance and ensure user adoption

• Manage stakeholder expectations and ensure alignment between project outcomes and organizational goals

• Coordinate with various departments and teams across the organization to ensure a seamless deployment process

• Address potential cultural resistance to new technologies or processes among employees

• Conduct thorough testing and validation to ensure the HR tech solution meets functional and performance requirements before deployment

5. During evaluation

Last but not the least! Continued evaluation is a must to optimize the solution. At this point, you’ll need to:

• Identify relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure the success and effectiveness of the HR tech solution

• Obtain accurate and meaningful data for evaluation purposes, which may be hindered by data silos or poor data quality

• Address resistance to change and ensure ongoing user adoption and engagement

• Balance the need for continuous improvement with resource constraints and competing priorities

• Manage expectations among stakeholders regarding the pace and impact of these initiatives

• Address issues of bias and fairness in algorithms and decision-making processes

• Address security and privacy concerns

Every project is unique. 

That said, your support is what HR Tech vendor partners need for planning, developing, and implementing robust HR Tech projects that deliver results aligned with your business expectations.

However, like I said earlier, if you are short on time or don’t have the tech expertise on your team to manage this project, you can always work with HR tech consultants. we have worked on HR tech deployments as a vendor partner and buyer and would be happy to assist. You can schedule a no-pressure call with us.