3 Experts on How to Get Leadership on Board With a New Tech Tool
Welcome to Recruiter Q&A, where we pose employment-related questions to the experts and share their answers! Have a question you’d like to ask about employment data ? Leave it in the comments, and you might just see it in the next installment of Recruiter Q&A!
Today’s Question: Let’s say you’re an HR pro or recruiter who wants to convince the company to adopt a new recruitment software. How do you make a solid case to leadership so that you get the tech tool you want?
1. Frame Your Pitch in Terms of Investment and Return
The most challenging aspect of convincing the leadership team to make an investment in any tool is being able to demonstrate an identifiable and measurable return. This challenge is magnified when the tool isn’t tangible. At Predictive Results we solve this problem for our HR or internal recruiting prospects by helping them solve a problem in real time.
We work with our prospects and their people data in order to engage leadership. For example, let’s say our plan is to improve the selection process for a sales role. To do this, we will assess the current top performers and bottom performers in the sales department. In coordination with our HR contact, we will sponsor an executive briefing that includes leadership. At this meeting, we dive deep into our assessment results and findings, and we show them what their top performers look like so they can hire more people like them.
When leadership sees an economical solution to what is undoubtedly a pressing concern, convincing them to invest in it becomes easy. We prove that an investment in [the right] process and products will give them an almost immediate positive return. Done deal!
Getting a “yes” from others who are both directly and indirectly affected by the new process/technology is very important. Remember: It’s not just about you – it’s about the overall productivity of the company, department, etc. By gathering the support of others, you make a stronger case then you would if you went it alone.
You may also want to find and present a case study from a similar organization. Your company will not likely be the first to adopt this new process/technology. Do some research and find other organizations that have successfully implemented the process. Be honest about what the challenges may be, but provide an explanation as to how those challenges can be overcome.
Executive leadership always wants recruiting metrics visibility, so any new hiring software must have sufficiently relevant and flexible reporting capabilities. The idea of big data permeates expectations from management and is often a reflection of the frequency and detail that managers already get from their sales dashboards. If they can see revenue projections and customer data weekly or even daily, why can’t they also see recruiting, hiring manager, and candidate data monthly or even weekly?
Data reporting has historically been a sore point with recruiting systems, as with any enterprise software. The more popular applicant tracking system vendors have addressed this generally in one of two ways: useful standard reports or highly flexible, custom report tools built on top of business intelligence platforms. I have yet to see a widely used vendor provide both.
Once leadership is shown the metrics capability of hiring software, demonstrating ROI for the other features becomes secondary.
