Building the HR Tech stack: 5-critical steps to get you started

Should you maximise the HR tech you currently use or start fresh? This is a difficult question to answer. Partnering with IT is critical to help you (HR) better understand the IT strategy, business pain points and to follow a standardised approach towards building the HR tech architecture that delivers to the business needs and project outcomes.

So where do you start? Well first of all start off by doing your homework:

Step 1, start by engaging the business and HR of course. Understand the pain points in the business and conduct a complete business analysis and assessment to determine requirements that will make up the business case. Research market solutions (perhaps sign-up for a few vendor demo’s) and build out your requirements. Doing so will help you to understand the significance of the tech gap and enhance the importance of the business pain point.

Step 2, illustrate (and by this we mean actually draw out) the employee experience from a systems perspective and identify the gaps. Determine where in the experience, or multiple experiences, that a system or platform will uplift, deliver and impact all employee, user and business outcomes. You will need to evaluate each system’s functionality in order to do this. We will discuss this in more detail in upcoming blogs.

Step 3, engage IT. If you don’t have an IT department or are a startup then engage a technical lead or external consultant. If you haven’t already, develop the relationship with IT and partner with them to gain more traction within the business. IT are the tech experts; you need them! A clearer understanding of the IT strategy and operations, will help you to achieve buy-in and earn the budget from Executives for your project. Without IT, building your tech stack will look like another HR flop.

Step 4, is to develop a sound business case that showcases the business need, the solution, the savings and proposed ROI, the challenges and suggested implementation approach. This step is by far the most critical step in building out the HR architecture as it highlights relevance and context for Executives to base their decision. This step without comprehensively completing steps 1-3 will be futile.

Step 5, presenting the business case. After all the hard work that has gone into steps 1-4, delivering a sloppy and unprofessional presentation is not going to do your (and HR’s) credibility any good.  Practice presenting the business case to your team and get their feedback. Refine the presentation and deliver it to your HR Director, or another Director in the business, or your trusted HR network. Remember, you want to win the Executives over. How you present the business case, how professional and confident you are, the design and overall experience is equally as important as pitching for new customers!

Important note: Whether you are implementing, integrating, maximising or optimising your HR tech ecosystem. We would always recommend that steps 1-5 are completed for each HRIS project.

Congratulations!! You have achieved your goal. The Executives are onboard with your proposed solution to this business problem. Now it’s time to go to market, develop and issue an RFP and engage vendors. In the unlikely event that your business case is rejected. Go back to step 1 and identify the real business problem.