Ask This, Not That: Mastering HR Software Selection to Cut the Fluff

We are gonna talk through a ton of different stuff. Today we're really lucky 'cause we're actually collaborating with another network and community who's doing this work, uh, really with tons of different vendors and, and, and helping leaders like yourself with their software selection. So I would love to welcome Phil, founder of software, uh, select software reviews, who's gonna be helping me unpack these things. Welcome Phil. Thanks for being here with us. Thank you so much. Excited to see what folks are looking at in the comments. Hopefully we can shed some light in, uh, helping folks out. And at the end of this hour, you have a lot more tools in your toolbox to make the right decisions. Yeah, we got, it seems like a lot of different challenges. There are groups like Mark, besides functionality, cost model is a big factor, right? We're cutting costs, trying to do more with less. Yep. Um, Be able to show ROI of switching to a different system. So if, I'm sure like a lot of you, you probably have tools in place today, so it's not just like starting new with a different system and, and that's gonna be a big upgrade. You also have like a change management thing going on, like kind of move off of something Internal. Stakeholder management is huge. Cost is a big thing, especially the hitting costs. I think Mark said death, death by a thousand cuts. I know we're gonna talk about some of the hitting costs and some of these contracts when you get in with a vendor, and unfortunately when you decide on a new A-T-S-H-I-S-L-M-S, whatever it is, a lot of times these are long contracts and they're a pain in the neck to go from one system to another. And so it's really important to just make sure you, you know, what you're getting yourself into and hopefully I'm, I'm gonna give you some tips and tricks here today to make sure you get, you buy the right system. Awesome. Well, let's start to jump into it. I'm gonna stop sharing so we can see each other. So I'm excited to jump into this too because I mean, I came from kind of the software sales side of things. It used to be internal at a HR tech company. I went to the dark side and started working with companies more on their tech stack as well as just employee experience design and strategy. And we work with a lot of different vendors on our end, but it seems like I go to every conference and every event you see another 50, a hundred new vendors popping out of the woodworks. You see a lot of different things with AI on everyone's AI power these days. That's kind of the flavor of the year. Um, so yeah, I'm excited to just tap into your expertise and perspective on these things and Sure. Maybe we start with just like, how do we cut through the noise? How do we start to really just not get too swayed by just the flashy features and tag lines out there and just really understand more like what do we actually need as a business? So how do you start to, like, for you, Phil, how do you start to help companies shift from chasing some of those flashy features to really just focusing on real business problems and pains and things that can move the needle? Sure. And, and just so folks know kind of where I'm coming from, I have personally bought, I always say over a million dollars worth of HR and, and talent acquisition software. I helped scale a company from 300 to 3000 employees, specifically on the talent acquisition side of things. And I now run this business called Select software reviews, where we have a team of mostly x HR and TA professionals who will do demos of these platforms. They'll talk to users, they'll do a lot of research, and then they write up reviews, which around a hundred thousand companies a month use to figure out what tech tech to buy. And then we have a team of advisors that you can talk to on a one-on-one basis and get advice. And, um, we actually have, uh, a, a special offer for everybody in this community. I'll, I'll talk about in 20 minutes or so. Um, if you are looking for a new system, um, and you, and you want that sort of help, but you know, Zach, to your question, it's really hard to separate the things that you get excited about on a demo from what's real and, and perhaps what you should be focused on. And so the, the kind of frameworks that I use are, one, trying to understand from your businesses perspective and the other business leaders within your organization, what are the most important challenges that they're facing that HRTA can help? So maybe you're having coffee on a quarterly basis with the head of sales or the head of engineering or operations or whatever it is, and you're just like, you know, tell me about your business. What's going on in, in your neck of the woods and what are you struggling with? And maybe it's a retention thing. Um, maybe it's a talent acquisition. We, we can't hire enough people. Maybe it's a skill thing, maybe it's a culture thing. And each of these, of course, you know, you, you are the kind of business partner. I love the term HR business partner and I think, you know, most strategic HR professionals are effectively HR business partners for the rest of the organization. And so it's really taking the information that you're collecting from other parts of the org. Maybe it's board presentations, c-level, other leaders, and understanding, okay, how can we make an impact? Another really strong framework I I actually follow, even though I'm like pretty analytical guy, I'm an MBA and I'm a programmer and all this stuff. I actually think that your gut is a really good barometer for where you should be focused on. So you're taking in data all day long, you know, you're seeing a Glassdoor review, you're hearing feedback from an interview that a candidate went through, you're getting feedback from the head of operations, all these things. And so in your gut, you kind of know our employer brand's terrible, or our candidate experience is terrible, or we have no employee tech, we don't have employee engagement, we don't have performance management or our LMS looks like it was created in the 1980s and we've never updated the content. Whatever the case may be, you probably know what a gut level, what you should be focused on for your organization. And and the last framework that I usually use because I am kind of like a a finance nerd is just where can you build a business case that's compelling to the kind of canonical cold-hearted CFO who only cares about the p and l? Where can you say like, Hey, we can increase revenue by decreasing time to fill, or we can, you know, increase our gross margin profile by increasing the lifetime of customer success person by better onboarding or better training or better culture. So sorry for the long-winded answer. That's that's where I start. Yeah, I love that kind of, there's, it seems like there's a few key elements, like one, be listening on your end, always be listening and gathering data from the field, right? You're already doing it. Just maybe be more intentional with how you're categorizing it and capturing it, whether that's the Glassdoor review or some of the maybe employee, you know, challenges or issues. Get that, get surfaced to HR and then also tap into your other stakeholders, understand what they care about most, what are they dealing with mm-hmm. What is at the top of their agenda. And I guess something I would add to that, that maybe to expand that piece is also just try to stay in tune and really understand where the business is going in the future as well. Like what does the next six 12, you know, 18 months look like? What are some of the key objectives and goals and things you're hoping to grow into? Like I just talked to one of my members and they're like planning to hire 250 to 500 some people over the next 12 months. Okay. If like, that's the strategic direction for the business and you're looking to scale your headcount to that level, like, okay, what are all the things that are gonna happen to get that? And are there certain systems and tools you should look at that's gonna help it be more efficient as you share, like be more efficient and, and more productive on the bottom line for the business? Okay. So let's say you're talking to some of your, your partners in their software selection. I'm curious if there's any red flags you often see, or dead giveaways when that that really just showcases they haven't actually taken those steps to like clarify what the stakeholders care about. They don't know what the future of the business and they haven't been DA gathering debt. Like obviously those are debt giveaways, but like, are there other debt giveaways or red flags that people should be aware of that clarifies they haven't actually looked at the true needs before vendor selection? I think there are a couple and it's a good time to be introspective in hr. Time is your biggest resource. I think that unfortunately every single company that I've run into looks at HR as a cost center. And so they're basically like, okay, how can we give as few resources to HR as possible and then also ask them to do all of these hundreds of different things. And so, you know, the majority of HR professionals are running from one thing to another, to another to another. And you're just trying to like figure out, you know, why the 401k deduction was double, it should have been deal with the employee relations issue. And, and so you, you've gotta be so careful of your time on these large strategic initiatives. And so for me, the the main things that you really need to lock down that, you know, you're kind of going on the right path are what is your actual timeline for this? And if you don't know your timeline, that probably means you gotta think about internal stakeholder management. What's your budget for this? And if you don't know your budget, again, that's probably a function of internal stakeholder management, understanding like the folks that say, Hey, we're we're looking for new HRIS, you're probably gonna replace some stuff with that new tool. So the budget is gonna be a function of what are you replacing? You know, maybe you already have some rudimentary payroll system, maybe some sort of recruiting system, et cetera. And then in addition, what's the incremental and what am I gonna be able to get from the CFO to get the right employee engagement module that I've been honing for, for forever, right? Um, what are the real catalysts for this change and who else is involved in this change? So why are we upgrading to a new HRIS? Did we just complete an acquisition? Are we growing fast? Are we seeing churn in our employee population, et cetera? What are those catalysts and who else cares about those catalysts? So why it matters? Who else cares? They're gonna have inputs on what for having more standard candidate guidelines. This integrates with our onboarding system, et cetera, and we need this thing. Um, we, you know, let's carve out that 15 or 20,000 bucks or whatever. It's for your organization, ASAP, uh, and having two strategic leaders is better than one. So I I think once you've sort of figured that out. And then the last part is basically what are the other stakeholders that might need to weigh in here? Is it it with security? Is it legal? Uh, are there other people? Maybe you're, you're you're buying an a TS that's gonna change their career site and the head of marketing needs to weigh in on that. Once you've figured out that sort of, you know, budget, timeline, authority need, you are gonna be in really, really good position. I really appreciate kind of the catalyst piece there as well. And I've always found that pretty essential with any, I think people led program, right? Like can you attach it to this like critical moment or situation and kind of, you know, prompt that is really driving the need behind this. And then mm-hmm. I also agree kind of the, the other, the the piece of like finding your other internal champions and stakeholders to be part of the process. You're not advocating for this alone, right? Two stakeholders is better than one. Like that's where you can actually, you know, turn from like one person shouting at the world to an actual movement towards the investment. And I think that's a really critical piece is finding that other internal stakeholder to kinda help you spearhead this home. So yeah, a hundred percent. And the the other thing too about these catalysts is that they can be sort of like growth oriented like m and a or you know, expansion. They can also be pain oriented. They can just be, you know, our current payroll provider when we email them gets back to us a week later, or this is the second time this year that payroll has been screwed up and nobody at our vendor can tell us why those sorts of things are, are true too. We, we had somebody come in, uh, this week, uh, uh, who is looking for a new HIS and they're basically like, look, our 401k got deducted the amount got deducted twice from people's paychecks and showed up once in the 401k balances. We don't know what happened to the other money. This is not the first time we've had a hiccup with our existing vendor and it's one of the huge ones, you know, that we all know about. And so we're just done, we're we're ready for something new, something modern where we're gonna have better customer support. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just heard about that from another member of a payroll group missing a pay period and I think it was like a day or two late, which maybe doesn't seem that crazy, but when you're messing with people's pay and money, it's pretty, it's pretty serious. They get upset. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So, okay, I would love to now transition a little bit into evaluating vendors and how we can start to actually unpack the demo and the evaluation. Like at this point now we've understand maybe a pain point or a catalyst for something that we're looking to invest into. Now we're at the point where we're actually evaluating the vendor and we might be looking at a series of different people. It can be pretty distracting with the shiny objects and the features and as some of the people shared in the, in the chat, like, the user interfaces look great, right? But does the actual functionality live up to the hype? So I'm curious of, uh, maybe we just start with demos in general. Like, do you often find certain overhyped features that, you know, companies really hit on in their demos that might not matter that most that we should look out for A hundred percent? Yeah. The demo candy, as I like to call it, and these sales reps are really well trained and they're doing the same presentation four or five times a day. They're in a flow. And for me, one of the things I love to do is just sort of disrupt that flow. So what I like to do when I look at new software is create a rubric and it's basically, here are the five or six things I really need to have, here are the four or five things that are, are nice to haves or maybe I'm curious about, maybe I heard about this from a friend of mine, a peer or at a conference or in a webinar like this, and each vendor I want to be, how does a career site build their work? How would I create a landing page for this sort of persona I, and and just sort of drill into the functionality that you really care about. Because if you don't, if you don't interrupt them, they're on a 45 something that you might never use, right? Like you're querying the database through natural language through a chat GBT sort of interface and it's just like something you're not gonna use. Um, versus getting to what you actually care about and seeing, you know, does, does the rep know the solution That's important, but also like when you take them off their game, like what's behind the, the, the curtain a little bit. Um, and, and sometimes you're pleasantly surprised, which is a great thing, but, but sometimes not. The rubric also allows you to be a lot more systematic when you're going back and looking at your notes. So let's say you talk to three vendors and these sort of all start to blend in together. It's just the way it is, especially if you're busy. And so what if you have, um, these notes, you're going to know in a lot more certainty what actually had what feature and function. A pro tip that I like to do is to actually send this spreadsheet to each of the vendors and say, Hey, this is what I've got for notes. Is this correct or not? I black out my notes on the other vendors and, but I leave the names of the other vendors. So let's say you're looking at A-D-P-U-K-G and Bamboo, you send it to the a DP rep and they know you're looking at UKG and Bamboo and they know what the UKG and bamboo reps are gonna price that. And so we've seen discounts come back of like 30, 40% off the list price because all of a sudden it's like, oh, this is a competitive process. Um, so oh, I'm sorry I wrong if my, uh, audio's cutting in and out here, hopefully it's not too bad. It's Okay now. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Um, but yeah, basically if you're able to send back, um, this spreadsheet, you can get clarity, maybe you missed something. Um, so you know, your notes are correct, but also each rep knows, Hey, this is competitive. I'm gonna put my best foot forward in terms of price, which is important. I love that. I love that. Not trick, but tactic to just i one, just being honest and open to, to the vendors that, hey, we're shopping around, we're looking for the best fit to our business. The HR tech space is super competitive right now, which a lot of these reps are incentivized to do whatever it needs to do to make the deal happen. So, and if you're not putting them in that type of environment to to be competitive, you know, you're getting priced out at the normal pricing. If not, they're gonna try to maybe even, you know, upsell it even more on you. But if you make 'em aware that hey, this is actually, so I'm looking at three or four of your top competitors, people naturally are gonna be competitive with you on the quote and the and the partnership. Yeah. And that's what we see with the companies that we help is there's the list price, there's the, you know, the friend price, the discount, maybe it's a 5% discount and you're like, oh, great, I got a 5% discount. And for the reason they do that is 'cause a lot of people are like, all right, check the box. I negotiated. I don't like to negotiate. I'm not a hardball person and I can tell my CFO, hey, we're saving X number of dollars here. But we've literally seen reps respond after we send that spreadsheet and be like, you know what? I misquoted you, it's actually, you know, another 15% off or, or whatever it is. And so this is like a good way, especially if you don't have sharp elbows to get what is probably a, a really good price. Yeah. Um, what are maybe do you, do you have certain questions that you would advise I asking that gets them to, 'cause you kind of talked about how people naturally these reps are in the flow, they've been doing tons of demos, they kind of understand maybe the flashy things that really get people's attention, but we kind of wanna break 'em outta that so we can actually get a true peek behind the hood of what the company and the platforms all about. Mm-hmm. But certain questions or ways that you've seen your advisors or companies do this to kind of help peel back the layers a little bit. I I think peeling back the layers is a good way to put it. I, we have this framework, we say like buy HR tech like a toddler. So I have a three-year-old and it's always why, why, why? And like, you know, after the five why's, you're sort of going back to like the big bang happened and that's why, you know, we're here and you know what I mean, like six why's in, but we sort of say it ingest, but it, but it is true. If you, you know, I'm thinking about a specific talent acquisition tool that we evaluated where they were ba their tagline was, we're the best source of hire. What does best mean? Uh, best means the highest, you know, highest percentage of people that get hired. What does that mean? Highest percentage? Um, that means applicant to hire ratio. Okay. How did you get that data? Um, we got it from greenhouses a TS. Okay, what is across all of greenhouses customers, what does, what does that mean? Turns out it was like one customer ever told them anecdotally on a, on a conference call, you know, you're the best source of hire. And and this became like the tagline of the company, and this is a company that we all probably know and, and probably some people on the phone pay them and maybe it's working for you. That's awesome. But I think that if you dig in one, you might find the truth which steers you to a yes or no decision, but two, it also gives you leverage because all of a sudden, you know, you're not just somebody drinking from the Kool-Aid, you're, you're coming back and saying, well, you know, it's, it's $10,000. But as we've sort of discussed like this whole promise of best source of hire, it, it's a little bit wobbly, right? Like you don't actually have the data to back it up. We'd love to try it, but like, how can we try this? Right? Like what, what's sort of the economical way to do it? And so being a toddler and, and not doing it in an annoying or or aggressive way, but just opening your your mind up to curiosity of like, oh, okay, like, so how does, you know, how, how does this work basically? Yeah. Yeah. I kind of, I like the flow we've been on so far. So it's like, all right, stage one, if you can really understand the catalyst, the key stakeholders, what they care about the future of the business, convert that into decision criteria and key pain points that you're looking to solve and key needs for, for the solution that you're evaluating. And, and then just be hypercritical in the questions around those decision criteria, right? Like if, if time to hire is a critical aspect of, of the solution, like ask why five times around their time to higher capabilities and why they're able to expedite that, right? So, um, it kind of that like that's a nice flow there and then obviously use that as leverage and also showcase like the other companies you're, you're evaluating to help give you more leverage in the actual, when they're sending you proposals and actually evaluating the partnership. So I really like that flow there a lot. I think one of the key pitfalls of buying software is the salesperson is obviously motivated to sell, right? That's how they're gonna hit their number, get their bonus. And so the answer many times is, yeah, sure, you know, that's on, you know, that's on the roadmap or we do that. Yeah. And I think another great example, a lot of folks are looking for hrs is does this tool integrate with X? Um, you know, does this integrate with my onboarding software or LMS or you name it and you might get a, yeah, okay, what does that integration look like? Oh, it's a, it's a tech integration. Okay, what does that tech integration look like? And you might find out, hey, I've gotta download a CSV, reformat it and upload it every week for the rest of my life, right? And that's like not a very good integration versus, you know, this is something our developers built in. This is one of our closest partnerships. It's seamless. Let me show you how it works. Um, let me show show you how it worked for you guys for the plan that you're actually gonna buy, right? Because unfortunately there's an incent there's an economic incentive for that person to not owe to hide the ball a little bit. Yeah. And this is another point that I try to make with folks is the quality of your sales rep is actually really important as well when you're making decision. Because the best sales reps, they can work anywhere. You know, they just show up to a company and they say, look, here's my track record, I'm really good. I crushed my quota and I wanna work at your company because I heard it's a really good product. And so the best sales reps work at companies that have really good products. And so if you have a good relationship, they're responsive, they're organized, they know the product, they know the market, they know your business and they've answered truthfully, then you, you have a pretty good confidence level that this is a good product for you. Yeah. If you catch somebody in a lie, you know, why are they lying? They're lying because they don't have the information or they, they need to hide the ball in order to make the sale. 'cause they don't have the product, they don't have the customer support, they have hidden fees, all these things. So I think it's really important in that spreadsheet with all your criteria and where, where all your notes are to also write down what you think of the sales rep. It'd be interesting to do like a HR tech horror story like campaign. 'cause I remember a group, this was years ago we worked with, they were on the integration push selling this amazing integration between platforms and now data's flowing between systems so freely. And I remember asking them a little bit into it and I found out that they, they promised to overnight sync in the integration. Mm-hmm. And I found out what it really was for those that invested in the integration, they assigned this outsource team in the Philippines and in India to export their data and import it into the other systems overnight, you know, during their core hours of the day. And that was the actual integration, right? So I think, yeah, like you hit it on the nail, like there are a lot of incentives that sales reps have to make a deal happen. And especially when it's a high pressure environment and sales rep is like, I might lose my job if I don't make this sale. A lot of times people resort to saying whatever they need to say to make you feel confident about the purchase. So, which is an unfortunate part of the reality, but that's why it's on our part as buyers to be really sophisticated with understanding like, what does an integration actually look like and how does it function? What's the difference between an AI powered solution that's truly AI versus a large language model or something like that, right? Or like, there's all these different sophistications in HR tech that can cause us to be blindsided if we're not able to peel back the layers on those things. Which is actually something that maybe you can tell us a little bit about this Phil next was like the power of having like an advisor to this process, right? Because we're supposed to be experts as HR leaders or people leaders of the people function. And there's so much around that involves psychology and organizational sociology and, and just managing people problems and strategies like HR tech's like a small sliver of our responsibilities. But it makes up a huge impact. It's probably a lot of value in having a strategic partner for that. So yeah. Can you tell us like what is the value or the power of having a, an advisor help with this? Or what does that even look like with a group like yours? Yeah, I mean basically buying HR tech is, is super hard. 'cause all the reasons you just outlined. I mean, I talked to somebody last week who bought one of the best hrs on the market, but it was not the best one for their company. And it's hard to know that when you are in the sales process 'cause you're like, everything here looks amazing. And it does. And this organization, it was 50 people and they bought an HRIS that's really for 500, a thousand employee company and they just can't wrap their arms around it. And it's like, it's unfair to ask people to, to know all this stuff. And that's why we have our advisor program. And um, we actually have a special offer for, for folks on the, on the call that are interested in this, um, and talk to one of our advisors. But basically, you know, we, we talk to your company and it's totally free. It takes 15 to 30 minutes. We understand the integrations that you need, your size, your requirements, all these things. And then we go into our database and we say, okay, for your organization, you know, you're looking for a new HRIS, but you don't need payroll and you needed to integrate with this payroll vendor or an a, a new a TS and you want the cheapest one or a new a TS and you want the best one or you know, all these different permutations. And we basically do the work for you. We match you at the right companies, we'll make a warm introduction to one of the top reps at each of these companies who's actually gonna treat you well. And then we're, we're support along the way. So pricing information, you've got stakeholder management questions, you can come to us and we'll help you out. And that's why we have a 4.9 star rating. Got tons of testimonials on our website if you wanna check 'em out. A couple of quick case studies just to illuminate this, and you know what, probably most of the companies we work with are between 30 and 3000 employees. Some of the logos you might recognize, Indianapolis Cults, MIT chip City, I actually didn't recognize this, apparently it's a big, uh, cookie company. Frank and Eileen also didn't recognize this. Apparently it's like a big women's, uh, fashion company. But great example, this company that came to us, they've been looking for months for an A TS and it's just a, it's a big market that's changing all the time. We were able to give them the one vendor they hadn't looked at that was the best fit. They signed a contract, super happy. This is super common. Companies come to us all the time, we're sick of our HCM, our payroll vendor. They don't respond to emails. They screwed up something up. Help you get the right systems in there. And then also we, we talked to a lot of fractional folks, you know, fractional CHROs, et cetera, who are helping their clients out and we can point them in the right direction and make them look good for their clients. The offer that, uh, we actually put together for your community is anybody who books a call with our advisors and, and gets help, um, gets those vendor introductions and, and we can help you on your way. Um, we'll actually give you a, a $50 gift card. Um, I'll put a link in the chat, um, or you can check that QR code there, but you can just book it pretty simple. Um, you can talk to one of our advisors and get the help that you need and, and they'll steer you in the right direction. They'll make sure that you're not talking to vendors that are not a good fit for your company. They can be there as a resource, kind of a concierge as you go forth in your buying cycle. You got questions on your pricing, your CFOs kind of being a roadblock, whatever the case may be, they can help you out. So, um, it's a great service. It's free, it's got a 4.9 star rating. And, um, we love being in this business because all day long we just get to help people and we get notes from people from all over the world, really. I mean, our focus is the U United States, but folks that are looking for an E-O-R-H-R-I-S-A-T-S, performance management, LMS, like whatever the case may be that are just like, you saved me a ton of time, I was stressed out about this, we made the right decision, implementation went well. So, um, please use this as a resource as you go forth and conquer in, uh, what can be a a, a stressful, um, time. And I'll put my, my LinkedIn profile here as well in case anybody wants to connect on LinkedIn. Yeah, I encourage everyone to definitely check it out. Like if you're, uh, saw at the beginning, many of you're looking at different systems or thinking about currently replacing or investing in a certain system, like you're already spread thin across so many different things like the evaluation process to really research, find the credible vendors that are good fits for your industry, for your size company, and then go through the process of engaging with 'em and all those things. Like, it's a lot of time. So, um, that alone would, would make a full use to kind of book something with Phil and their team and check that out. I mean, it's free to do, why not? So, um, sweet. Well, I guess like next part here, for those groups that are ready to maybe engage one of your advisors, they're, they're at the point where they kind of understand their needs a little bit. They're gonna talk to your advisor a little bit. I mean, regardless with the advisor or not, there is a process internally that we need to understand to, to evaluate these things and make decisions, right? Because I mean, I think some of the biggest headaches on the vendor side was you get a champion that's bought in and then other decision makers aren't ready or aligned, then it becomes bottlenecks. And for many of you listening, you might be ready to push forward something you want to get this a TS system invested into because it would save you headaches and, and late nights and tons of hours or your team, uh, you know, so many different things. But you need to make sure that as you go through the evaluation process, there's not these bottlenecks that maybe you should proactively work on so that you can quickly get to a decision. Right. So, um, when you've approached these situations, bill or your advisors have, like who must be involved in the evaluation process, are there certain things that you, you work around so you prevent some of those bottlenecks so that people, HR leaders can kind of push forward these initiatives? Like what, what are some of the things you see or, or work on with groups in that scenario? Yeah, It, I I think a lot of this comes down to internal stakeholder management. So one of the things that I like to do is called the HR tech roadshow, which is basically a, a short PowerPoint presentation that in many ways you're putting together almost for yourself as well, which outlines current state of the world, the pain, what we wanna do about it, and the hopeful end result of this. And then hopefully at the, the result includes some sort of like business case with a number, you know, we're gonna help decrease costs, increased revenue type of thing. And so an example of that might be, right now our career site looks like it was start, it was built in 1998, that's leading to very few inbound strong inbound candidates. We want to get an applicant tracking system that has an employer branding suite that will allow us to build a beautiful career website. We expect that we will therefore generate, you know, 300 more quality inbound applicants per month with our applicant to hire ratio. That means 10 hires, and on average 20% of our hires are from third party recruiters. So we can kill two recruiting fees per month, and that's $50,000 or $600,000 a year. Um, is is an example, right? It it could be, you know, a DP not to throw them under the bus, but I think a lot of people are, are probably sick and tired of a DP doesn't respond to our emails. It, it could be, you know what, whatever the kind of pain point is, and you're putting this together so it's like, yes, this makes sense. My gut told me that we need a new at TS we need a career site, and when I kind of do this analysis, it makes sense. Now I'm gonna do my roadshow, I'm going to do 15 minute coffee with the powers that be. Um, so it depends on your organization. It's probably gonna be some combination of the C-F-O-C-E-O, it and maybe a couple of other key people in your organization. If you're gonna touch the website, maybe you want to talk to marketing as mentioned earlier, and you're just gonna have a conversation with them and, and honestly like you're trying to get their feedback too, right on, is this the right thing to do? This is really, this isn't a hundred percent a pitch, it's also a, you know, give me feedback like, am I on the right track here? And if you're aligning those folks, it's like, all right, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go out and research a couple ATSs and I'm gonna come back to you with the same presentation. But in the middle of it is, here's the research that I've done and here's my recommendation. So I looked at, you know, greenhouse team, Taylor, lever and Bamboo, and here's why I think Team Taylor is the best one for us. Here's how much it's gonna cost, here's the implementation, here's kind of the end result. And this is, you know, this quarter I'm, I'm recommending us by Team Taylor and carve out the time to implement it and get it live. Um, so that's kind of my recommendation for your own sanity check, but also internal stakeholder alignment. Yeah, I think even for us, like as individuals driving it, yeah, for your own insanity check, like is this something that's actually bringing value to the business? Like you want to know what you're gonna stand on as an executive or as a leader is truly providing value to the organization. In a lot of ways, you might have it as a hunch because you're in the field, you're in it, you're in the weeds of this area of the business, so you can feel the pain, but maybe after you go through the evaluation, you're like, you know what? The, the juice isn't really worth the squeeze. After we've gone through this evaluation of the impact and the time saved and the other things we're doing, it would actually cost a lot to get off of this. And then we would've to train people to transition, like, you know what, it's actually not that worth it. Now on the other end, if you go through that process and you've seen like, oh my gosh, we're gonna save $600,000 by moving like to a million dollars now you can feel even more excited to stand on that right as you campaign for it internally and be like, whoa, I'm actually gonna impact the bottom line in ways that many people at this organization don't have an opportunity to do. And that should create some excitement and, and almost some, some another level of energy in you to campaign for this, right? Mm-hmm. So Lucy's question in the chat, reasonable budget for HRIS for a 10,000 employee company. I mean, you're looking at millions of dollars, uh, for a, for a much smaller company, it's gonna be, you know, maybe on average $15 per employee per month. So a hundred employee company, it's 1200 bucks a month, 14,000 bucks a year sort of thing, uh, is maybe like a decent ballpark, but as you scale to that level, you're, you're definitely looking at a seven figure sort of thing. And, and it probably a very long process to make sure that you're buying the right solution as well. Yeah. The other thing, Zach, I'll say to you as well, to your point is you might be saying to yourself like, oh, okay, like that, you know, kind of basic structure for, uh, this PowerPoint kind of makes sense to me, but I'm not like the best at the ROI calculations. And one thing that you'll be surprised about perhaps is that there are many people in your organization who care enough to help. And so for that particular part of it, maybe it's getting somebody in the finance department, somebody within MBA who just sort of thinks in spreadsheet to say, okay, you, you know, here's how I build the business case here. You can even use an LLM to be a thought party partner on stuff like this. It's like, hey, here's kind of what I'm contemplating, what might be potential revenue calculations? How might I think about that for my organization? And even can you do the math for me and give me a spreadsheet, which these, you know, chacha BT can do that, which is kind of crazy. Um, but I, I think that people don't leverage enough the other leaders in their organization to be thought partners as they go through these sorts of processes. Yeah, I, I a hundred percent agree. I used to go to even like the sales VP to help talk me through how I should position this to the executive team, right? Like sales, the sales organization internally, like they're taught and masters at value propositions and communicating ROI and, and positioning things in a way that showcases the value of the product. So create some of those internal alliances or collaborations and go to them be like, Hey, this is kind of what I'm doing. This is my challenge here. How would you position this or how, what, what ROI or how would you calculate the impact of this initiative? And, and what are you seeing? And that can really start to round out some of your blind spots that you're probably just not seeing right now. We got a couple minutes left here. Um, I would love to maybe just move to this like AI powered space that we're in right now and just get your general thoughts on how to best navigate this right now because I mean, I went to a few conferences this year already, and I'm not even sure of the questions to ask these groups to figure out if they're truly AI powered and what that even means, right? And I think about the integration example that I shared before of a company saying, yeah, we're, we provide full and then integration where data flow is between systems and it's just this, like this team in the backend uploading and uh, offloading data between 'em. So, um, what, uh, what are some of your thoughts on how we cut through some of the AI hype or the noise, like how do we navigate a lot of the noise around these new AI powered solutions? So yeah, it's interesting. I, I think there are a couple of different ways that HR teams can leverage ai. Obviously you can get your own chat GBT license and there's lots of different things that you can do. You can, you know, feed it data from an employee engagement survey and ask, you know, who, who do you think are the rising stars in our organization? Or something like that, which is really cool. We're also seeing it pop up throughout lots of talent acquisition and HR technology. And I think for the most part, these tools are now pretty real. There are some more aspirational ones I think that are like, Hey, we're like a full agent that like replaces an HR coordinator and one, I'm sort of like a little bit misaligned with that because I think that this should be like an augmentation of your team versus like a replacement. Um, just from like a, an ethical standpoint. But I also think that those tools, like there, there really are no autonomous tools out there right now. Even the coding ones that are probably the, the most advanced, they need a lot of oversight to make sure that they're correct. So I, I think that if you, the, my advice is because again, it's, it's hard to say like, here's the stuff that that's real and here's the stuff that's not, it's a lot of it depends and shades of gray. My advice is to make sure that at least on a weekly basis, you're inter interacting with LLMs. Pay the $20 a month to have the chat GBT license, ask it, you know, silly questions like, you know, what's the best restaurant to go to in Boston for, uh, anniversary or something like that? Um, and then start to feed the data and, and or, or ask a business questions like, Hey, you know, we, we had a problem, we had a Glassdoor review that said X, Y, and Z and I don't think it's right. Like what should I do about it? Or we have an employee that's doing a B, C, what, what should I do about this? Or I'm, I'm thinking about buying a new HRIS for these reasons. What's the good presentation I should give my CFO to um, go and and and pitch this? And you're gonna start to develop an intuition around what this technology can do right now. And so when you see it in a tool natively, you're gonna be able to suss out pretty quickly, you know, this seems like too magical from what I understand from my inner actions with chat BT or, you know, quad or whatever it is. And you're gonna be able to be that toddler and, and peel back the onion and perhaps find that there is, you know, a team offshore doing some data stuff in the background or maybe this is just something that's a really well developed product. Yeah, I'm, uh, I'm curious of if you have any thoughts on Jackie's question in there. Are there any providers or people you're really excited about, um, in the market right now? I think what's interesting is all of the HCM companies are becoming more holistic. And so if you look at deal that started as an e an EOR and now and then added payroll and now has US payroll and has an HRIS and has compensation and an LMS and will soon have an a TS rippling, you know, kind of the same thing. Um, I think that there are some best in class companies. Like I think, you know, hi Bob has gone super deep on the HRIS and I would imagine eventually they'll have more payroll. I think they have UK payroll right now. They'll probably US payroll soon and they'll probably have an a TS soon. Um, there are definitely companies that have tried to go through the strategy of being everything and, and kind of failed a little bit. I think Lattice performance management is best in class, but from what I understand, their HRIS is not that good yet. Um, given six months, give 'em a year, you know, maybe they'll, they'll get there. But, um, yeah, there are definitely a lot of, you know, in the mid-market there's Bamboo that's really good that has a comprehensive suite. Uh, yeah, there's a, there's a lot of vendors that have popped up and continue to innovate. And it is, to your point, Zach, it is a competitive market and it's a chatty market too. And so you've gotta do a good job, uh, to, to win and continue to grow. Yeah. And some of these companies, the bigger ones, uh, are kind of resting on their laurels a little bit. I think they're gonna start to get their lunch eaten and, and that'll hopefully motivate them and to be better. Yeah. Yeah, I think it something I've always that seen that's pretty interesting for the HR tech space. It's almost been a race to become that all in one solution that yeah, everyone, it's, I don't even know if that's realistic or not. 'cause it's been such a pipe dream for so long and so many of these groups, they might start as like a core a TS or a core HIS or core payroll. And what happens is they grow to a certain state and then they want to expand into this all in one solution. So they acquire a bunch of point solutions that then they hope they can integrate together into one tech stack, but it doesn't always play out that way. Or they don't always acquire the best solution in that point solution, right? They're just kind of like checking the box, like, hey, now we have a LMS system, but really is the LMS like top and world class? So I think that's something for some of you to real think about too is like, what is the best in class solution? Like what's the core module or the core solution you actually need? And then there might be some payoffs that you need to maybe just negotiate internally with yourself on, okay, are we willing to sacrifice these other parts of the solution because it's not really that important to us, or should we go to other point solutions to our best of class on those things and try to make shift this multi solution ecosystem in our business? Which is, I mean, is sometimes not the best, best way to think about it, but it might be the best for your operations, I don't know. But For smaller companies especially, I think you the all-in-one, maybe with a couple point solutions, you know, maybe you have like a weird time tracking need or something like that is the way to go. And yeah, I was talking to the CEO of Greenhouse at Transform a few months ago and he's like, I'm not worried about, you know, deal launching an A TS because it's taken us like 12 years to build all these features of functionality and like, we still have like a huge roadmap, right? It's getting easier to build software and I think we'll see more of these like compound companies that do a lot of things well, but without a doubt, you know, high Bobs HRIS is always gonna be better than ripplings because like that's all they've done, you know? But Rippling also has an a TS and you know, all this other stuff. So, um, yeah. Yeah. And I, I appreciate Monty's view of like how, why don't these solutions just build 'em in a way so that they can play well together, but we're in a very competitive landscape. People want to to be the one all be all right. Yeah. So, um, yeah, Robert, maybe AI will solve all of this, but, uh, we'll see. So, but we are, uh, we are at time, so I mean, I shared a couple links for everyone in the chat for select software. They create some amazing research and guides on this. So at the very least, if you're, I saw some of you are looking at a TS systems or HRIS systems, they have some reports and guides for 2025 that they just released. I put those in the chat. We'll also send those in a follow up email. They also have a webinar tomorrow on HRIS systems, so make sure to check that out. Phil, any closing thoughts or words that we start to start to wrap this up? I mean, thanks for having me. Sorry for the tech difficulties. I think at the end of the day, so much of this stuff is, it depends, and there's no reason to become an HRIS expert to, to buy an HRIS when you have all this other stuff on your plate. Just leverage the resources out there, leverage our advisors, and, you know, make sure drastically increases your chances of, of doing a good job. And, um, just also know that there's no perfect solution out there and there's no silver bullets. These solutions need to be implemented correctly. They need to be utilized correctly. And, um, I think some people have the expectation of, Hey, I'm gonna buy this thing and it's just gonna like solve my problems. And the reality is, is quite different. It might solve a lot of your problems. It might, um, you know, help your business a lot, but there's no silver bullets. HR is challenging. I think that's why a lot of people are excited to get up in the morning because there are so many different challenges, internal stakeholder management, employee, all sorts of things. But you can have such a large impact on the business, which is to me the most exciting part of it. Yeah, I agree. Stay focused on being a strategic pillar to the business. You do not need to be an HRIS expert or subject matter expert, right? Leverage resources like SSR to navigate these, these decisions, right? And, and make better, uh, buying decisions when it comes to the HR tech. I mean, these are big decisions and make a huge difference on your life as well as the, the systems and the health of the culture of the business in the future. So, um, Phil, we appreciate you being in this space and, and providing such, uh, research and expertise in this. I appreciate it. Yeah, our pleasure. Thanks for having us. Well that wraps us up, everyone. I appreciate you taking some time outta your busy schedules to join this discussion. Yeah, thanks for the clapping hands. Uh, we hope to see you at the next one, stay part of the community. If anything, that's one thing I've learned, uh, leverage the community. It's one of the most useful ways to figure out what's best out there, how you can, how you can engage with what's world class and what isn't. So appreciate you all being here with us and we'll look forward to seeing you at the next one. Thanks everyone. Thank you.

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