What to ask before you buy HR software

Most of what an ATS demo shows you is scheduling and templated messages, and a chat window already writes those. Ask instead whether it does the screening: reviewing applications against job requirements, checking selection criteria, running the background checks. That is the work sitting in the middle band, and it is the reason to pay.

The middle band here is unusually large, and almost all of it is the same shape: being the link between management and employees. Handling the questions, interpreting the policy, applying it consistently. Ask whether the system answers an employee question or just stores the document that contains the answer.

This is the category where the research and the market agree most closely: nearly two thirds of the work needs purpose-built software and payroll software has existed for forty years. So the question is not whether it can, it is what is left. Ask about the exceptions, the retrospective corrections and the queries, because that is what your team actually spends its week on.

The warning label for this whole section. Two fifths of this job is already reachable with a chat window, which is the highest of any People occupation, and a lot of what learning platforms charge for is content generation. Ask what it does that you could not do in an afternoon for nothing, and expect the answer to be about evaluation and evidence rather than about making courses.

The most protected of the People occupations, and the middle band is mostly advice rather than analysis: resolving classification complaints, advising managers on regulation. Ask whether the tool has data you do not, or only a nicer way to look at the data you already have.

The largest middle band of any People occupation, and it is nearly all drafting and negotiation preparation. This is the category with the least mature software and the most to gain from it. Ask what happens to the case record when you leave, because it is the record you will need if a case becomes a claim.

Two thirds of this job needs software built first, and it is the most concentrated single opportunity in the People profession. Ask whether the tool actually moves the documentation, or whether it is a checklist that reminds a person to move it.

There is no occupation in the taxonomy for this, which is itself worth noticing. Judge these against the same six criteria as everything else, and pay particular attention to whose data it is, because an engagement platform holds the most sensitive free text in the company.