41 questions, written to be read out loud in the meeting. Each one asks for the thing rather than the claim, because every vendor says yes to "do you support that" and almost none of them can show you.
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Compensation, Benefits, and Job Analysis Specialists, 24 rated tasks in the exposure report. 8 of them need software built first, and that is what a tool in this category has to earn its price on. The 7 in the first band are already reachable with a chat window you have.
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.
A salesperson cannot show you real candidates, cannot post to your job boards, and cannot open another customer's account. Asking anyway wastes the meeting and tells them you have not bought one of these before. So every question below says where it belongs.
Their sandbox and their invented people. Everything here is something a salesperson can do live in forty minutes without touching a real record.
10 questionsAsk for a sandbox and a fortnight. Use made-up employees and CVs with the names taken off, so nothing real is involved. Whether they hand one over without a sales process is worth knowing on its own.
4 questionsAsk for two customers your size, and ask each for a screen share rather than a phone call. Real volume, real reporting and real mess only exist here, and almost nobody asks.
6 questionsNot a conversation and not a slide. Ask for the document, and get anything you are relying on into the contract rather than into the product.
15 questionsTheir sandbox and their invented people. Everything here is something a salesperson can do live in forty minutes without touching a real record.
The data is the product. Ask about the sample the way you would ask about any survey, because that is what it is.
How many organisations are in the benchmark for my sector, my country and my size band? Not the headline number.
A cut built on 40 companies is a different product from one built on 4,000, and the number that matters is the one covering roles you actually pay. Ask for the sample on your cut and watch whether it drops sharply.
Worry ifA global total offered in place of your cut.
How recent is it, how often does it refresh, and is it collected from payroll files or from a form somebody filled in?
Self-reported survey data and payroll-verified data are different things sold at similar prices. Both are usable if you know which you have.
Take one of our job titles that does not fit your library cleanly, and match it in front of me.
Job matching is where benchmarking quietly goes wrong, and a job title is not personal data, so this works fine in a demo. Bring a genuinely awkward role rather than the easiest one.
Show me the same role at the tenth, fiftieth and ninetieth percentile, and tell me how many data points sit behind each.
The median is usually well evidenced and the tails often are not, which matters because the tails are where you argue about a specific person. Ask where the numbers get thin.
Show me a review cycle on your demo data: a three per cent pot, a dozen exceptions and two people on leave.
Modelling the clean case is easy. The exceptions are the reason anybody buys the tool, and the leave cases are where the fairness problems live.
Show me the manager view. Nine people, a fixed pot, twenty minutes and no training.
Managers use this once a year under time pressure. If the screen needs explaining, you will spend the cycle answering questions instead of running it.
Where do approvals happen, and what does a finance director see?
The approval chain decides whether the cycle finishes on time. Ask what happens when one approver is on holiday for a fortnight in the middle of it.
Show me a total reward statement as an employee would receive it.
Often the only part of this the workforce ever sees, and often the weakest part of the product. Look at whether it can be branded and whether pension and benefits values are right.
Ask these at the end, when the demo is over and the room has relaxed. They are worth more than the previous hour.
Which of the things you showed me today are live for every customer, and which are on the roadmap?
The most common complaint from buyers in this market is feeling misled afterwards, with promised features never arriving. Ask in the room, write the answer down, and put anything you are depending on into the contract with a date against it.
Worry ifAnything demonstrated in an environment no customer is on yet.
What are the three things your customers complain about most?
A good salesperson answers honestly, because they know you will find out in month two. "Nothing really" means either they do not talk to their customers or they will not tell you.
Worry ifA strength dressed up as a weakness.
Ask for a sandbox and a fortnight. Use made-up employees and CVs with the names taken off, so nothing real is involved. Whether they hand one over without a sales process is worth knowing on its own.
Load a made-up salary file of ours in your format and let us see the matching, unaided.
How well your own job titles map to their library is the thing that decides whether the data is usable, and you cannot judge it from the roles they chose to show you.
Model one cycle ourselves without anybody helping.
A compensation cycle happens once a year, so nobody ever becomes fluent. If it needs the vendor on the phone in the trial, it will need them every year.
Can we have a sandbox for two weeks with our own test data, without a sales process attached?
Everything you learn in a demo is about their product being used the way they use it. A fortnight with your own made-up data tells you whether your team can use it. A vendor confident in the product hands one over.
Worry ifA trial only available after a commercial conversation, or a guided tour rather than an account.
Set up one thing we would need on day one, ourselves, while you watch.
Pick something ordinary: a workflow step, an approval, a template. If it needs the vendor, then every change for the next three years needs the vendor, and nobody put that in the quote.
Worry ifConfiguration that turns out to be a professional services ticket.
Ask for two customers your size, and ask each for a screen share rather than a phone call. Real volume, real reporting and real mess only exist here, and almost nobody asks.
Did the last cycle finish on time, and what held it up?
It is almost always approvals or an exception the tool could not model. A customer will name it and the vendor will not.
How much of the cycle happened in the tool, and how much in a spreadsheet?
The honest answer is rarely all of it. Which part fell out, and why, is the clearest picture of the product you will get.
How much do you trust the benchmark for your own hard-to-match roles?
Every buyer has a group of roles the library handles badly. Which ones, from somebody in your sector, is worth more than the headline sample size.
Ask the vendor for two customers your size, then ask each for a screen share. These four are for that call, with the vendor not on the line.
How long did implementation actually take, against what you were told?
The most useful number in the whole process, and the vendor will quote you their fastest. A customer will tell you what it cost in their own team's time, which never appears in any quote.
What did you assume it did that it turned out not to do?
Everybody has one. It is usually a reporting gap or an integration that needed building, and it is the thing you would otherwise find in month three.
What happened the last time you raised something serious with support?
Support quality tends to drop once a contract is signed, and a reference customer is a year past that point. Ask for a specific incident rather than an opinion.
Not a conversation and not a slide. Ask for the document, and get anything you are relying on into the contract rather than into the product.
If we contribute our data, who sees it, and are we being sold our own numbers back?
Contribution is often the price of access, which can be a fair trade. You should know you are making it, and it should be in the contract.
Is the benchmark data, the review software and any total reward statements one price or three?
These are commonly bundled in the pitch and unbundled in the quote.
What happens to our access to the benchmark data if we leave? Can we keep what we have already used?
Benchmark data is usually licensed rather than bought, so the analysis you did last year may not be yours to keep. Worth knowing before you build a pay structure on it.
Where does the employee and salary data come from, and how often does it sync?
A compensation tool fed by a quarterly spreadsheet export will be wrong during the cycle, which is the only time it matters.
Can it produce gender pay gap figures we could actually file, and who checks them?
If it can, that is real work saved. If it produces something indicative, you need to know before you rely on it.
Implementation, migration, integrations and support tiers are where the quoted price stops being the price. Ask for the total before the demo ends.
What does year one cost in total, in writing, including implementation, migration and integration fees?
The licence figure is rarely the bill. Implementation, data migration, API charges, premium support and mid-term true-ups are all common and all appear after signature. A vendor who will put the year-one total in an email can be held to it.
Worry ifA licence price now and implementation "scoped later".
Is implementation a fixed fee or time and materials?
Fixed fee puts the risk of a slow implementation on the people running it. Time and materials puts it on you, and HR data is always messier than anyone expects.
Worry ifDay rates with no cap.
What is the renewal price, and is the increase capped in the contract?
Year-one discounts often disappear at renewal, which turns a good deal into an expensive one two years in. A cap written into the contract is a normal thing to ask for.
Worry ifUplift "in line with the market".
What notice do we give to leave, and does it renew automatically?
Thirty to sixty days is reasonable. Ninety or more with auto-renewal means one missed diary entry costs another full year. Ask for the clause and read it in the room.
Worry ifNinety days or more, auto-renewing, multi-year.
On the day we leave, what do we get, in what format, and at what cost? Is that in the contract?
You want every record you put in, plus anything the system generated about your people, in CSV or JSON, at no charge. A feature can change in a release note. A clause cannot, and this one costs nothing to ask for at the point of buying.
Worry ifA PDF export, a fee, or access cut off before the export arrives.
For each thing this system does, are you controller or processor, and is the data processing agreement attached to the contract?
The roles have to be settled activity by activity rather than once for the whole product, and the ICO expects a contract that says so. If they are a processor you have to give explicit written instructions, so ask what those will say.
Worry ifHesitation, or "we are the processor" as a blanket answer.
ICO, six questions to ask when procuring AI recruitment tools, November 2024
Where is the data hosted, which sub-processors touch it, and how do we hear when that list changes?
Employee data includes salaries, health information and grievances. You need to know who holds it and to have a route to object when a new sub-processor appears.
Do you train any model on our data? Is it off by default, and is that in the contract?
Ask plainly and get it in writing. "We do not sell your data" is a different sentence and is often the one that comes back.
Worry ifAn answer about anonymisation that never says no.
Send us your most recent penetration test summary and your ISO 27001 certificate or SOC 2 report.
A certificate number is easy to claim and easy to check. The pen test summary tells you whether anything serious was found and how fast it closed.
Worry if"Available under NDA once we have progressed further."
When an employee makes a subject access request touching your system, what do we get from you and how quickly?
You have a statutory deadline and the vendor does not. Ask for their internal service level in days and check it leaves you time to review before you answer.
Skip this if you only employ in the UK. All of it is for the written stage rather than the demo, and the dates have already moved once this year, so check them before you rely on them. None of it is legal advice.
Which state and city pay range disclosure rules do you support in job adverts, and how do you keep that list current?
Several states and cities require a good faith range in the posting, with different rules about what counts and which roles are covered. This usually lives in the applicant tracking system rather than the compensation tool, so ask both and find out who owns it before you assume somebody does.
The Pay Transparency Directive is the biggest change to compensation practice in a decade, and it is what a compensation tool bought this year should be built around.
Can you produce gender pay gap reporting by category of worker, in the format each member state requires?
Reporting applies to employers with 100 or more workers in a single member state and is broken down by worker category rather than reported as one company figure. Ask which member states they have built, not which they intend to.
Where a gap above five per cent cannot be objectively justified, can you support a joint pay assessment with employee representatives?
That assessment becomes an obligation once the gap has gone unremedied for six months, and it has to identify causes and the measures to fix them. It is real work, and it is the part most tools have not built.
Do you support a job architecture built on gender-neutral criteria for work of equal value, and can you show me the methodology?
Equal value is a wider test than equal work, and it needs a defensible way of comparing jobs that are not the same job. A benchmark library organised by job title does not do this on its own.
Can a candidate be given a pay range before the interview, and can you stop us recording pay history?
Giving starting pay or a range early enough for an informed negotiation, and the ban on asking about pay history, are both in the Directive. Check the applicant tracking side too, because that is usually where pay history gets captured.
The transposition deadline was 7 June 2026 and most member states missed it. Which national laws are you already following?
Only four member states met the deadline, and Germany, France, the Netherlands and Spain are among those that did not. The answer will be uneven everywhere, so a vendor tracking it country by country is worth more than one waiting for it to settle.
Morgan Lewis, EU Pay Transparency Directive, the transposition deadline has passed, June 2026
Anything above that states a legal duty or a date carries its source. Everything else is our judgement about what is worth asking, and you should treat it as that. None of it is legal advice, and the law here is moving quickly enough that you should check a date before you rely on it.
Band figures generated from the exposure report. Ratings from Eloundou, Manning, Mishkin and Rock, GPTs are GPTs, Science 384, 1306–1308, 2024, applied to O*NET 30.3 task statements. O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA, used under CC BY 4.0 and modified here.