Questions to ask a core hr and hris vendor

Break the rehearsed route

All of this runs on their invented employees. None of it needs your data and none of it is on the standard path.

1. One of your demo employees wants to know how much holiday they have left and whether they can carry it over. Show me them finding out without asking HR.

   Self-service adoption is the strongest predictor of whether an HRIS is worth what you paid. Count the taps on a phone, and notice whether the carry-over rule is one the system knows or one written in a document it merely stores.

   Worry ifA search result that returns the staff handbook.

2. Show me a messy mid-year change. Somebody moves team, gets a new manager and goes part time, all effective the same date.

   Every system handles a new starter. The ones worth buying handle a change that hits holiday accrual, pay, reporting line and approvals at once, and keep the history straight so next year the figures still make sense.

3. Approve a holiday request on a phone, as a manager, in front of me.

   Approvals are what managers do most and enjoy least. If it needs a laptop and a password reset, requests sit for a week and your team does the chasing.

4. Move a team of eight under a different director, live.

   Reorganisations are frequent and painful. Ask what happens to the approval chains and the reports that pointed at the old structure, and whether this needs their support desk.

5. Who can see salary, and show me the log of who looked at what.

   You will want this the first time somebody asks how a figure got out. If the audit log is a paid add-on, or only kept for thirty days, better to know now.

6. Somebody is on long-term sick, then phased return, then back full time. Show me the record afterwards.

   Absence with a shape to it is where these systems most often quietly go wrong, and it is the record you will need if the case ever becomes a dispute.

If there is an assistant or anything described as AI

Most systems in this category have added one. It is usually the newest part of the product and the least tested, so treat it separately from everything else.

1. Ask it a policy question your demo data cannot answer, and show me what it says.

   The failure that matters is not a wrong answer, it is a confident one. A tool that says it does not know is safer than one that improvises, because your employees will believe whatever it tells them about their own entitlements.

   Worry ifA confident answer to something the system has no source for.

2. When it answers, does it show which document it came from?

   Without a link back to the policy, HR has to re-check every answer, which is more work than answering it themselves.

The two questions that get honest answers

Ask these at the end, when the demo is over and the room has relaxed. They are worth more than the previous hour.

1. 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.

2. 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.

Drive it yourself

1. Import a made-up employee file in your own template, and tell us what failed and why.

   Data import is where implementations actually stall, and doing it once with fake data tells you how clean your real file needs to be. The error messages are also a fair sample of how the product treats you when something goes wrong.

2. Add a field we need that you do not have, and then put it in a report.

   Every organisation has one. If adding the field is easy but reporting on it is not, you have found the shape of the next three years.

3. Change one approval chain ourselves, without asking anybody.

   Approval chains change whenever the company changes. If this is a support ticket, budget for support tickets forever.

Getting a sandbox at all

1. 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.

2. 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 a customer

1. What proportion of your employees actually use self-service, and how did you get there?

   The vendor will quote an adoption figure from their best account. A customer will tell you what it took, which is usually more communication than configuration.

2. Show me the report you send your leadership team every month.

   Reporting is where this category most often disappoints, and you can only see that on a real dataset. Watch whether it comes out of the system or out of a spreadsheet.

3. What broke when you changed payroll provider, or what are you dreading if you do?

   The HRIS usually outlives the payroll contract, and this finds out whether the integration is really theirs or really yours.

4. How much of your HR admin still happens outside this system?

   There is always some. What it is, and why it never moved in, tells you where the product stops being the system of record.

Worth asking any customer, in any category

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

What is in the box, and what costs extra

1. Send us every module and what each costs. Where does core HR stop and performance, learning, recruiting or payroll begin?

   This category is sold as a suite and priced as parts. The quote in front of you often covers records and absence, with everything that made the demo impressive sitting on top.

   Worry ifA single per-employee price and no module list.

2. Which features sit only on a higher tier, starting with the API and the integrations?

   Tier gating never appears as a line item, and integrations on the top plan only can double the real price.

3. We are buying this quarter. Which modules will you include, for how long, and what is the renewal price for them?

   Modules cost the vendor almost nothing to switch on, which makes them the most negotiable part of the deal. Get the free period and the renewal price together.

4. What happens to the bill when headcount goes up thirty per cent, and when it goes down?

   Per-employee pricing usually ratchets up easily and down slowly, or not at all. Ask about the minimum commitment and whether you can reduce at renewal.

5. Name what you have built with our payroll provider, and say whether it is native, a connector, or an API we would build against. Then walk from offer accepted to first payslip and name every point where a person retypes something.

   Those three integration answers cost very different amounts and take very different times, and the retyping step is where the promised saving quietly disappears.

   Worry ifA logo wall where the answer to "how" is "we have an open API".

6. What happens to a leaver record, and can we set how long each type of document is kept?

   Employment records have different retention periods by document and by country. One global setting makes you keep everything for the longest period, which is a risk of its own.

7. For a company our size, how long is implementation, who does the data cleaning, and is it included?

   The data cleaning is the part everyone underestimates and it is nearly always yours. Ask what format they need and how many weeks of your team it usually takes.

What it costs, all in

Implementation, migration, integrations and support tiers are where the quoted price stops being the price. Ask for the total before the demo ends.

1. 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".

2. 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.

3. 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".

4. 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.

5. 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.

Data protection and security

1. 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

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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."

5. 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.

If you employ in the United States

1. Does this system make or materially inform decisions about pay, promotion or termination without a person, and can we switch that off?

   California rules on automated decision-making technology take effect on 1 January 2027 and cover significant decisions including employment and compensation, with opt-out rights and disclosure attached. Working out which parts of your HRIS count is the first step, and most buyers have never asked the question.

   Covington, round-up of automated decision-making technology laws for employers, August 2026

If you employ in the EU

1. What do you give us for a works council consultation?

   In several member states, Germany most strictly, a system capable of monitoring employee performance or behaviour needs an agreement with the works council before it goes live. That can add months to an implementation, and a vendor who has been through it will have the documentation ready.

   Worry ifA vendor selling into Germany who has never heard of it.