As the madness of Christmas shopping approaches (have you done yours? I know I haven’t), we thought we’d put together a quick primer on how to choose software for your business. Picking new recruitment software shouldn't be taken lightly. A wrong decision is costly because you’ve not only spent money on unsuitable software, but also because it impacts whether you can do your work to the best of your ability.
To help recruiters out, we’ve put together a list of some of the most costly mistakes buyers make when they’re shopping for new recruitment software.
Fixating on the up-front cost
When you’re having a look around for new software, it can be easy to focus on which options look to be the best value for money right now. We’ve seen a lot of recruitment companies come a-cropper of this thinking though; the cheapest option now is not necessarily the cheapest option in the long run.
Say you buy a piece of software, and it seems like a great fit. It’s 10% cheaper than the other software you considered and will do a perfectly good job. However, maybe after a few months you have need of some support and it turns out that support isn’t included in your package. You have to pay a little more. Maybe now you’ve only saved 5% of what you might otherwise have spent.
At the 6 month mark, business is good, you’re growing well and the software has helped with that. But you’re starting to feel limited by the software. Do you have any options to scale the software up? Maybe you need additional features now which you didn’t 6 months ago. Once again you find yourself facing a cost to upgrade. This upgrade will make your second option MORE expensive than your first.
At this point, you might decide that you want to move off of your current software and do it right, only now you have the cost of migrating all of your data across to the software that you knew was the better fit for you 6 months ago. A decision based on the up-front cost, rather than thorough research on what the package provides you with will almost always end up costing you more in the long run.
Takeaway: if something’s cheap, identify WHY and what you’re losing out on.
Leaving it to the last minute
We’ve all done it, left an important decision too late because there was other stuff that felt more pressing at the time.
Faced with this situation, it might be tempting to choose the software that is able to get your up and running faster, but that’s not the way to do it at all! Instead, think ahead of time when the best time really is to start looking at recruitment software, beat the crowds and get the software you need, when you need it.
We’d recommend avoiding October to February, as business start-ups go into a frenzy. Instead focus on having a really strong Q1 and then get stuck into software shopping once you’ve kicked off the year with a bang.
Focusing on the now
I touched on this briefly when discussing up-front cost, but it deserves its own section. You should absolutely consider your plans for the next year as a company when choosing your software. If you only want to talk about what you’re doing now then the salesperson is only going to be able to help you with information about how their software can help you currently. Always build in your plans for the future, and ask serious questions of the provider as to how their software will help and grow with you as your business scales.
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