Making the business case for a technology investment

Explaining the need for a new platform, suite, tool, upgraded system, or other technology can be difficult, whether we’re talking about an applicant tracking system, candidate relationship management, sourcing, screening or assessment, or a wide variety of other software.

We asked Crystal Stanfield, Vice President of Global Talent Acquisition at Cboe, based in Chicago, for advice on making the case.

It could be a new piece of talent-acquisition technology that you don't have now. Or it could be a major upgrade. It could be moving from a discrete tool to a new tool that’s part of a suite. How do you make that case, that business case, to whoever needs to hear it? 

Understand what your corporate strategy is and what your talent strategy is and make sure that you are aligning the tool or solution to those strategies. Tie any talent challenges to any type of HR strategy that you have that you're trying to accomplish, whether it's a short-term strategy or a long-term strategy so that people understand why it is really important. 

What about all of the measures that we traditionally hear about, whether it's quality of hire, time, cost, successfully winning a competition over a candidate, compliance, diversity, and so on? Do they come next? 

All of those things are really important. And each business is different and each business has their own set of challenges. Make sure that you really fully understand the environment that you're in, and you can connect [those measures to your business challenges]. 

I imagine with talent acquisition, a lot of times money comes from somewhere else. So with talent redeployment, for example, instead of laying someone off, you can redeploy them and that saves money in recruiting costs because you don't have to go hire someone, you can fill it internally. Or with money, you are spending on job boards or agencies, for example, that can sometimes be diverted to technology. 

Yes. Understand what your executive team or your CHRO is really focused on. Are you saving money? Efficiency? Or are you doing some cost avoidance of some kind? All of those things are at play. 

You must have to continually revisit your spending allocations.

What was working for you a year ago in terms of attracting talent may no longer be a relevant source. Do you need to continue spending money there? As a talent leader, you should be looking at the data and understanding where your people are coming from. How long is it taking you to get people in seats? How is that impacting the business from an effectiveness perspective?

Sometimes you can go out and you can go offshore and get that talent for a short period of time. Sometimes you have to build that talent and create development programs internally. And sometimes you have to go buy it and go out to the market and find what you need. Money is always at play. Understanding what's important to your leadership team is really important to the whole process. 

You’ve done this yourself.

At Cboe, we decided three years ago that we were going to build. We were buying all of our talent through agencies. I came on board and I looked at what we were spending, and I said, for a fraction of that cost, I can build you a world-class team that will be able to improve things like time to fill, candidate experience, quality of hire, and things of that nature. We set forth to do that. 

Part of that was getting new technology to help us be able to accomplish those goals. We built the team and got the technology and we made some tradeoffs. We also built some business cases to get some of the resources that we needed, tying it all to pain points and business strategy. 

(edited slightly for clarity)