How to convince your employer to invest in tech

Tech helps to make working life easier. There are costs involved when implementing, however, which may make employers hesitant to fork money out.

An issue with bringing this up is figuring out whose responsibility it is. This can boil down to who it affects the most. For instance, artificial intelligence (AI) hiring and recruitment automation tech would naturally be the responsibility of the hiring manager.

Rich Lewis-Jones, Asia-Pacific vice-president at SmartRecruiters, discussed how recruitment can push for this type of tech: “I think talent acquisition are the champions because, in terms of they’re the people that we work with day in, day out, they’re the users of our platform.”

Another key department that has sway over this is HR. As the manager of people and culture, the HR department has the standing to promote systems that will improve the lives of employees.

“We’ve certainly learned that you obviously need your HR operations and HR teams on board. They’re the ones that are going to jump at a platform because of the capabilities that provide them. What talent acquisition need to do is go and build their message to HR and IT that these platforms can plug seamlessly into those HRS and ERP suites, because data flow is very important,” said Mr Lewis-Jones.

Just as important is convincing business leaders. By providing evidence that a system can improve functionality and efficiency, you’ll have an easier time swaying the C-suite.

“What is incredibly important for talent acquisition teams is that they’re not saying, ‘We’re just improving candidate experience.’ We’re trying to drive higher manager engagement and make our recruiters as productive as possible. You need to be able to talk the C-suite’s language,” Mr Lewis-Jones explained.

“Being able to demonstrate that you are going to hire a better quality of talent faster by opening up the top of funnel, and then that is subsequently going to help drive revenue, you’ve got the ear of the C-suite.”

What can make this approach even easier is asking tech providers for insights and analysis of how systems have aided previous customers. If a program has tangible evidence of success, leadership is much more likely to see the value in the investment.

Mr Lewis-Jones commented: “We’ve got really nice business case return investment calculators that we can say, ‘What are you spending today? How many hires are you making? How many recruiters have you got? What’s your advertising spend?’ And we can actually make a really conservative predictive analysis of what they will get back in terms of revenue.”

“Some of these are ranging from anywhere from $1.5 million in revenue, just attributed to some increase in hires, all the way up to some that are reporting anything up to about $35 million.”

Economic conditions may make this process easier again, as new methods are often required in times of hardship.

“We’re certainly seeing an increase in it because, yes, we are in an economic downturn, but I think if the pandemic has taught us everything, good recruiting drives amazing business outcomes. What the pandemic has done ironically is give talent acquisition teams a seat at the table. So, I think modern platforms like ours, and it’s not just the product, it’s the people that we have in our business, are now able to work with our customers to show the impact or the business impact that talent acquisition teams are having,” he said.

Mr Lewis-Jones concluded: “Talent acquisition teams, even HR teams, are now moving away from being viewed as a cost centre and being seen as true strategic business functions that can actually contribute to driving revenue.”

The transcript of this podcast episode, when quoted above, was slightly edited for publishing purposes. The full audio conversation with Rich Lewis-Jones on 31 May is below, and the original podcast article can be found here.