HR Tips: 4 Questions to Ask an HR Technology Provider Before Signing Your Contract

Part of offering a modern HR and benefits experience in today’s workforce is deciding on the technology solutions you and your staff will use. But there are a lot of HR tech providers to choose from. How can you know which is the best fit for your business? 

Lucky for you, we’ve been down this road before, and we’ve developed some lessons learned along the way. Here are 4 questions you should ask your HR technology provider to vet their strengths and make the right choice for you and your company. 

Do employee’s benefits selections automatically sync to changes in payroll?

The best HR tech includes auto-sync capabilities. 

Employees can make benefits selections during onboarding, open enrollment, and after a qualifying life event (QLE). Many modern HR technologies allow employees to make benefits selections through the app, but some of them require some tedious data entry to sync up those selections with other parts of the employee’s record.

Since QLEs can happen at any time, it’s especially important that your HR technology has auto-sync capabilities. If an employee gets married, welcomes a new child, or has another QLE, you’ll want the changes to be automatically reflected in that employee’s withholdings, payroll, and benefits. Otherwise, an HR specialist will have to make changes manually and review all changes for accuracy every time. 

Your time is valuable. Why waste it doing something that technology can simply and accurately take care of for you? 

Are benefits elections and company policies accessible to employees on mobile devices?

Frankly, if your HR service provider doesn’t offer mobile accessibility, this should be a deal-breaker. Mobile apps are ubiquitous in today’s world. There’s an app for almost everything, from shopping to reading a book to chatting with friends. People have come to expect them. HR tech should be no different. In fact, we’d argue that mobile apps are crucial to maximizing the employee experience with HR tech. 

Whether your employee is at their desk, meeting with a client, at lunch, or at home, they should have the ability to access your HR technology. With a mobile app, they can check health benefits, request time off, submit timesheets, and complete many other tasks regardless of where they are at the moment. 

Do you have a broker I can use? Can I use my own broker?

Do you currently have a benefits broker whom you love? If so, you probably want to choose an HR technology provider that will allow you to keep that broker and incorporate his or her services into your platform. 

If you don’t have a broker already, the idea of finding someone who can manage your benefits portfolio using a particular HR technology might sound a little daunting. In that case, you should choose an HR tech provider that has a pool of brokers for you to choose from. 

Does the platform offer Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) to reduce manual data entry?

Electronic Data Interchange is a tool that allows businesses to communicate information electronically. Whereas in the past, HR managers had to fill out endless forms by hand and then enter that data into a computer system, with EDI, you can upload employee data once, and a computer network will automatically communicate that information to all the necessary networks. 

For example, information collected at onboarding will automatically save to the network and then pre-populate all future forms with that data. This greatly reduces the need for manual data entry and saves a lot of time. 

If your small or midsize business wants to offer a modern HR experience, you need a great HR technology provider. We hope that these tips help you to choose the best HR tech for your workforce.