Recruitment Automation
Skip the feature list. Ask these instead.
Every vendor demo looks good. The difference shows up three months in, after the data gets messy.
What should you ask a recruitment automation vendor before buying?
Ask whether it writes back to your actual ATS, what happens when it hits bad data, and whether your team can change the workflow without filing a support ticket. A vendor that can't answer these clearly will cost you more in cleanup than it saves in time.
01
Does it read and write to your ATS, or just sit next to it?
A tool that can't update candidate status in your actual ATS creates a second system of record. Someone ends up copying data between the two by hand, which is the exact manual work you were trying to remove.
02
What happens when the data is wrong?
Ask the vendor to show you, not tell you. A tool that silently sends a message to a duplicate record or a stale email address is worse than no automation, because nobody notices until a candidate complains.
03
Can your team change it without the vendor?
If every workflow tweak needs a support ticket, the tool is renting you a process, not giving you one. Look for a vendor that explains the logic rather than hiding it behind a black box.
Most of this gets decided before a vendor ever enters the room. A setup scan tells you which gaps in your current data a new tool would inherit, so you're comparing vendors against a known problem instead of a guess.