What are the top features to examine when buying a talent management system for SMBs?

What a great question. Before I dig into specific features, I think my # 1 piece of advice to SMBs looking for a Talent Management System is to choose a flexible one. Most SMB executive plans usually call for corporate and financial growth. With expansion in mind, it is important to find a system that can grow with you. Otherwise, you will just spend more money on replacing the system in 2 years when your talent pool and employee size increases.

On to features. I’d go with a system that automates any of your candidate management (CM) tasks first, but also has the option to streamline employee management later down the line. CM features I’d look at would be:

Sourcing, Candidate Relationship Management (CRM), Applicant Tracking, and Onboarding.

If you don’t have the budget to automate your entire candidate management program yet, I’d say your top priority should be applicant tracking and recruitment, which most systems have. Once you can automate the application process, you can spend less time entering in candidates and more time evaluating your potential new hires. The more you can automate the better.

I also have three questions you should ask the prospective vendor when evaluating their features:

1. How easy is it use? (Is it intuitive?)
2. How configurable is it? (Does it match your current processes well?)
3. How is the customer service? (How quick is the turn around time for a question to be answered?)

You want a system that people are going to use effectively; otherwise, buying a system could be a waste of time and money.

Hope that helps!