I've spent essentially my entire career focused on HR/Payroll/Talent Systems.
I started as an HRIS Analyst at a large company for about 6 years. Then I spent about 10 years working for a couple of major vendors in product management and implementation consulting. I've worked with dozens of companies across multiple industries, participated in implementations from both sides of the table, and eventually became the executive decision-maker responsible for purchasing millions of dollars in SaaS products and services.
In other words, I should know better.
And I still feel like I got duped into buying a product and service model that did not live up to what was sold.
I'm intentionally not making this post about one vendor because I don't think this is a one-vendor problem.
Look across the major HCM/payroll platforms: UKG, Workday, Dayforce, Pay***, and others. Different strengths, different weaknesses, but I increasingly feel like enterprise HCM has become a race to see how much complexity, risk, and responsibility can be pushed back onto the customer while the recurring SaaS bill keeps climbing.
Large organizations can spend millions of dollars every year on these platforms, plus implementation partners, consultants, integrations, testing resources, internal support teams, and optimization work. Yet after all that investment, we still encounter significant functionality gaps, inconsistent implementation quality, features that looked much better in the demo than they work in production, and "roadmap" answers that can stretch indefinitely.
And maybe the most frustrating part is this:
As customers, we keep participating in the same process.
We sit through scripted demos.
We evaluate massive RFP spreadsheets where every vendor answers "Yes," "Supported," or "Configurable."
We negotiate subscription rates.
We buy implementation packages.
We discover limitations during design or testing that weren't obvious during selection.
We create workarounds.
We pay consultants to solve problems we assumed the software would solve.
Then, several years later, we start another selection process and largely repeat the same exercise.
So I don't want this to just be another "Vendor X sucks" thread.
I want to ask the people who have been doing this for 10, 15, 20+ years: How do we get better at buying enterprise HR technology?
More specifically:
- What do you now require vendors to prove during the sales process instead of simply answering on an RFP?
- Have you found an effective way to run unscripted, scenario-based demos using your actual business requirements?
- What questions expose product limitations before the contract is signed?
- What contractual protections have actually mattered when functionality, integrations, implementation services, or performance don't match expectations?
- How do you distinguish a genuine product capability from something that technically exists but isn't realistically usable at scale?
- How do you validate that something on a vendor's "roadmap" is more than sales-cycle optimism?
- How do you evaluate the implementation partner with the same rigor as the software?
- What implementation practices have prevented you from discovering major design problems six months too late?
- What metrics do you use after go-live to hold the vendor accountable for service quality, defects, support, and platform performance?
- Has anyone established a meaningful scorecard or governance model for a strategic HCM vendor?
- And when a major vendor simply isn't delivering, what leverage have you actually found that works?
I'm especially interested in hearing from long-tenured HRIS/HCM leaders, Payroll leaders, CIO/CHRO decision-makers, former vendor employees, consultants, and people who have led multiple enterprise selections or implementations.
I have several ideas about how buyers could change the selection and contracting process: proof-based evaluations instead of feature checklists, real-world test cases, stronger implementation acceptance criteria, contractual accountability around critical requirements, reference calls that aren't entirely vendor-controlled, and much more disciplined post-go-live vendor management.
But I'd rather not turn this into my manifesto yet.
If you could redesign the enterprise HCM buying process based on everything you've learned the hard way, what would you do differently?
And perhaps the most interesting question:
What's one thing you wish you had forced the vendor to prove before you signed the contract?
I'll share some of my own lessons in the comments as well.
*Note AI used to help summarize and organize my thoughts.