Human resource leaders have monumental tasks ahead of them: boosting workforce productivity and trust, containing costs while cultivating a digital-first culture, remaining risk-aware today and designing sustainable talent models for the future, and figuring out a strategy for the biggest technological advancement any of us will see in our lifetimes (please don’t make me say “AI” again today).

For every one of these imperatives and more, the potential for HR to drive significant impact and value through technology is immense. By embracing advanced tools and systems built for continuous improvement and scale, HR can transform from a traditional administrative function to a strategic powerhouse that fuels people outcomes and organizational success. The key is to align technology initiatives with the organization’s overarching goals, ensuring every technological investment drives tangible benefits, creates accretive value and supports the workforce effectively. We can’t gain trust if we only care about productivity gains, for example. We must keep people front and center to drive business performance.

We’re hanging a lot of hats on the technology choices we make. In 2024, HR technology stands as a critical pillar supporting organizational growth, employee engagement and operational efficiency. But beware: Getting your HR tech wrong isn’t just a hiccup—it’s a potential catastrophe.

The cost of HR technology failure: More than just money

In my early years as a recruiting practitioner, I was part of an internal product team tasked with building a homegrown candidate relationship management (CRM) system to support our global talent pipelining efforts. Of course, there were CRMs in the market, but we were a mega enterprise with vast technology resources and thought we could do it ourselves, maybe even better. Can anyone relate?

We invested one year and somewhere around $1 million designing to specifications, building the system, conducting user testing, training our function and rolling it out. If you’ve been here before, you know what happens next: You watch and wait. For everyone to use it, for highly sought candidates to fall out of the sky, for recruitment marketing campaigns to flow like a river, for a robust, engaged talent community to become a rich, dynamic, high-converting asset.

It never happened. No one used it. Because everyone expected the CRM to “work” automagically and the way we’d designed it to.

What went wrong? We made several false assumptions:

False assumption 1: We needed a (fill-in-the-blank technology—in our case, CRM).

At least, this may have been a false assumption. We didn’t actually know. Your ability or inability to hire the right people effectively may or may not have anything to do with how you create, nurture and convert a carefully curated pipeline of talent. If it does, a CRM might be your answer.

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