The End of Inferior Recruiting Tech Begins With a Superior Request for Proposal

Recruiters are rarely in the room when new technology gets chosen, even though they're the ones who have to live with the result. A conversation among talent acquisition leaders lays out how to change that, starting with how a request for proposal actually gets written and who it's written for.

The core advice is to get every stakeholder group — talent acquisition, IT, purchasing, procurement — aligned on the actual problem before anyone starts evaluating vendors. Vague pain points don't translate into a usable RFP on their own; someone has to turn "this is hard" into functional and technical requirements, and that translation work is where most projects stall. Focusing evaluation strictly on requirements, rather than the full feature list a vendor wants to showcase, keeps comparisons apples-to-apples and speeds up selection.

Other points covered:

• Mapping the vendor landscape is hard even for people who follow the space closely; relying on a single Google search is a bad strategy since vendors optimize heavily for SEO.
• Review sites like G2 and Software Advice offer directional signal at best. Reviews are worth reading for consistent patterns, positive or negative, but should be weighed against who's writing them — admins, power users, and end users all have very different experiences with the same product.
• Networking with peers who run more demos, and simply asking for recommendations on LinkedIn or through a trusted Rolodex, often surfaces better information than formal research.
• Moving from consulting or analyst work into an in-house seat changes the calculus entirely: cost, contract length, implementation burden, and what happens if a tool stops serving the organization all become the buyer's problem, not just a recommendation.
• No applicant tracking system or CRM is complete out of the box. Most tools require heavy configuration and ongoing training, and blaming the platform itself often distracts from deeper process problems that would resurface with any new system.

The overall guidance is to treat tech buying as an ongoing exercise in translation and patience — building shared language across departments, being honest with recruiters about why a decision was made even when it disappoints them, and accepting that the perfect platform doesn't exist yet.