How HR can break the tech regret cycle
HR Tech regret isn't a buying problem — it's a readiness problem. And until HR starts asking harder questions before the purchase, the cycle won't break.
The news
HR Executive published a piece arguing that the root cause of HR tech regret isn’t bad software — it’s that organizations buy technology before honestly assessing whether they have the skills and capacity to make it work. The article makes the case that HR leaders need to ask one question before any tech purchase: do we actually have what it takes to implement and sustain this? Read it here.
My take
I’ve had this conversation more times than I can count, and it almost always goes the same way: a company buys a sophisticated HR Tech platform, the implementation drags, adoption flatlines, and eighteen months later someone’s shopping for a replacement. The vendor gets blamed. The real problem was never the vendor.
What I keep seeing is that HR leaders are evaluated on the decision to buy, not on the outcomes of the investment. So the incentive structure pushes toward acquisition — selecting the shiny platform, getting the contract signed, announcing the transformation. The harder, less glamorous work of building internal capability to actually run the thing gets treated as someone else’s problem. Usually IT’s. Or the vendor’s. Or a consulting firm that bills by the hour and disappears when the budget runs out.
The skills gap the article is pointing to is real, but I’d push it further: this isn’t just about technical skills. I’ve watched clients struggle with Workday, with Eightfold, with Phenom — not because their teams couldn’t learn the tools, but because nobody had done the upstream work of defining what success looks like, who owns ongoing configuration, and how the data coming out of the system would actually change a decision. That’s a strategic readiness gap, not a training gap.
HR earns its seat at the transformation table by being honest about this. Not by greenlighting every purchase that comes with a compelling demo and an analyst’s endorsement.
The so-what
Before I’d let a client sign a contract on any significant HR Tech investment, I’d want to see two things: a named internal owner with bandwidth to actually run it, and a clear answer to “what decision will we make differently because of the data this produces?” If you can’t answer both, you’re not ready to buy.
The best technology in the world can’t fix an organization that isn’t ready to use it. HR’s job is to know the difference — and to be willing to say so out loud.