Tips on Buying HR Tech: A Conversation with Geoff Barlow

We had the pleasure of talking to Geoff Barlow, Director of Talent Acquisition at Core & Main, about his experience buying HR Software, his favorite tools, and what he's learned that other TA/HR professionals shoud know.

There are a lot of nuggets in this conversation, here are some of the most impactful:

• Geoff spends time actively understanding the problems that business leaders in his organization are grappling with when thinking through where to spend his time and efforts to improve the HR Tech stack of the Talent Acquisition team.
• When looking at new initiatives, he builds an ROI analysis that associates a direct dollar amount with the value of a new tool. For example, his team bought a CRM and tied the value from this tool back to a lowered time to fill.
• Geoff enlists the help of people from other parts of the organization to build his business case (getting the finance team to quantify the cost of vacancy per day), identify tools, and buy/implement.
• Geoff makes sure the senior executives who could kill a deal will be on board before spending significant time to discover and vet vendors.

Lastly, we asked Geoff what HR Tech he thinks people should know about. He talked about thermal imaging tech to help screen people who may have contracted COVID-19, along with Phenom People which helps with the candidate experience as well as candidate relationship management and internal mobility.