If You Pay Peanuts You Get…

I‘m amazed sometimes that large enterprises with great brands sometimes completely forget the basics of procurement for talent management software.

We have been talking to a couple of companies recently, and have found ourselves being compared to a competitor we have never heard of. That obviously concerns us – but what’s really worrying is that from an analysis of the provider in question we find that the service they are selling is extremely basic, and probably represents a tenth of the functionality we provide – so why is this prospect looking at it so seriously? Sure enough it turns out that the client likes the idea of a simpler solution. Ah – so fair enough, we have to get better at delivering our products that are not only completely flexible, configurable with a great UI but also simpler to use.

Then I thought, how robust are they? – After looking at their applicant tracking website and to my horror you can see their entire online application internals (ie. their log files) are completely open to the public Internet, including their data cache.   So anyone with a snooping mind could not only look at all their customer url requests, but could also potentially expose the candidate personal data. If that is not a breach of data protection I don’t what is.

But lets give them the benefit of the doubt – they must be new to this game and their customers will run a simple penetration test, and I’m sure they can close all the holes quite quickly. They must be a company in good standing for the customer to be even talking to them? – I tell myself. However a quick check at companies house reveals that not only have they got a revenue of peanuts – they are also insolvent, and have been so for the past few years.

The point of all this is that being a SaaS provider you have a duty to deliver a quality service that is available, secure and has proper disaster recovery so that your customers can trust you. If you do not subscribe to these principles – then don’t compete in this space!  If SaaS starts to get a bad reputation for poor reliability, insecure and flaky delivery then we all suffer.   At the end of the day we are managing other peoples data and we have duty commercially and morally to respect that.

And to the blue chips who are buying services like this – please – do the due diligence and don’t buy in to every person who comes through the door with a nice story on social media.