My friend Kyle Lagunas from Software Advice has an interesting blog post today, 4 Questions You Wish You’d Asked Your Talent Management Vendor. His article gives advice to potential talent management system buyers on how to avoid potential problems and pitfalls with the technology and vendor-client relationship.

And since he asked, I figured I would give Kapta's answers to his questions.

1. How is your product different from your competitors?

Kapta is very different from other talent management system vendors. First, we work specifically with small and medium-sized organizations (usually with fewer than 500 employees).  Secondly, our approach is to combine the best of traditional, look-back performance reviews with modern, collaborative performance management.

The result is that you get better quality reviews because employees and managers have more data points to draw on when doing the appraisals.

2. How can your product improve my processes?

Kapta has built-in best pracitce and one of our main pieces of advice when working with customers is to make sure they don't over-complicate things. I think you'll agree that many HR professionals have a tendency to over-think and over-produce their processes. This causes all sorts of problems down the road.

So our advice to customers is to keep the talent management process simple, because simple never goes out of style. We can accommodate lots of variations of performance review processes, but at the end of the day you're not going to succeed unless you have a repeatable process that makes sense to the whole company.

More concretely, we're also publishing dozens of really helpful guides and resources for our customers to help them get the most out of their talent management technology. Check out some of our examples here and here.

3. How will you help us be successful?

Great question, and one that is often over-looked during the sales process. Our answer is that we've been gathering data for the last six months (and conducted over 120 interviews - click here to see the results) to make sure we know exactly what the problems are and how to solve them.

Our research informed our product development process. For example, we learned that HR executive don't want lots of futuristic technology that they can't understand (or pronounce). Instead, they want tools that will take the pain out of their current processes.

We also realized that customers want implementation and services support when they are rolling out their talent management software. So we changed out tune and build those capabilities into Kapta's offering.

My quick answer is that we make you successful by listening to you and learning from you. We're nimble and quick enough to be able to respond to any issues that come up and turn problems into big wins.

4. Can I get a reference?

Yes. Kapta is an open, transparent company and we encourage you to talk with any of our customers directly.

Bonus questions: Is this someone you’re going to want when things get stressful and challenging? Is this someone you’d be comfortable calling–and that you feel comfortable will get back to you?

These are also great questions, and actually they cut both ways. What I mean here is that it's just as important for us vendors to choose our customers as it is for clients to pick us. When I'm talking with a prospective customer, I'm looking for someone with a clear understanding of their talent management goals, the support of their organization to achieve those goals, and a really strong partnership attitude. I don't like sales transactions any more than you do, and I certainly don't like customer problems. So when I say win-win, I mean it.

I hope that gives some perspective on Kapta and how we work with customers. If you're still looking around for other options, here's a full list of talent management system vendors.