Hiring a new employee is like making an investment in your organization’s future. No matter how smooth of a talker they may be, only a fool would hire someone sight unseen. This is why there are certain protocols in place to judge the reliability of a prospective employee, so that you mitigate the risk of getting a lousy return on your investment (or worse, make your organization vulnerable due to some unscrupulous character’s misdeeds). Things like background checks, drug tests, and following up with former employers and references are all meant to ensure that you’ve truly found the right person for the position, and not someone whose employment you’ll eventually live to regret.
A compensation management solution can be thought of similarly, as an investment. One that will not only do what your organization needs it to do, but will do so securely and reliably. In order to ensure you’ve found the right compensation management tool for the job, it’s wise to inquire about how secure and reliable it is.
For instance, many (if not most) compensation management solutions have moved to an SaaS model, forgoing in-house servers for cloud-based hosting. This brings a great many benefits in terms of convenience and compatibility, but it also needs to be tempered with responsibility. Some important questions to ask regarding SaaS compensation management solutions are:
-Where are the servers that will host our organization’s data located?
-Who operates the servers on which our organization’s data will be hosted?
-What kind of encryption will the compensation management solution feature?
-Does the developer of the compensation management solution have sufficient insurance should something unforeseen and unfortunate happen?
-How will the compensation management system be structured? That is to say, who in our organization will have access to the system, and how much access will they be granted? (for instance, it wouldn’t make much sense or be very secure for a low-level manager to have the same user privileges as an executive)
-What kind of user auditing will the compensation management system have? Will it allow us to see everyone who has accessed the system, and what changes they made?
A good developer of compensation management solutions should be able to answer all of these questions, and any others you may have, to your satisfaction. It’s always important to do your homework, whether you’re hiring a new employee or investing in a compensation management system. Both are large investments that, if made wisely, can be important factors in your organization’s success. Which is why it would be a shame to squander such an opportunity on so-so software or services. Investing in a compensation management solution, like the hiring process, requires due diligence in order to make the best possible decision for your organization. In both situations you need to ensure that the employee (or compensation management solution) are not only reliable, but will not compromise the security of your organization or its sensitive data.