Best of Breed vs the Suite: Who Should Implement Your Talent Tech?

We wrote about the trend of the large suites buying up Best of Breed point solutions back in 2025. Now the rubber is hitting the road, with many suite customers getting the opportunity to implement a Best of Breed Talent Acquisition platform thanks to subscription renewals, or because they want to move away from the suite’s incumbent solution and level up their TA function. 

TalentTech is engaged in a number of bids with potential clients who want to implement the Best of Breed option available within their suite, e.g. SmartRecruiters within SuccessFactors. Within the mix of implementation consultants bidding for these projects, we usually find: 

• The incumbent “maintenance” MSP (managed services provider) 

• A large generalist implementation consultancy 

• A specialist implementation consultancy, e.g. TalentTech 

The consistency of this mix is interesting. 

The MSP 

The incumbent MSP should know the existing systems and business processes well, and the teams doing the work are usually offshore to keep costs down. Some of them are possibly really good, but as one potential client commented to me the other day, “you get what you pay for”. This is not necessarily a slight at the MSP. It’s a reflection of why MSPs are chosen and what they’re there to do. MSPs are there to keep the wheels turning at an affordable price, not to deliver transformational change to systems and processes. 

The large generalist implementation consultancy 

The second type of vendor we find ourselves competing against is the large generalist implementation consultancy. They may be a big-name consulting house that started as an accountancy firm, or a specialist in a different part of the HRIS that has branched out into other workstreams. Often, they’ll roll out the big guns during the courting and sales process, but when it comes to implementation, someone else takes over. That person may have done the training but hasn’t worked a day in the trenches. 

From a pricing perspective, many of the suite implementers come from a time when ERPs were on-premise. Their pricing usually assumes they will plant their people in your office for the duration of the project. This adds significant cost, but does it provide value or benefit? 

The specialist consultancy 

A specialist consultancy like TalentTech exists because we have a mission to ensure our clients realise the goals they set themselves, not just to win business. We also bring deep domain experience because we’ve been hands-on doing the work we’re advising on, in our case Talent Acquisition. 

This means we can approach projects flexibly, depending on the client’s needs. We can be extremely hands-on, designing processes, configuring the system and editing offer templates. Alternatively, we can act more like guides and sounding boards, teaching you about the system’s capabilities and limitations and working with you, sometimes challenging you, on what you envision. We can then play more of an advisory or assisting role while your teams do the configuration. 

This has significant benefits because your teams will develop a deeper understanding of the system by doing the work themselves and will also learn how to maintain it post go-live. 

Which approach wins? 

“Winning” depends on who we’re talking about and what their goals are. 

When IT or Procurement “win”, they usually go with the MSP. Why? The price tag appeals to Procurement, and many MSPs were originally IT shops, so they are a known entity to IT departments. 

If Finance “wins”, they’ll go with the large generalist consultancy. Often, they are already doing a range of work on the ERP side of the system and have developed relationships within the Finance function thanks to their audit arm. The HR and Talent Acquisition side is an afterthought, tacked on to the scope, often for a significant discount because the “on-premise” era pricing for the ERP is so high that the cost of implementing a Talent Acquisition module is a drop in the bucket. 

When HR/TA “wins”, they will pick either: 

• The specialist consultancy, because they want a partner who understands the day-to-day. 

• The large generalist consultancy, if there’s a suite of work to be done, for many of the same reasons as Finance. 

• A hybrid approach, using the large generalist for the areas where they are actually a specialist, e.g. core HR/payroll, and a specialist for Talent Acquisition. 

This “best of both worlds” approach recognises the diversity within the broader HR function and allows each team to aim for its own optimum outcomes, with relevant, specialist support from its respective implementation partner. 

What’s really important? 

When picking an implementation partner, the three sides of the Iron Triangle, time, speed and cost, are important. But to achieve the outcomes you’re looking for, you also need to ensure you pick a partner that understands what you’re trying to achieve and knows when it’s efficient to use a templated implementation versus when a more customised approach is required. 

Your implementation partner needs to both guide and challenge you. Sometimes, what you want to do can’t be done by the system. That’s a given. Other times, you may be inadvertently stuck in “this is how we’ve always done it” land, and your implementation partner will need to wake you out of it. How your implementation partner works with you to resolve these challenges depends on their expertise, experience and relationship with you. 

Finally, your implementation partner needs to care about the quality of the implementation, not just notch up another project close. Picking a specialist implementation partner who understands both the day-to-day of your work and the system you’re going to implement is your best bet. 

If you’re thinking about engaging implementation partners for your upcoming implementation, make sure you reach out to TalentTech and see the difference for yourself.