Value by Design Part 2: Designing the Experience That Turns Technology Into Real Value

The hard truth about Talent Tech is that the technology does not deliver value on its own. Value is created through how people interact with that technology in their everyday work. The experience you design long before going live shapes those interactions, influencing whether hiring managers engage or delay, whether recruiters trust the system or work around it, whether workflows genuinely reduce effort or quietly add friction, and whether data becomes something leaders rely on or something they question.

Most HR tech projects fail because they spend too much investment in selecting the right platform, and too little investment in designing how people will actually experience it. In Part 1 of Value by Design, we focused on making intentional choices before implementation. In Part 2, we turn our attention to what happens next: the people, the process, and the progress that determine whether that intent translates into real outcomes.

Experience is not an afterthought in transformation. It is the mechanism through which value is realised.

People: Designing the Behaviours That Unlock Value

Every outcome organisations expect from HR technology; speed, quality, adoption, and data integrity, is ultimately driven by human behaviour. Systems rarely fail in isolation. What fails is how people engage with them under real operational pressure.

Across implementations, the same behavioural patterns surface repeatedly. Hiring managers delay decisions because the process feels unclear or unnecessarily heavy. Recruiters bypass the ATS during peak pressure, intending to update it later. Job intake varies based on who is involved, creating inconsistency that ripples downstream. Leaders approve exceptions to keep work moving, slowly eroding the simplicity the system was designed to enforce. Champions are introduced too late, once key decisions are already locked in.

These behaviours are not the problem themselves. They are symptoms of an experience that has not been designed to make the right behaviours the easiest ones.

There are also blockers that are rarely addressed directly. If hiring managers do not change how they engage with the process, nothing else meaningfully shifts. If people do not trust a workflow, they will always find a way around it. And no amount of system configuration will compensate for unclear or competing behavioural expectations.

Teams that unlock value take a more deliberate approach. They identify a small number of behaviours that directly drive the outcomes they care about and design explicitly around them. They remove friction so the desired behaviour is easier than the old habit. They involve champions early as co-designers rather than late-stage advocates. They pay attention to emotional resistance as carefully as they do process gaps.

Where teams struggle, the causes are predictable. Awareness is mistaken for adoption. Training is expected to create habits. Real users are only involved during UAT, when meaningful change is already difficult.

In one example, recruiter adoption was persistently low because the workflow felt heavy and duplicative. By observing how recruiters actually worked under pressure, the team identified redundant fields and a manual handoff that added no value. Removing both increased system usage and improved data quality within weeks, which flowed on to actionable metrics, like faster time to hire and increased recruiter capacity. The technology did not change, the experience did.

Process: Designing Simplicity That Drives Speed and Trust

Complexity is one of the fastest ways to undermine adoption. Every additional step in a process carries a cost, not only in time, but in trust and data quality. Most HRIS professionals understand this instinctively, yet complexity often creeps back in through legacy thinking and unmanaged exceptions. When the dust settles, those same HRIS admins are left to sustain this complexity long after go live - and find themselves responsible for maintaining processes they didn’t design nor support.

In practice, many hiring delays are caused by process friction rather than system limitations. Exceptions quietly erode data integrity over time. And if a workflow requires a lengthy explanation to justify itself, it is already working against adoption.

One of the hardest truths for organisations to accept is that the process people actually follow is the one you have designed for, whether or not it matches what is documented. If people consistently opt for a workaround over the official process, then the workaround is actually the most efficient process.

High performing teams design process with intent. They focus on the majority scenario rather than edge cases. They challenge inherited steps by asking whether they genuinely create value. They prioritise clarity before automation and actively involve recruiters and hiring managers in shaping workflows, rather than presenting finished designs for approval.

Where teams lose ground is equally consistent. Old processes are recreated inside modern platforms. Political considerations outweigh operational simplicity. Customisation is used to preserve exceptions instead of eliminating them.

The impact of simplification is often immediate. Reducing approval layers can cut hiring time by days, not hours. Analysis frequently shows that approval steps add little more than delay, returning significant recruiter capacity when removed. In global environments, replacing country-level exceptions with a single universal workflow can dramatically improve adoption and reporting reliability

Progress: Designing Momentum That Builds Confidence

People rarely resist change because they dislike improvement. What they fear is uncertainty, particularly when they do not understand what the change means for them personally. Momentum replaces uncertainty with confidence, but only when progress is visible.

Silence during implementation creates its own narrative, and that narrative is rarely positive. People trust progress they can see, not progress described in status updates or slide decks.

Rather than relying on traditional change management, effective teams focus on making progress tangible. During discovery, they communicate outcomes rather than features, explaining the problem being solved and why it matters. During design, they highlight what has been simplified and which friction points have been removed. As readiness approaches, they use before-and-after comparisons to clarify what will change and what will remain the same. At go live, they reinforce early wins and keep the story active rather than declaring success and moving on. This does not mean sharing every detail early, but sharing meaning at the right moments, so people understand what is improving and why.

In one global rollout, a short video demonstrating a simplified interview scheduling flow created more confidence than extensive written communications. People could see the improvement, and that visibility mattered more than detail.

Momentum fades quickly when updates are saved for the end, when feature lists are shared without context, or when teams assume people will patiently wait for launch without forming opinions along the way.

Sponsorship: Leadership Sets the Ceiling

Strong sponsorship is visible, consistent, and aligned. Effective leaders reinforce a shared definition of success, treat simplicity as non-negotiable, remove barriers rather than introduce exceptions, and publicly reinforce progress. Most importantly, they model the behaviours they expect others to adopt.

Just as critically, strong sponsors actively back the people responsible for delivery. They give teams the authority to make decisions, defend those decisions when challenged, and remove organisational friction that would otherwise undermine progress. When leaders are not aligned, or not visibly backing the people leading the work, the organisation never is.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

Many teams unintentionally undermine value by designing for edge cases instead of outcomes. It is very easy to say “But what about X?” in a meeting and it is much more difficult for a project manager to justify “Well, X is only about 1% of all cases”. Nonetheless, every edge case adds a layer of complexity to the process, and has a snowball effect on the process, so it is worth doing the work to really understand if they are justified.

Additionally, allowing politics to override simplicity, adding exceptions that erode process integrity, engaging champions too late, assuming training alone will change behaviour, underestimating how quickly negative narratives form, and designing workflows without a clear understanding of real user behaviour are all among the most common pitfalls we see teams get stuck in.

Where to Start

Regardless of where your project sits today, progress begins with small, intentional moves. Identify one behaviour that directly drives the outcome you care about and anchor decisions to it. Simplify a single workflow step that creates friction and allow that improvement to build belief. Speak to real users and listen without defending the design. Share one visible value moment, whether that is a blocker removed or a step automated. Define what good should feel like, not just how it should function.

Clearer, faster, and easier are often better design guides than any requirements document.

Experience Is the Engine of Value

In Part 1 of Value by Design, we argued that value must be designed intentionally before implementation begins. Part 2 focuses on how those early design decisions shape the day-to-day experience of the people expected to use the technology.

When people understand why change matters, when processes genuinely feel simpler, and when progress is visible, adoption follows naturally and value emerges quickly and more efficiently. Experience is not the soft side of transformation. It is what turns technology into impact.

What Comes Next?

Designing the experience creates the conditions for value, but it does not answer the question leaders ultimately face: how do we know value is being realised, and how do we demonstrate that impact in a way the business trusts?

Part 3 will focus on how to go about measuring value, making it visible, and proving the impact of a successful implementation to the rest of the company.

If you need support in building this mindset into your next project or want help assessing where value can be unlocked in your current tech stack, we would be happy to talk. Reach out any time to discuss your goals, your challenges, or your upcoming plans. TalentTech is here to help you design the experience that turns technology into real value.

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