Demo Preparation Guide

Most HR teams evaluate vendor demos based on gut feeling. But a structured approach leads to better decisions, faster consensus, and less regret later. This guide will help you prepare every demo professionally.

Prepare Use Cases

Prepare 3–5 concrete scenarios that you encounter daily:

• Onboarding: "Show how a new employee in the Netherlands is registered, including contract generation and portal access."
• Leave Request: "Walk through the complete leave process from employee, manager, and HR perspectives."
• Reporting: "Show how we report monthly absenteeism figures per department."
• Mutation: "Demonstrate a job change including salary adjustment and workflow approval."
• Offboarding: "What does the offboarding process look like, including checklists and system access revocation?"

Set Up a Scorecard

Create a standardized scorecard so that all attendees evaluate based on the same criteria:

Score each criterion on a scale of 1–5, with explanation.

Brief the Team

• Share the use cases and scorecard with all attendees beforehand
• Assign roles: who focuses on UX, who on technology, who on process fit
• Agree that questions will be grouped at the end

Ask the Right Questions

About the workflow:

• "How many clicks does it take for a manager to approve a leave request?"
• "Can this process be adjusted if our policy changes?"
• "How does the system handle exceptions?"

About integrations:

• "How is data synchronized with our payroll system?"
• "What happens if an integration fails — is there error handling and alerting?"
• "Can we build new integrations ourselves via the API?"

About the user experience:

• "May we click around in the system ourselves?"
• "What does the mobile experience look like for employees?"
• "How fast do pages load with 500+ active users?"

About support and future:

• "What happens if we find a bug — how quickly is it resolved?"
• "Which features are planned for the next 6 months?"
• "What percentage of feature requests are actually built?"

Watch out for red flags

• Vendor deviates from your use cases to their "happy path"
• Vague answers to integration or security questions
• "That can be done in a next version" without concrete planning
• No possibility to click around in the system yourself
• Excessive use of slides instead of live product

Immediate Evaluation (within 24 hours)

1. Have everyone fill out the scorecard individually — before group discussion
2. Schedule a 30-minute debrief with the project team
3. Note per vendor: top-3 pros and top-3 concerns
4. Document open questions for follow-up

Make a Comparison

Place the completed scorecards side-by-side and calculate weighted scores. Discuss where scores diverge significantly — these are the points that deserve extra attention.

Send Follow-up Questions

Send a list of open questions to the vendor within a week. Pay attention to how quickly and thoroughly they respond — this says a lot about their post-purchase service.