The last time I sat in an HR tech strategy meeting where IT and HR were actually speaking the same language, the HR director and CTO didn’t just nod in polite agreement-they argued about API limitations like they were discussing their weekend plans. This wasn’t some HR tech consolidation fairy tale. It was BrightPath Solutions, a $300M healthcare staffing firm, where their payroll system lived in Oracle, performance reviews in Workday, and their ATS in an off-brand cloud provider. The result? New hires got mismatched onboarding emails, recruiters wasted 8 hours weekly chasing down candidate updates, and their time-to-fill ballooned by 30%. They weren’t just inefficient-they were actively losing talent. The turning point came when they realized consolidation wasn’t about buying new tools. It was about stopping the fire drills.
HR tech consolidation isn’t optional
I’ve watched firms treat HR tech consolidation as an HR problem, an IT problem, or worse-a “we’ll fix it later” problem. But the numbers don’t lie: Gartner reports 68% of mid-sized firms cite fragmented HR/IT systems as their #2 inefficiency after talent acquisition. The question isn’t whether to consolidate-it’s whether you’ll do it before your competitors do. Take FreshWorks, a SaaS company that finally merged their fragmented tech stack after their ATS crashed during peak hiring season. Within six months, they reduced candidate drop-off by 45% and cut their HR tech budget by $250K annually. The key wasn’t the tools. It was recognizing that consolidation forces teams to stop treating each other as obstacles and start treating each other as partners.
How to spot your consolidation blind spots
Teams often resist consolidation because they don’t realize how deeply siloed they’ve become. From my perspective, these are the warning signs most firms ignore until it’s too late:
- IT gives HR a “works for us” spreadsheet-with no ability to filter by department or role.
- Employees complain about “which portal?” every time they need benefits, training, or payroll access.
- Your tech stack looks like a jigsaw puzzle missing 30 pieces-each with a different login and security protocol.
- You’ve heard “that’s how we always did it” at least twice this week.
These aren’t just inconveniences. They’re the early symptoms of a system that’s holding you back. The bigger the company, the higher the stakes. Yet I’ve seen Fortune 500 firms spend millions on “all-in-one” platforms only to realize they’ve created a monolithic mess. Consolidation isn’t about consolidation’s sake-it’s about eliminating the daily friction that drains time, money, and morale.
Where to start without starting over
Consolidation doesn’t mean gutting everything. It means strategic reduction-like a chef removing the inedible ingredients from a dish rather than starting from scratch. Start with the workflows that hurt the most. At Deliveroo, they didn’t overhaul their entire HR tech ecosystem. They focused on onboarding, the single process where friction was killing new-hire retention. By merging their ATS with payroll in a single portal, they reduced first-week drop-off by 40%. The lesson? Pick one high-impact area, prove the value, then expand.
Here’s how to begin:
- Audit ruthlessly: List every tool, its current owner, and its last proven business case.
- Pick the 3 workflows causing the most hand-offs-recruiting, performance, or employee data access.
- Choose one vendor that can handle at least two workflows. Don’t chase “all-in-one” if it means sacrificing usability.
- Train HR and IT together. If they can’t use the system, neither can the rest of the company.
- Measure the gap: Time saved, errors reduced, or employee survey scores-whatever metric matters most.
I’ve seen firms fail at consolidation because they treated it like a tech project. The most successful ones treated it as a people project. The tools are just the vehicle. The real work is aligning teams around a shared goal: fewer hand-offs, clearer data, and-most importantly-less daily frustration.
The companies that treat HR tech consolidation as a project, not a product, are the ones winning. The firms that wait until they’re bleeding money or talent will always be playing catch-up. The question isn’t whether you’ll consolidate. It’s whether you’ll do it before your next big miss-like losing a top recruiter because their onboarding portal crashed, or missing a hiring deadline because IT and HR were still emailing spreadsheets. The tools are here. The only question left is whether you’re ready to actually use them.
