The five components of an HR tech stack, and where Belgian SMEs get stuck
Nobody designs an HR stack. It accumulates. A tool for payroll, then one for recruitment because hiring got busy, then engagement surveys because someone read an article.
Here is what a stack looks like when you lay it out on purpose. Five layers.
1. Core HR component: the record
Employee data, contracts, absence, benefits. One place that answers "who works here, on what terms". In Belgium there is an added twist. Your social secretariat, whether that is SD Worx, Securex, Acerta, Partena or Liantis, already holds a version of this data. Any core HR tool in your stack that does not exchange cleanly with yours is not core HR. It is a second copy of the truth waiting to disagree with the first. This is what makes this component a lot more complex for Belgian SMEs.
2. Process tools: the work
Recruitment, onboarding, performance, learning, engagement. This is where stacks grow fastest and where overlap hides. Three tools that each send a survey. Two that each track a hiring pipeline.
3. Reporting: the answers
Headcount, turnover, cost per hire, absence trends. If your reporting layer is a monthly export into Excel, you do not have one. You have a person doing it manually.
4. Automation and AI: the admin
The layer where the actual time comes back. Answering the same policy question forty times a month, chasing signatures, moving data between systems. Worth being blunt: most vendors have relabelled a search bar as AI. Ask what it does without a human in the loop, and ask it in the demo.
5. Integrations: the plumbing
The layer everyone discovers last and pays for twice. A vendor saying "we have an open API" is not the same as "we have a working, supported connector to your payroll provider, and here are three Belgian clients running it."
Where SMEs between 150 and 500 people get stuck
Layers 1 and 2 get bought. Layers 3, 4 and 5 get promised. A large company has a vendor manager whose job is to check the promise. A 250-person company has an HR lead who saw the demo once and is going on trust.
What to do with this tool stack challenge
Take the five layers, list your tools under each. Two things surface immediately: a layer with four tools in it, and a layer that is empty.
That map is what a costing exercise runs on. How to turn it into a number is in "Blogpost: the ROI of consolidating your HR stack". Whether the gaps get filled with a specialist tool or an existing platform module is in "Blogpost: point solutions or one system".
We built a database of every HR tool in the Belgian market: what each does, what it costs, what it actually connects to. In a diagnostic workshop, we identify which players make sense for your company for each of these 5 layers.
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