We are asked this most weeks, usually by someone expecting us to argue against it. We do not.
Usually yes. Platform add-ons make everyday work quicker, they are far cheaper than building the same capability and they arrive already connected to your records. Take that.
Just be clear what you have bought. A vendor builds for its whole customer base, so it ships the workflows most of its customers already run. The workflows that are specific to how your firm wins are the ones least likely to arrive, because they do not generalise. Buy the shared speed. Spend the build budget on the rest.
If your platform sells an add-on that makes search better, drafts the routine writing, tidies records and speeds up matching, buy it. Building an equivalent yourself would cost more, take longer and sit further from your data. We build that sort of thing, and we would still tell you to buy the version that comes with the platform when the platform sells one that works.
What we would not do is call it a strategy. It is a licence fee that makes your people quicker, which is worth paying and is not the same as being different.
A feature only reaches a platform roadmap if it is worth building for a large share of the customer base. That is not cynicism, it is arithmetic: the engineering cost is fixed and the return comes from how many customers use it.
So the roadmap fills with the workflows that are common across the market. Everybody writes job adverts. Everybody searches a database. Everybody summarises a call. Those get built, they get built competently, and every customer on that tier receives them in the same release.
The consequence follows directly. If a capability arrives because you paid a subscription, it arrived for your competitors on the same subscription, in the same month. Whatever advantage it creates is one everyone in your market gets at once, which makes it a cost of staying level rather than a way of pulling ahead.
Describe the workflow out loud, then ask what it took to explain.
That second category is where the interesting work is, and it is almost exactly the category that never appears on a roadmap. It is also, not coincidentally, the category that a competitor cannot obtain by signing the same contract you did.
A vendor is most likely to ship the thing someone has already bought from it as a product. The pattern is well established: a workflow becomes common, a point solution appears, the platform acquires or rebuilds it, and within a couple of years it is included. If the capability you rely on follows that path, your advantage has a countdown on it.
Work built around how your firm specifically operates does not follow that path, because there is no market of thousands waiting for it. The reason it is expensive to build is the same reason it is durable once built. That is an uncomfortable trade and it is a real one.
It is worth being blunt about this because it is where a lot of consultancy marketing quietly overclaims. Making a recruiter faster inside their CRM is good work. We do some of it. So does the platform, so does every serious firm in this space, and increasingly so does a competent internal team with the same tools.
None of that is a differentiator for the firm buying it, and it is not a differentiator for the firm selling it either. Treat efficiency as hygiene: necessary, worth doing properly and finished as an argument the moment everyone has it.
At the work that is specific enough that nobody would sell it to you. In a recruitment business that usually means the custom workflows either side of the CRM rather than inside it: how a brief is qualified before it becomes a job, how outcomes feed back into who gets worked next, how several systems agree on what happened, how the reasoning behind decisions gets captured at all.
Those sit above whatever platform you run, they survive changing platforms, and they are built on material only your firm has. That is the half worth owning.
Buy the add-on. Then ask what it will never do, and decide whether that gap is where your business actually competes. For most firms it is.