HR Software

Whether you are part of a large or growing company, or both at the same time, it’s important to get handle on your employee management systems before rapid growth or disorganization causes disruption to your daily tasks and your bottom line. It can be hard to do so, however, when you add new employees frequently or when you have a large number to grapple with. That’s where HR software comes in, allowing you to manage your staff in an efficient, consistent, legal, and scalable way, so that you can follow rules and regulations, get things done quickly, and grow without worrying whether it will mean an HR headache for your company. With the right software, it won’t.

What are the different types of HR Software?

Talent Acquisition Software

Stellar companies have one thing in common: they hire the right people. But looking for staff to fill key roles in your company isn’t always easy, especially with the wide variety of places you post jobs and find quality candidates these days. The answer is a system that keeps track of everyone you’re considering, which is where recruiting and applicant tracking software comes in. Hiring gets much easier when you can systematize your talent acquisition processes, manage your goals and your parameters for each job, quickly identify top candidates from a wealth of applicants, and make the right hiring decisions quickly.

Compensation Management Software

Your employees no doubt love working for you, but at the end of the day there is one thing they’re looking for: reliable pay and benefits. If you can’t consistently deliver on these, your organization will suffer. HR software can help streamline that too, systematizing your benefits and payroll processes so you can stop worrying. It also allows you to calculate salaries and commissions correctly, distribute bonuses to your team, pay your employees extra depending on their performance, and easily adjust pay for promotions. With the right compensation management software, you can also manage equity payments and more.

Compliance Management Software

Remaining in compliance with federal and state rules and regulations, the decrees of unions with which you work, and your own company policies is the best way to steer clear of unhappy employees, legal trouble and paying stiff penalties or compensation. Compliance management software can help automate your compliance procedures so you can spend less time thinking about it and more time doing what your organization actually does. With customizable forms to help with all your compliance situations as well as time & attendance record-keeping, you’ll have far less trouble staying on track. Plus, this software can grow as your company grows, making it easier to stay on top of compliance even in the midst of a boom.

Performance Management Software

Performance management software comes in many forms. From the training software you can provide to new or recently promoted employees to get them started, or to staff for continuing education purposes, to the goal development software you can use to create effective, streamlined performance objective plans, performance management software helps you keep your employees on track. Growing their knowledge base with the right training programs is key to meeting your company’s overall goals, while mapping out their plans for the future will help keep them around over the long haul.

Putting It All Together

A smoothly functioning operation will use software for all of these processes, and after a while, you will master the art of integrating each with the other to create a well-rounded, efficient environment. Your performance management software will create outcomes you handle with your compensation management software, for instance, while your compliance management software will ensure you’re using the rest of your systems in the right way.

Be careful not to jump in feet-first with a single vendor who promises to do it all, however. No matter how ardently they promise to cross all your T’s and dot all your I’s, a vendor with such broad-sweeping applications may end up being a jack of all trades and a master of none. This is known as the “hybrid problem,” and you can solve it by carefully selecting specialists for each of your software platforms, such as Lessonly for training and others for compensation management, compliance and so on.

Benefits of HR Software

What’s the most critical component of any company? The people. The company succeeds or fails by the quality of workers they hire. Since the HR department is directly responsible for hiring and getting the right folks on board, they are vital to the company’s success. That’s why they need the proper tools to function well. We’ve compiled a list of benefits an HR platform can provide.

1. HR Software Solutions Help Companies Retain Employees: The cost to hire a new employee can be as high as $7,645 after recruiting, screening, and training. A better solution than hiring new employees is to maintain and develop current employees with HR software. A people management software allows companies to create an employee’s career development plan. HR employees can regularly gather information about employee performance and complete accurate employee appraisal with hr software. The HR platform can promote more conversations with employees that are key to highlighting what’s working and what needs improvement. 
2. The Best HR Software Manages Leaves and Absences: Life happens. Sometimes, employees need to take unforeseen time off of work and managing these requests can be a time-intensive process for HR employees.  Luckily, HR software can alleviate these issues and keep the HR department organized. Well-designed HR software solutions provide the HR team with an overview of an employee’s time off with personal leave, sick, VTO, and PTO days. The HR software can also have a specific HR platform for managing these requests so it allows managers to take care of more important tasks for the business. By providing the HR department with the necessary means to manage absences, the company can experience happier employees and a more productive HR department.
3. An HR Platform Automates Timely Processes: Menial tasks can be time-consuming and frustrating for HR employees, especially when a simple HR software could complete many of them. For example, 40% of an HR employee’s time is spent performing benefits administration. Most these tasks include data entry and can be automated using HR software. Payroll is another area in which HR software solutions can free the HR department to focus on what’s most important for the company, such as hiring and retaining top talent.
4. HR Software Reduces Errors: Mistakes are inevitable when employees perform data entry related tasks every day. Some of these errors can be costly from both a financial and legal standpoint. So, how can companies reduce mistakes? Businesses can take processes such as payroll and benefits administration out of the hands of employees and into the control of HR software. Companies will experience decreased mistakes and save time, mental energy, and financial resources with HR software.
5. Become a Metric-Driven HR Department: There’s no excuse for making uninformed decisions in any department of the business, especially HR. With HR software systems, companies can accurately gauge results, such as the employee turnover ratio, hiring costs, and average time with the company. Then, the HR department can develop data-driven strategies to improve areas of the company, reducing costs and creating a better working environment. Everyone wins when companies give the HR department the tools they need to create a better business with HR software.

Cloud HR Software

It’s all about the cloud these days, and while many organizations still run their applications on dedicated servers, many more have taken to the air. Vendors in the cloud offer benefits such as automatic updates to ensure you stay current and in compliance, limited customization so that HR professionals spend more time on the actual needs of the company and less time trying to tweak the software, and reduction in costs because system upgrades are much easier for the vendor to manage.

The cloud offers other benefits, too. Generally any customizations and add-ons move forward with each upgrade, reducing the burden of recreating the right system each time you purchase an upgrade. The cloud is also incredibly mobile-friendly, enabling access from anywhere, so your HR employees have more freedom to work from home or remote sites without worrying about an inability to access data. And since many HR applications are typically segmented, making it difficult to integrate them and to communicate between the individuals or departments who manage them, cloud computing that puts them all in one place streamlines communication.

Open Source HR Software

When deciding which HR software systems to use, one of the main questions you should ask yourself is whether you’ll do better with open source or licensed software. If you are a company that prizes flexibility and innovation, open source software may be the answer to your HR software prayers… if you have the time and money to devote to it.

However, many companies choose to go with licensed software vendors because they do not have the time, money, manpower or know-how to effectively manage an open source software platform. In this case, that license is your best bet, because it ensures that your software vendor will take care of the updates and maintenance that keeps your HR software reliable, secure and innovative so you can continue to meet your business needs over the long haul.