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.

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.