How to choose HR software for your business

How to choose HR software for your business
Human resource management has many sides and aspects, and here we’ll focus on each of them. If you think we’ve missed something, feel free to contact us and remind us about it!

An HR management system is a digital tool dedicated to facilitating all aspects of human resource management, and each area has a corresponding system. Therefore, we can specify several types of them, based on the task on which it’s focused: talent management, learning management, employee experience management, human resource management, etc. We’ll overview all of them further.

To understand which HR app you need, it’s essential to write out your company’s work processes and how employees are engaged in it. How large is your company? Do you have high or low staff turnover rates? Do you need to teach your employees some specific skills? Do you have various departments? How many connections with other businesses or suppliers do you have?

Answering these questions is essential to understanding which type of HR software is the best fit. After determining it, you’ll select the specific one depending on the features you need and the budget you’re ready to invest in HR process automatization.

So, let’s dive into it further to see how HR tools work and then overview their types.

What is HR management system software?

Human resource automatization improves the company’s productivity greatly. It also facilitates the information exchange between various parts of the company: employees, teams, and departments. If the company should fill a job vacancy, find a new employee or contractor for some work, onboard them, and improve their performance, an HR management system helps to do this. It automatized the search, candidate screening, and analysis of their work.

Therefore, a suitable candidate can be found much quicker compared to the manual search. After that, they should be onboarded and introduced to the job position and all its workflows. The company’s leadership can track and monitor all these processes easily.

The online HR system coordinates all data about the company’s work on its servers and enables its employees to reach it quickly, using it for work planning and training. They can communicate, exchange information, and plan work schedules, while their managers can track their productivity and send tasks quickly and efficiently. Many such systems also work offline if they are installed on the internal company’s server. They enable downloading all essential materials, such as documents, media, and statistics, and work with them without Internet access, if necessary.

There are many types of HR system software that solve various business purposes. Let’s overview these purposes before analyzing their types.

What does HR software do

Various systems have different focuses of work, meaning that they help company management in various areas.
HR recruitment
software helps HR managers find and recruit talents, automatizing the process of job description creation, search, candidate screening, and interviewing.

HR monitoring
software works to gather analytics and generate reports regarding employee performance, finances, supply chains, and other essential company elements.
 HR project management
software helps managers allocate tasks, assign deadlines, plan workflows, and organize the workforce in general.
HR resource planning
tools serve as databases, recording, showing, and analyzing the state of the company’s human, financial, and other resources.

HR educational
software, such as learning management systems, enables the creation of training courses and motivating employees to work better and uplift their skills.
Go further
to see how all these tasks are realized in various HR software!

Types of HR system

Let’s start with the common six-part cycle of employee management workflow,
HRMS: Human resources management system
This is the most general type of HR system, based mostly on employee hiring and onboarding, despite they cover all staff management cycles to a more or less extent.

BambooHR is a typical HRMS dedicated to hiring and onboarding employees and managing their work. It’s good for medium- and large-size companies with a stable set of routine workflows and steady turnover rates. Automating their operations helps the company to operate faster and more efficiently, filling vacancies quicker and ensuring that all employees know what to do and how.
HCMS: Human capital management system
Human capital management is the tracking and analyzing of employee performance, ensuring the best possible results. While these tools are often interchangeable with the HRMS, there are subtle differences in the stages where such tools are operating. HRMS focuses on employee hiring and onboarding, and HCMS is based on monitoring and organizing.

Asana is one of the typical apps from this category, dedicated to project management and employee communication, where they may organize their work by themselves. It’s especially useful for remote teams, enabling team leaders to plan schedules and assign tasks while team members may discuss them and complete on time.
HRIS: Human resources information system
Also sometimes being interchangeable with two previous tools, this system is dedicated to storing and managing essential company staff data, such as the employee’s performance and turnover rate. HRISs are necessary for companies with many employees working in various departments, each of which has connections with each other and with other businesses.

Workaday is an example of such a tool, serving as the platform that connects financial, operational, and workflow data and analytics, enabling the leadership to plan the company’s activity.
HR ERP: Enterprise resource planning system
Similarly to HRISs, complex resource management systems are necessary for large, multi-industry businesses, such as holdings, investing companies, and venture funds. They should maintain many connections and resource flows simultaneously, and ERP helps them in this.

The SAP suite is an example of such a tool: a large set of corporate tools for supply chain management, financial planning, spending management, and business network building. Such systems are relevant only for large corporations with already established workflows and connections with many businesses. They automatize all their vast networks of data and interconnections, enabling them to grow even further.
Core HR software
This software type is based on the most basic HR activities such as onboarding, payroll, and employee performance. They are HR tools with the most simple interface and features, dedicated to helping the management to onboard people and manage their work.

Rippling is an example of such a tool: it’s simpler than BambooHR, much lighter compared to SAP or Workaday, and dedicated to creating a workforce directory, ensuring seamless onboarding and managing the whole company’s staff. It’s the best choice for small and medium-sized offline businesses that only need to organize their workforce.
They’re focused on the talent organization and uplifting their skills, ensuring their constant growth and development. They cover the latter stages of the employee management cycle, but they are highly useful for employee onboarding too, enabling the management to create courses and other introductory materials.

Our CleverLMS is a good example of such a system, with course creation options, task planning, and reward systems. Good corporate LMSs integrate with workflows, so employees uplift their skills while working. Unlike other types, they are also highly interactive to motivate employees and reward those who learn the best.

These tools are similar to HCMS, but focus on employee uplifting and organizing to ensure the best possible productivity and well-being, similar to LMSs. They unite employee’s onboarding and organization with motivating them and tracking their results.

A good example of the TMS is ClearCompany, with its focus on assigning tasks, employee tracking, rewarding them, and analyzing their productivity. TalentLMS, while providing mostly LMS features, also works as an onboarding tool.
EXP: Employee experience platform
These platforms serve to improve employees’ experience and enable the company’s management organize employees better. It usually focuses on ensuring the best employee and customer experience by optimizing all work processes and company’s internal and external communications.

Zendesk is the typical example of EXP, focusing on analyzing the company’s productivity and identifying how it can be improved. It’s the best for companies oriented on sales, as it unites sales analytics, employee management, and customer relation management.
Wrapping up
As you see, the choice for HR information systems is large. You can explore the colored infographics below to understand better how various management systems can be used. Bear in mind that all such systems also provide project management (such as task planning) and communication (message/media exchange) features, which are crucial for the proper information flow.

Which type is the best for you?

It’s important to note that many platforms unite various elements of the diagram, as they want to promote themselves as “universal solutions.” It can be useful . Here are several examples.
  • You’d better to choose an LMS in case your priority is the constant education and improvement of your employees.
  • The HCMS is good for project management, scheduling, and is especially suitable for remote teams organization.
  • The TMS will be the best if you need not only constantly uplift your employees’ skills, but also plan to search and onboard new talents periodically.
  • The HRMS is the good choice for large companies with stable workflows to automatize all of them and fill vacancies as soon as possible.
  • The HR ERP or HRIS are the best choice for large corporations and holdings where controlling the vast network of connections is necessary.
  • Choose EXP for sales teams and other highly dynamic workspaces, where you need to monitor your team and your customer’s satisfaction as your main value.
Let’s overview several approaches of how HR apps can be deployed. You can choose to install the system on your own computer or corporate server, obtaining an internal HR system. While it’s your responsibility to allocate space for it and maintain its functioning,

If you don’t want to set the platform on your own servers, choose the cloud HR system which will be installed in the remote cloud while serving all your purposes.

Lastly, you can download a mobile app of the management system and use it on your smartphone, no matter whether you decide to install the software or use the cloud version. For example, the CleverLMS mobile app enables its customers to educate employees right during work without any detachment. It’s especially useful for industries such as sales, manufacturing, or nursing, where employees have no time to spend at the computer and should learn during work.

Benefits of implementing HR tools

HR platforms automatize all work processes and facilitate communication and other information exchange in your company. By implementing it, you make your company more competitive, as it works faster and can proceed with larger amounts of information. In addition, it’ll adopt innovations quicker, evolving and renewing its work processes. However, the platform choice and relevancy depend on your company’s size and industry.

The HR software pricing correlates with its features, the market’s competitive landscape, and the pricing model chosen by it. For example, CleverLMS costs $5 per user per month for general use, which is still less than most other HR management tools, according to Forbes. For large enterprises with more than 1,000 users, it costs even less: $3.5 per user per month. Custom on-premise solutions are also available.

Various other HR software solutions choose different pricing models and approaches: each of them has its benefits and flaws. For example, the per-user model, adopted by CleverLMS and many other, charge you for the number of employees in your business, ensuring that you don’t overpay and can scale your company without additional expenses.

We believe that this model is the best-suited for any enterprise management software, although there are also general subscription models when you purchase the subscription plan based on your needs. There is also custom pricing, which CleverLMS partly uses, too. Therefore, different HR software solutions realize their functions differently

Top HR software in 2023

You’ve already seen some examples of the top HR systems in each category we’ve listed here, but how exactly can you know which is the best? While there are platforms that cannot bring to you anything other than disappointment, most of them are highly interested in organizing your workflow. Competition is high in this field, and it increases along with the quickly-growing workflow management tools market. Let’s summarize which of the mentioned tools is the best for each task.
CleverLMS
is the best universal choice if you want a simple, inexpensive, and robust set of features to improve your employees’ skills constantly.
TalentLMS
is a good option for medium-sized businesses, especially those working in the content creation industry.
ClearCompany
is a universal talent management tool, good for startups that need to attract talent in various industries.
Workaday
is a good choice for companies with many supply and delivery chains to optimize and organize them in the best possible way.
SAP
is the best for large corporations and holdings that need to organize, analyze, and optimize a vast network of connections and business data.
Zendesk
is a good solution for teams where customer satisfaction is the desired value.
Asana
is good if you need project management features to organize your team working on some projects.
BambooHR
is the choice for medium and large companies with routine workflows to automatize and optimize them.
Rippling
is good for small and medium offline businesses to manage the workforce in a convenient way.
Therefore, the best HR system is the one that serves your purpose in the best way. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or propositions, and good luck!

BY JONATHAN HILL

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