In a global pandemic, every company needs the best hr management software. Human resource professionals have it harder than ever. To win, your HR team needs the most fitting tools available. These HR software packages performed the best in our testing.
As the responsibilities of HR departments grow, so do the abilities of the software solutions they employ. Human resource management software these days manages aspects as diverse as sexual harassment training ad payroll. The best HR management software can help drive the intricacies of hiring, firing, benefits administration, and performance management. We look at the best solutions and how they can make managing payroll, in-house certifications, incentives, and other personnel-focused tasks much easier.
What is Best HR Management Software?
Human Resource Software also covers a series of disciplines for vertical solutions.
When choosing HR management software (HRMS), you’ll want to consider various key elements:
- Does its user interface (UI) offer an intuitive experience that doesn’t require a heavy training burden?
- Does the tool tie into your legacy software packages, particularly when it comes to data feeds?
- Can it scale as your company grows?
- Does the vendor offer the kind of service you’ll need should the software fail at any point?
- Once you’ve defined your requirements and preferences, you’ll be able to approach any of these vendors with a wish list.
- Test the solutions that meet your needs and choose the one that fits your ideal mixture of price and utility.
Key Features of HR Software
How your company manages HR can be highly individual, but there are certain key skills and features you should look for in any solution to make sure your pick can grow and change along with your organization’s needs. We’ve defined key capabilities below:
- Applicant Tracking (AT). Includes the capability to manage job postings, apps, and even onboarding of new employees.
- Benefits Administration. Is significant for most HR processes and what HRMS software makers offer here can vary from simply maintaining employee enrollment to offering special benefit plans to customers.
- Scheduling and Shift Planning. Is often assigned tools though the ability can show up as part of larger HRMS platforms or those that focus on businesses where this capability is important.
- Performance Management. Might be the ability to simply keep a record of employee goals or it can track goals down to the task level and tie success quickly and automatically to compensation and payroll.
- Online Learning. Can be another offshoot of performance management, letting managers provide the training employees need to accomplish their goals and also keep the company in compliance if certifications are required for certain jobs.
- eLearning Authoring. Can let your business build its training materials to be offered within or on a publicly accessible learning hub.
Despite its target audience, here are some other key features to look for in any HRMS system:
- Mobility. This still isn’t a must-have feature for a successful HRMS implementation, but it’s getting there. Human Resource data tends to be data that employees need to access on the fly, especially things such as benefits information and time-off requests. Providing the capacity to do that easily and securely on mobile devices means making sure the solution offers client software for both Android and iOS devices at a minimum.
- Security. Be sure to investigate how the solution protects customer data. Most of these systems are cloud-based, which means your employee data including personal information and financial data will wind up stored online someplace.
So, ensuring that the solution’s adequately protected with role-based access controls and at least the option to encrypt data is critical.
Applicant Tracking
This section is about making sure you don’t let your best candidates slip through your fingers because of mismanaged onboarding. The best applicant tracking (AT) tools let you follow your candidates from the first communication until the day they leave your company. Before you choose a system, it’s important to consider your team’s particular needs. Do you want AT as part of a larger software ecosystem? Do you want something that can handle an unlimited number of users and job openings? How great is it to you that your system integrates well with your corporate website and email client?
Benefits Administration
Benefits administration is a core part of any good HR organization. Some companies may be satisfied with the features provided by some of the all-up HR management systems reviewed in this HRMS roundup, but others have more complex BA requirements and need software that specializes in BA. This is why we opted to devote a whole roundup to the category. Flush benefits packages are a major transfer point in attracting top talent to your startup, small to midsize business (SMB), or enterprise. But the ease and efficiency through which your business offers its various benefits packages are how you keep those employees happy and show them they’re valued.
BA software should do two things: It should make it easy for HR managers to choose and customize plans, and it should make it even simpler for employees to register for those benefits via an automated enrollment process as well as easily access their benefits and insurance information. The stand-alone BA abilities you choose within your HR suite should be able to handle basic pharmaceutical, dental, vision, life insurance, and disability, with customizable plans.
Performance Management
Businesses tend to look at a solution’s performance management features when choosing which and the best HR management software to adopt. This is because there are various popular methodologies for ranking employee performance. Software makers have continued to create a range of cases to suit business needs. Evaluating employees for bonuses and compensation as well as crediting them for certifications, as well as skill advancement are all key features to look for.
While it doesn’t have its payroll module, it can effectively communicate employee performance results to your existing payroll system. Data integration should be a key feature no matter what system you wind up choosing, as is the ability to define your design workflow for the performance review process. This means the system can use email, document routing, and internal workflow routing to let you design an initial performance review, followed by the right number of following approvals and evaluations necessary in your organization.
Scheduling and Shift Planning
For operations dependent on running multiple shifts of workers, scheduling and shift planning features are must-haves. While this is often done by using dedicated apps separate from the HRMS suite, some suites include this ability as well. Whether you want to opt for one of those or a dedicated shift planning water is dependent on the features you need and possibly on whether you can integrate a dedicated solution with your overall HR software platform. In small operations, shift scheduling is often handled using just a grid built on a spreadsheet. But opting into a dedicated scheduling solution can give you much greater versatility than any spreadsheet can provide. The ability to quickly tie scheduling into both attendance and payroll is a basic benefit. But the ability to give scheduling on across mobile platforms while allowing shift members to pick up, drop or swap shifts without a manager or IT intervention is not only advanced, it’s something you should test to see if it fits into your day-to-day workflow.