Top 5 Benefits of HR Software: Examples of Leading Solutions Explained

HR software offers companies big and small an efficient way to streamline and automate processes that relate to employee management. From applicant tracking to attendance tracking and payroll management, and to benefits administration and training management, HR software comes in a wide range of packages, that no single solution fits all.

Hence, before you jump in and subscribe to a plan, it pays well to understand this software category.

In this article, you’ll have a clear picture of the benefits of HR software in your company. You’ll also go through the fundamentals of this software solution.

Do you find it hard to look and identify the right candidates to hire? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. In fact, worrying about this aspect is not misplaced as so much money is at stake in having new hires.

Hiring a new employee is not cheap. In a press release by ULTATEL’s CEO Amr Ibrahim, it’s revealed that SMBs can spend up to $7,645 in the hiring process for a new employee from recruitment, screening, and training. With that, it’s crucial to ensure each new hire is worth it. But the challenges faced by HR teams don’t stop there, though.

According to a survey via Robert Half, 36% of HR managers reveal identifying and hiring the right candidate tops the most difficult part of their work. The next aspect, voted with 26%, is terminating employees. Finally, handling benefits and perks programs and guaranteeing equity on internal and external compensation comes next with 23% and 14%, respectively.

With today’s technological advancements, there are tools available to help streamline and solve these challenges in your HR’s workflows. Built specifically for HR teams, an HR software assists managing your workforce with an array of benefits.

Definition of HR Software

Before delving into the benefits of HR software platforms, let’s have HR software explained first. Also often referred to as Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) and Human Resources Management Systems (HRMS), it’s a software built for streamlining and automating your Human Capital Management (HCM) processes in one database.

The HR technology landscape is crowded with various solutions due to the continually changing functions of HR departments. Despite this, many of these systems don’t face direct competition as they tightly target a broad range of niches. For a start, HR software systems come in both integrated suites and best-of-breed platforms.

The purpose of HR software solutions come in various specialties (for instance, administration, benefits, employee management, learning management, performance management, recruiting, talent management, training, and workforce management). You may read this article on what is HR management software for an in-depth discussion of its definition, features, and benefits, among others.

Meanwhile, here’s an overview of some of an HR software’s main categories:

1. HR Administration. This is where the three traditional pillars of HRM (payroll, time and attendance, and benefits) are automated and streamlined.
2. Talent Management System. This is a more targeted database and location specifically for recruitment, employee retention efforts, and employee development.
3. Learning Management System. This is designed for determining an employee’s education, skills, and qualifications and developing them with available courses and materials.

The simplicity of monday.com’s UI makes it adaptive to HR processes, among other business workflows.

Key Features of an HR Software

No two HR software system is alike. Each product offers their own features and capabilities. However, there are key features you have to look at, such as:

1. Performance evaluation
2. Time tracking
3. Attendance management
4. Applicant tracking
5. Recruiting
6. Payroll management
7. Reporting and analytics
8. Learning management
9. Self-service
10. Benefits administration

Benefits of HR Software

HR managers face numerous responsibilities and tasks in their daily workflows. Twenty-one percent of an HR manager’s time is spent on meetings with business partners and senior staff according to Total Jobs. Other tasks that consume their time include employee relations and engagement with 15.3% and meeting with employees with 13.6%.

Those three tasks require ten times more of an HR manager’s time compared to low-priority tasks such as employee engagement (2.6%), redundancy management (1.5%) and onboarding and instructions (1.1%). In order to free up their time to focus on their high-priority tasks, an HR software helps in various HR-related processes.

After having HR software explained, let’s proceed with the HR software benefits:

1. Overseeing your employees

Maintaining and keeping your staff is crucial. While recruiting is necessary to grow your talent pool, growing and developing your current staff is more cost-effective, especially since they’re already familiar with your company’s policies and workflows.

An HR software allows you to keep track of every aspect that’s required to plot your employee’s career development plan. This includes gathering information about their performance on training courses, keeping a record of each employee’s points for development, and conducting appraisals regularly.

You can also assure that the data from appraisals are stored properly including details on the topics you’ve covered, the goals you set, and the feedback received. This improves your employee’s morale by giving them objectives to aim for and making them feel engaged with your company.

Sample features:

1. Employee documents database. This lets you save all your employee documents in the system.
2. Appraisal management. Handling the appraisal process from scheduling meetings to storing reviews of the employee’s performance and feedback.
3. Applicant tracking. Streamlines how you find the right people and choose the best candidates.

2. Monitoring leaves and absences

At times when your employees suddenly have to request leaves for holidays or sickness absences, you wouldn’t want to be caught off-guard and entangled with messy, time-consuming email trails. This can significantly disrupt your workflows and productivity.

As one of the most time-consuming aspects for HR managers, a good HR solution can help you efficiently manage absences and leaves. It simplifies and automates the way you plan for the holidays, keep track of each employee’s remaining leaves, calculate pro-rate entitlement, and handle holiday requests.

Sample features:

1. Absence management. Overview of an employee’s absences, leaves and training to handle employee calendar efficiently and effectively.
2. Payroll management. Exporting adjustments to the employee’s payroll to the systems.
3. Company calendar. An overview of upcoming company holidays, employees who are out of the office, upcoming birthdays, and events, among others.

3. Seeing data at a glance

Out-of-date and inadequate information makes decision-making difficult. For instance, a position with high turnover needs you to oversee the amount of training the employee gets and their performance. Getting in touch with their line managers is also vital.

An HR system collects data and lets you access it anytime and anywhere you need it. The data is available at a glance and you can view and retrieve them with only a few clicks. This enables you to deeply drill into the analytics of the data which are relevant in identifying trends and spotting problems. It’s a feasible solution that relieves you from the mess of having a paper-based system with file cabinets and information that’s difficult to reiterate and extract from memory.

Sample features:

1. Training record. Scheduling and monitoring training to employees by HR and line managers.
2. HR reporting. This helps you gain HR insights and create detailed reports.
3. Audit trails. This enables you to monitor data changes by who, what, and when.

BambooHR’s dashboard helps you gain greater visibility of your employees’ profiles.

4. Securing data management

In a typical setup, your sensitive employee data are stored in your office’s filing cabinets. But is it really safe? There is little to no assurance that everyone who can access these files is authorized. But by storing these vital data in the cloud through your HR system, you can prevent unauthorized people from getting their hands (and eyes) on information they’re not allowed to see.

It also gives you full visibility on who viewed what information and when. Since it’s saved on your computer or mobile device, you won’t risk your files from physical catastrophes such as fire or flood. Additionally, it enables you to have a paper-free office as you no longer have to print documents, policies, handbooks, and training manuals.

Sample features:

1. Access permissions. Line managers and finance departments, among others, are given permission to access to the system to reduce your HR’s workload and ensure the right employee or department gets direct access to their data.
2. Employee Self-service. Employees can request for holidays and leaves and update their personal details with permission.
3. Security. User authentication, data encryption, and user authorization are only some of the features that an HR system has to ensure data is not accessed by unauthorized personnel.

5. Saving time and improving productivity

Admin tasks are some of the most time-consuming tasks an HR manager does. Some of these include holiday booking and approval, holiday allowance calculation, sickness recording and monitoring, employee data updating, objective logging, training monitoring, and expense logging and approval, among others.

Automation through HR systems reduces the time and effort it takes to complete each task. When you receive a holiday request from an employee, you no longer have to go through spreadsheets to look for the complete information on the employee’s request status. It helps you be more efficient and productive with your work management regardless of the number of employees you handle.

Sample features:

1. Email alerts. Instant notifications for edits, approvals, requests, and status updates to ensure information is up-to-date.
2. Reminders. Setting reminders for big events (birthdays, new hires, appraisals, and probation reviews, among others) for automatic notifications.
3. Task checklist. Tracking to-dos and scheduling time to ensure everything that needs to be done is accomplished.

Hibob helps you manage a people directory, making it easy to connect your employees with each other.

Examples of HR Software

The purpose of HR software greatly varies due to the variety of workflows of HR departments from one company to the next. Based on overall functionality, we listed the leading and most popular examples of HR software solutions we recommend you to check out. For more options, you may also read this top 20 HR software solutions.

monday.comVISIT WEBSITE

monday.com is typical of a new breed of HR software that is adaptive and scalable to different organizational needs. monday.com bills itself as a work OS, helping organizations of all sizes manage processes across different departments. Among others, it structures HR workflows, specifically for recruitment, onboarding, training and employee wellbeing. The software helps you gain visibility into daily employee performance, as well as manage your talent sourcing. A flexible solution, monday.com can also be configured for employee engagement, feedback tracking and vacation monitoring. You can assign it as the central system for all employee-related data, while integrating monday.com with your key business apps such as Google Drive, Slack, LinkedIn and more.

OnPayVISIT WEBSITE

Some HR software solutions are like OnPay, which is designed for payroll but integrated with key HR features. Its full-service payroll includes unlimited monthly pay runs, tax filings and payments, W-2 and 1099 employees, plus, multiple pay schedules and rates across 50 US states. OnPay also features an employee self-service portal for paystubs, tax forms, voluntary deductions and self-onboarding. Its HR tools include personnel checklists, an HR resource library and built-in document templates. The software suits both small and large businesses and integrates with key HR and accounting software like QuickBooks Online, Xero, When I Work and Mineral.

ADP Workforce NowVISIT WEBSITE

ADP Workforce Now is a human resource software solution that offers cloud-based tools for payroll, HR, talent, time, and benefits administration. It uses a single database to monitor and develop the organization’s human capital. ADP Workforce Now makes use of cutting-edge technology to create workflows and HR processes that create value for the organization. It provides solutions that simplify people management processes, ensuring that the most crucial asset of the organization is provided with consistent quality service. ADP Workforce Now seamlessly integrates with business tools such as Quickbooks, Oracle, Sage, and a host of recruiting and learning tools.

BambooHRVISIT WEBSITE

BambooHR, one of the most popular HR management solutions, is an online Human Resources Information System (HRIS) that helps you to focus on your people and not on paperwork. It’s an intuitive and easy-to-use cloud-based tool that enables you to create user groups, customize tabs, fields, and tables, track benefits, time-off, training, and integrates with third-party applications for payroll and applicant tracking. This all-in-one HR solution is built and priced for SMEs. The vendor offers an attractive free trial plan.

HibobVISIT WEBSITE

HR software like Hibob are fully featured HRIS that’s ideal for growing medium and large enterprises. Hibob features core HR functions, which you can build on for more solutions such as time management and performance evaluation. You can streamline approval cycles and the onboarding process via web or mobile, while keeping a neat people directory to help connect your staff to each other. Other key features include surveys, people analytics and a payroll hub.

By Emily Watson

Emily Watson is a human resource management expert specializing in workforce planning and HR development. Throughout her years in the industry, she has also dabbled in career path development, employee training, and workforce management. In her four years as a contributor for FinancesOnline, she has reviewed over a thousand HR tools ranging from recruitment platforms to unified human capital management suites. She has also created in-depth analyses of emerging HR technologies and trends to provide companies worldwide with the data they need to keep up with industry shifts.