Best HR Management Software in 2024

HR tools—also known as HR software platforms, HR information systems, human capital management software, or HR management systems—make managing a growing workforce more efficient. These software tools streamline and automate the traditional functions of the HR department of benefits administration, payroll, and personnel tracking. Still, choosing the best among many HR tools for small business or a large enterprise can be a challenging experience, which is why we invite you to go through this guide and to familiarize yourself with the basics of the best HR management software tools. You can also learn more about top 10 HR management software solutions from our comparison articles.

It’s always a good idea to start your research on the best human resources software by testing a fair number of free trial plans or demo offered by reliable HR software providers. You will also get a better grasp of what is HR software. It will save you some time and money because you will be able to experience the list of important features firsthand, do a comparison, and identify any possible issues. The best thing to do is to try services that currently have the highest SmartScore rankings and Customer Satisfaction Rating in our HR software reviews: Zoho People reviews, BambooHR, Zoho Recruit, Workable, FinancialForce HCM and TribeHR. You can get details on the other leading apps in this category by reading our in-depth article on the top 10 HR management software.

Regardless of their size, all businesses want a more cost-effective online performance and best HR software systems that can integrate easily with their software infrastructure in place. They also expect the system to be able to respond to employment challenges, which, once again, apply to all scales and industries. This is why the final beneficiaries of the best HR software can be:

• Small businesses – An HR system is always able to improve management efficiency as it integrates the HR function seamlessly in any other management aspect. Small companies can benefit from it by boosting their decision-making process because they will have all the information they need to make the most of their talent and human resources.
• Medium businesses – Medium businesses are exactly between starters and grown market leaders, which qualifies them as the ones having the least time to keep staff records for more important functions. They need an HR system to communicate with their employees, to provide them with information and to answer inquiries to ensure everybody is on board.
• Large businesses – One of the biggest challenges to every large business is to measure ROI, because it blocks most of their time and resources. They can be far more productive with a powerful HR system, because such can take over critical business functions and consequently reduce labour costs.

Enterprises need advanced HR software tools to perform a variety of core functions, such as hiring, onboarding, benefit and payroll administration, and also to keep their business agile, and base decisions on accurate analytics. The way online HR platforms are designed nowadays, they can be used for assessment science, referral recruiting, online learning and performance management, skipping the clunky setup, which gets even more painful as the company/organization grows in size. Needless to mention, large enterprises have vast and decentralized teams where recruiting and managing human capital can cost a fortune, if it wasn’t for a unified HR solution to handle them online.

In addition, the demands of enterprises may require cloud-based solutions for payroll administration (compensation, benefits, shifting and attendance), social and referral recruiting (social analytics, applicant tracking, career portal), and talent management (onboarding and goal setting).

• Zoho People: a well-known member of the Zoho productivity suite that covers all employee management operations, empowered with a centralized database and employee self-service.
• BambooHR: a great HR program for small and mid-size businesses with an inbuilt Applicant Tracking System (ATS).
• Workday: a popular SaaS solution for large and global enterprises that unifies human capital management with payroll and finance management, and is a solid alternative to legacy ERP.
• SuccessFactors (SAP): an advanced cloud-based HR system with robust functionalities that allow you to augment your workforce and to stay ahead of competitors.
• iCims Talent Acquisition: a popular on-boarding platform with career portals that empower companies to simplify and improve their hiring process.
• Zoho Recruit: a cloud-based recruitment application that is packed with customizable features to help companies find the right candidates quickly.

You can get details on other widely used apps in this category by reading our article on the top 15 HR management solutions.

Industry experts divide the field of HR management  software into three main types:

• Core HR. It focuses on the three fundamental functions of human resources management: benefits administration, personnel tracking, as well as payroll. Every business will require these basic functions once it has a good number of employees. Your business will need core HR functionality when, for example, manually doing the payroll and managing your employees using spreadsheets have become too burdensome and tedious a task.
• Strategic HR. It expands your business by attracting and cultivating the best people, and better handling your workforce overall. Generally, these strategic HR applications provide a unique blend of applicant tracking and recruiting, performance review, and learning management functionality. This kind of software automates and streamlines these strategic processes to make sure that your company is using its employees as efficiently as possible, and at the same time ensuring that employees are continuously growing and developing—thus, boosting employee satisfaction and retention rates.
• Workforce management (Workforce administration). It refers to the range of software tools intended to efficiently schedule and monitor your workforce. These tools are best for organizations where employees are working in shifts, and include solutions to monitor time and attendance, track compliance with labor laws and generally include payroll functionality, or effectively integrate with other payroll software programs.

Of course, core HR, strategic HR, and workforce management functions overlap often. While best-of-breed solutions for specific functions per category are available, there are integrated suites that boast across-the-board functionality.

As mentioned earlier, there are many submodules of HR software that deal with specific functions, including recruitment, time tracking and attendance, payroll, leave management, goal setting, etc.

Core HR

• Benefits administration – handles employee benefits, including paid time off, insurance policies on medical/dental/life, and 401k participation. Example tools: OmnipriseHRM, Triton HR, and Epicor HR.
• Payroll – manages employee 401k contributions, salaries, bonuses, as well as health deductions; calculates taxes; and cuts paychecks. Many solutions provide effective integration for direct deposit. Example vendors: Halogen, Tribe HR, and Vista HRMS.
• Personnel tracking – centralizes employee information, such as contact information, SSN, past employment, as well as demographic information. Example tools: Sage HRMS, Lawson HR, and Ascentis.

Strategic HR

• Employee evaluation – offers a centralized system where you or your supervisors can conduct and monitor reviews with their employees. Another term for this is performance review software. It features performance measuring, tracking, as well as goal management. Example tools: Empower by ECI, People-Trak, and Cornerstone CSB.
• Applicant tracking systems (ATS) – gives you a centralized database that allows recruiters store applicant data and employment applications well throughout the application process. Its features include applicant status monitoring, candidate tracking, and effective integration with other HR applications. Many vendors likewise include on-boarding features, such as the ability to do background checks. Example tools: MarketRate, iCIMS, and NuViewHR.
• Learning and development – provides a centralized hub to review new employee training as well as the ongoing skills development of your existing employees. Its features include curriculum and certification path definition, content authoring and management, as well as testing and reporting. Example tools: Halogen Talent Management Suite, SmartTeam, and Prosperity LMS.

Workforce Management

• Time and attendance – helps businesses track employee attendance and absences. It also enables employees to clock in and out. Most solutions also monitor accrual and usage of PTO and sick days. Rules-based solutions provide alerts when your employees miss or do established amounts of work. Example tools: LaborVIEW, TimeForge Labor Management, and Kronos.
• Employee scheduling – gives functionality for scheduling employee attendance and shifts to ensure compliance with your staffing needs. Tools can schedule staff across locations, departments, and projects, and alert employees when schedules change and when staffing levels become inadequate. Example solutions: Sage HRMS, Ascentis, and UltiPro.

HR management systems nowadays have reduced drastically the barriers to HR administrators to track the work of their employees, and they have facilitated the hiring process. Our detailed comparisons show that the following are some of the most distinct benefits of HR management software:

• Streamlined Administrative Tasks. Integrated HR suites’ main purpose is to replace the variety of standalone HR applications and to automate basic HR functions in a single system.
• Improved Recruiting. If you want to scale your workforce easily, a best-of-breed and effective recruiting and applicant tracking tool might be the best option. Many solutions today can automatically post your job vacancies on job boards as well as social media outlets. Likewise, it can simplify candidate tracking and improve the on-boarding of new employees. With searchable and user-friendly databases of candidates and robust reporting features, your business can make the most of your candidate pool, while at the same time expanding your talent base.
• Advanced Workforce. HR management systems help you ensure that your best employees are duly recognized and rewarded so they will stay with your business and continue to perform great work. The broad type of talent management tools can help you do that: with performance appraisal, gathering peer feedback, to employee training, and other development tools. Benefits of using such tools include higher morale, increased retention rates, and better employee productivity.

What can definitely be expected from HR software is to continue developing and presenting top-notch features that help businesses go out of the box, and the most recent trends are already proving that:

• Gamification. New HR managers pay specific attention to rewarding elearning and outstanding performance, which is why they include Application Tracking Systems to evaluate success at the end of each year. Needless to say, ATSs are priceless for managers to distinguish successful from unsuccessful employees, and to make smart decisions for their companies.
• Mobile HR. This is more of a necessity than a trend, knowing how decentralized teams can be nowadays. Mobile functionality grows and will continue growing, meaning that careers will be completely mobile-optimized, and the application process will happen exclusively via mobile devices.
• Video Communication. The latest trend among HR software vendors is to provide low-cost video production to their clients to empower recruiters to perform video interviews and decide based on them. Due the fact that more and more jobs have become home-based, the trend is expected to qualify as one of the basic recruitment mechanisms in the near future.
• The Rise of Remote Work. The necessity of having remote work available as an option has become a norm in 2020, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. HR systems are expected to be robust and scalable enough to accommodate remote work in their automated tasks, especially payroll and attendance management.

HR systems may be the tool of the future, but that doesn’t mean there are no risks and disadvantages when it comes to buying one. These are potential issues we would like you to pay attention to:

• Errors. As powerful and smart as they are, HRISs cannot be compared to human users, and, can, therefore, make serious inaccuracies and errors that can affect the welfare of the entire business. In the worst-scenario, wrong data entry could completely corrupt the workflow of your company.
• Privacy Issues. While it is a great idea to track employees and assign tasks online, HR systems pose a serious hazard to privacy breaches. To start with, there are laws that you have to comply with, a barrier that technical-savvy and well-intended users will respect, but you can never be sure enough that unauthorized users or dishonest ones won’t use the information for private purposes.
• Slave to Connectivity. Like other cloud-based systems, a connection to the Internet is a standard requirement in order to access information or connect with your superior or co-workers. A simple local outage or server down situation may pose some inconvenience.

With the health and safety concerns posed by the coronavirus pandemic, working from home transformed from being a viable option to standard operating procedure virtually overnight. Companies wholesale asked workers to stay home to work and get connected instead.

HR systems are in the same situation. Remote workers expect that since they are expected to work efficiently at home and help with business continuity, basic HR services will also continue to go uninterrupted or delayed. The demand for cloud-based HR software that can consolidate data from individual workers in their homes has raised considerably.

There used to be a time when HR recruitment via software meant posting on top job websites and asking applicants to call or email you for an appointment. Nowadays, posting a job opening is just the beginning of the HR software’s involvement, as recruitment occupies several modules under HR software.

HR gathers so much data from applicants (whether they get the job or not) and even more insights from new hires. HR software can help gather these pieces of information and consolidate them to give you an idea of how effective your recruitment campaign is, whether you attract the right candidates and whether applicant expectations fit the company goals.

Given the right tools, you may find even deeper insights into employees, what would make them stay in the company, what would make them leave, what intangibles do they find irresistible.

Rather than look at recruitment as a module, you may want to consider dedicated strategic HR tools for recruitment independent of, or integrated with Core HR software. Examples include Zoho Recruit, Pinpoint, and Manatal.