When a company has the same number of employees as fingers on a hand, everyone is asked to wear multiple hats. There is no HR department, there's no marketing department, there may not even be a single salesperson. Given this amoeba-like personnel circumstance, the software tools typically used by a business of this size are rudimentary, and not specific like an HR software: think Microsoft Excel or Google Drive. There are few, if any, specialists in an organization this size, so it makes little sense to pay for expensive software that requires a specialist.
However, as a business scales and adds to its employee count, the workers can shed some of their hats, offloading responsibilities to new employees. Departments begin to form, and you begin to see employees with the word "specialist" tacked on to the end of their title.
At this point, organizations often scrap the spreadsheets and invest in specialized software for each department. By doing this, teams ideally become more efficient. One person is able to complete the work that would otherwise require several people. Today, we're going to take a look at human resources (HR). We'll investigate five tools that every growing HR department should consider investing in.
Core HR software becomes a requirement for every organization at some point. This software is the hub for all other HR-related software. Its job is to store employee information and documents in a centralized database. Core HR software, like BambooHR, integrates with tons of other HR software, so you can do all your HR work without having to open several different tools. When you make a change in one tool, it reflects in all of the others.
As your business grows, you can expect a lot more applicants applying to your posted job openings. This is where an applicant tracking system (ATS) comes in. ATSs like Lever enable you to post jobs to job boards and easily track the information of each applicant. Using this one tool, you can post a job, review applicants, reject applicants and manage your interviewing schedule. This software gives one person the power and appearance of a fully built-out recruiting team.
As soon as managers have to start overseeing more than just a couple people, it can become difficult to track the performance of every member of a team. Performance management software enables a manager to keep tabs on an entire team and provide help to facilitate career progress. Tools like 15Five provide functionality for 360-degree feedback to ensure no employee falls behind and everyone within an organization is set up to succeed.
Employee benefit packages are a crucial part of employees' overall compensation, and it's important for a business to make it easy for its employees to understand and elect their benefits. Benefits Administration software like Ease Central enables employees to manage their benefit options while making it easier for the HR team to onboard new employees and stay compliant.
When you have a company of five people, it's not hard to tell when an employee is not engaged in his or her work (rarely is this an issue since early employees tend to feel highly valued). As a business grows, it becomes more difficult to ensure that everyone is happy. Employee engagement software like Bonusly allows the HR department to anonymously survey the workforce to see where the organization can improve so that the maximum number of employees can be fulfilled by their work.