Your Guide to Evaluating HR Software
How do you choose an optimal HR solution that will suit your company’s needs and stay within the budget restrictions? With so many HR solutions and tools available on the market, one can easily get confused.
We’ve compiled this guide to help you get through the process and make sure you consider the most crucial factors when choosing an HR tool.
Step 1: Analyze your company’s needs
First off, you’ll need to analyze your current situation and devise a list of requirements for the new software. Consider gathering together all the teammates concerned and making a brainstorming session to identify the goal of implementation, crucial points, and must-have features.
Depending on the company’s size, industry and employment format (e.g. remote vs office work), you will most likely come up with different requirements. It’s also important to think about how your HR processes might change over time as your company is growing and take that factor into account as well.
Step 2: Estimate your budget
Having defined the list of requirements and prioritized them, it would be a sound idea to establish your budget so that you don’t spend time on studying and testing tools that exceed your financial limitations.
HR management software solutions vary significantly in terms of prices and functionality, so to make the optimal choice, you’ll need to clearly understand the crucial requirements. Perhaps, you’ll have to back off from certain functions to fit into the budget, or, alternatively, slightly increase the budget to purchase the solution that seems to perfectly meet your needs.
Step 3: Compare basic functionality
Now it’s time to search for and compare the available offerings from the solution providers. Consider creating a spreadsheet featuring crucial information about the products, their functions, limitations and prices. You can also list your key functional requirements in the left column and mark corresponding cells if the product meets them.
Some factors worth reckoning at this stage, also include:
- Limitations on the number of users;
- Integrations with payroll system and other corporate systems;
- Such features as onboarding, time-off management, benefits administration, surveys and performance reviews;
- Free test period;
- Data security;
- Technical support.
Solution providers usually list all the crucial information on their websites. Still, if certain information is lacking, you can always request it by contacting the vendor directly.
You might also want to look through the user reviews on the products you’re evaluating to get a more realistic and unprejudiced view. Make sure the reviewers are not engaged with the vendor, though.
Step 4: Send out RFPs, make up a shortlist of vendors
By the time you collect basic information about several products, you might have already excluded some vendors because they don’t meet your requirements. But to make the final decision, you’ll certainly need some additional information which is specific to your particular situation.
Therefore, you can prepare a request for a proposal (RFP) and send it out to the selected vendors. The RFP can include brief information on your company, technical and functional requirements, the timeline, submission guidelines, required scope, and a questionnaire. Based on the vendors’ responses, you’ll be able to make a well-informed decision.
Step 5: Take a test drive
Now, that you’ve got a couple of most promising candidates, the best thing to do would be to try using their solutions within a trial period. Most vendors provide a free trial for 1–4 weeks, which allows you to test drive the system and make sure it suits your needs before making the purchase. For example, Brainy HR provides a free 30-day demo, which should be enough to test each module of the system.
When testing the solution, try to make the most of the available features and invite your end users to also take part in the evaluation and share their opinions. Pay close attention to the system’s limitations and possible bugs, as these can be used to negotiate prices.
Final thoughts
Choosing the right HR management system for your organization is not an easy task. You need to be fully aware of your current HR process and your future needs in terms of employee management. With dozens of solutions available, you’ll need to do a rigorous analysis and compare different products to find out which of them better meet your technical, functional and financial requirements. Make sure to involve all the interest groups in the decision-making process and test drive the system before paying for it.
