Building your ideal HR tech stack

From recruitment and hiring to training and onboarding, to payroll and benefits management, HR departments are critical to the sustained growth of every organization. As industries continue to modernize, HR tools become more sophisticated, more capable, and more trusted. 

We’ve compiled a guide to building your HR tech stack and selecting the best HR tools for your organization, beginning with building an understanding of the right tools for various HR tasks.

Before you begin

Before building your tech stack, start with the right questions. Clear answers to these questions will not only eliminate information overload when doing your research, but will also carve a path to the right tech tool to help you achieve your desired outcome. Some questions to consider include:

What are your company’s specific needs?

Here are some questions to kickstart your HR analysis:

• Do you have an efficient recruitment process, or could it use some updating? 
• Is your onboarding seamless and professional, or do you need tools to improve the experience? 
• Are you on budget for your HR needs, or could you stand to cut costs? 
• Are you growing quickly but struggling to find the right talent? 

Every organization has different needs at different times. Understanding your current and future needs will allow you to determine which tools will get you where you need to go.

What are your company’s goals?

Your goals will depend on the size and stage of your company. Are you in a startup phase? Are you in a scaling period or are you a legacy business looking to sustain your operations and modernize? Develop a clear vision of where you want to end up (if you haven’t already) and use all relevant tools to help you get there.

What existing tech can help you achieve these goals?

Now that you have a clear sense of your goals, here are some questions to take your analysis further:

• Are your goals and needs unique or common? Or have other companies faced these issues? If so, how have they solved them? 
• Have you already invested in HR tech? If so, has it been useful? If not, is it possible that you need to explore other options? 

Before branching into new time, energy, and capital investments into new tech, you must assess your existing tech. Doing so will save you valuable time and energy, and will save your organization valuable capital investment. 

Best HR tools

According to Kissflow, a great HR tool should have:

• Ease of use
• Quick implementation
• Multi-channel access
• Collection of ready-to-use reports
• Seamless integration with third-party tools
• Employee self-service portal
• Customizability to fit unique needs
• Scalability to meet business needs

Whether you’re looking for tools for recruiting, onboarding, or payroll management, there are many industry-leading resources for HR managers in organizations of every size. Let’s take a deeper dive into each task category.

Recruiting and hiring

Job posting: Better Team

Posting the position you’re hiring for can be a tedious task. Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to see the same job posted on hundreds and even thousands of job boards. On the one hand, it’s important to make sure you’re reaching as many potential candidates as possible. On the other hand, all that posting can take up lots of valuable time with no guarantee that you’ll attract the right talent.

Enter Better Team, an online HR tool for recruitment that gives you the power to post your job listing on all job boards at once. Better Team saves you time by eliminating your afternoon of copying and pasting and even helps create high performing job descriptions. 

Employee screening: HireSelect

Let’s say you posted your available position. Happily, you received interest from a range of candidates. HireSelect is a great HR staffing tool that takes candidates from the interest stage to the screening stage. 

HireSelect provides HR managers with easily implemented web-based pre-employment tests that gauge candidate aptitude, personality, skills, and other criteria. This service boasts industry-leading qualifications, with tests designed by Harvard psychologists and based on the US Department of labor’s O*Net database of more than 1,100 job profiles. 

Employee onboarding

Onboarding procedures: Tallyfy

If your current idea of onboarding is having employees show up and report to a supervisor, if you’ve ever had issues with employee retention, or if you’ve never standardized your onboarding process, Tallyfy is the HR management software for you. 

Here’s how it works. First, you compile a list of all the necessary tasks that need to be completed for new employees—filling in the proper paperwork, having documents approved by management, scheduling a start date, issuing the necessary onboarding materials, etc. Tallyfy then compiles all of these tasks into a simple digital platform, ensuring that each task gets completed promptly. It even allows HR managers to automate the approval process.

Employee orientation: Donut

A large part of onboarding and orientation is familiarizing new employees with current employees. It’s important for employees to make social connections at work and Donut is a great tool to encourage employee interaction. 

Seamlessly integrating with Slack, Donut pairs people up for conversation, forming connections between buddies, managers, and members of the same team. It’s that simple. Being the “new kid” can be intimidating and onboarding is a critical time in every employee’s journey within an organization. Donut even automates the logistics of the new hire process and sends notifications of key milestones at 60 days and one year.

HR processes and enrollment: Lucidchart

There is a lot of information to communicate to employees during onboarding—and a lot for new employees to absorb. From organizational structures to benefits enrollment processes to training flows, it’s helpful to create visualizations of all this information to clearly and consistently communicate key details to new and existing employees. With Lucidchart, HR professionals can automate key diagrams like org charts and make process creation and adoption more effective.

Payroll and benefits

Payroll and benefits management: ADP

If you’re looking for a comprehensive solution that combines HR, payroll, timesheets, taxes, and benefits management into a single platform, look no further than ADP. This cloud-based HR management tool is the resource of choice for over 650,000 businesses the world over and has been named as one of Fortune Magazine’s “World’s Most Admired Companies” for 12 consecutive years. ADP has a long list of integrations, including Slack and Quickbooks, making it a seamless addition to your HR tech stack. 

Employee wellness

Employee recognition: Bonusly

Everyone loves being recognized for doing a good job. When asked how to improve employee engagement, 58% of professionals responded with “employee recognition.” This is what makes Bonusly such a great tool. Bonusly allows employees to receive recognition from peers and managers through micro bonuses. Employees can then trade their micro bonuses for rewards from a custom catalog. Bonusly improves employee engagement and makes the workplace a more rewarding environment.

Productivity

Performance reviews and evaluations: Trakstar

Trakstar provides HR managers with tools to make performance reviews and employee evaluations simple and easy. Employees can share company-related information directly with HR managers and receive real-time feedback. Trakstar is an HR communication tool that improves the company from the inside out. 

For HR managers, flexible performance reviews that include individual goal-setting and a platform for personal development make it simple to track performance, assess performance, and make adjustments if necessary. As an HR data analysis tool, Trakstar has everything a growing company would need.

Learning and development

Employee learning and development: Trainual

Developing employees is a core priority of the most effective HR managers, and no one makes it easier than Trainual. Similar to the instruction manuals that come with cars, Trainual gives companies the power to store and reference each workflow, process, and operating procedure in one seamless training tool. From embedding videos to making videos on the fly to screen-capturing a work process, Trainual gives you the tools to make sure each employee is up to speed every step of the way.  

Tips to improve your tech stack

As your business evolves, your HR needs will also evolve. Using outdated tools or the wrong tools won’t serve you when you’re charting into new territory or expanding your services, so it’s important to regularly update your HR tech stack. Integrate different tools and allow them to work together. You may find that certain tools provide more versatility and efficiency when combined with others. Combined, they may be just the solution you’ve been looking for. 

Treat your tech stack like your workforce: Have a clear set of desired outcomes, be willing to try something new, and always move in the optimal direction for your organization.