HR Systems – pleading for implementation

When I made up a clocking for the first time,  I have done using Excel. It was a bit difficult because I had to compile the files received from more employees from different locations and put them in one single official Excel sheet. The probability of making mistakes was quite big, that’s why I had always checked them for three – four times before sending to my colleagues from payroll. That’s why my subject for today is related to HR systems – an overall perspective.

That means I will tell you when I consider it is necessary to implement in your business, in which areas you might use.

When is the best moment in time to implement HR systems?

First of all it is about the stage of your business. If you have a startup, your priorities may focus on strategy of growing, on sales and less on support systems, like those of HR.

But as your startup expands, your Excel files become less efficient, the probability of doing mistakes is bigger and you realise you need more people to hire, those who complete the Excel and those who check them. And that’s not only about payroll, it’s also on recruitment, onboarding, training, performance, succession planning.

Why would you choose an HR system instead of classical, well known and worldwide used Excel?

So the reasons of implementing HR systems are related to: more efficiency, more accuracy, savings comparing to hiring more people and their salaries value, supporting the strategy by obtaining complete reports about your employees.

Implementing an HR system means a depth analyse about the tasks of HR employees and decide which of them can be automated.

What types of HR systems would you implement?

The most important are payroll and time and attendance, irrespective of the stage of your business. You need to pay on time and accurately and a payroll system will eliminate the risk, because it incorporates the salaries,  the taxes, the personal information about employees, their bank accounts, company’s bank accounts. When everything is in the system, you save time, you save money and help your employees to focus on improvements, to come with new ideas and escape from burnout trap. Because burnout is not just about over time and stress. It’s also about doing the same things on a regular basis, so that to enter in an automatically mood and not refer the mistakes anymore.

Another HR system is personnel tracking. Imagine that you have a small office and your employees are already at least 50. For each employee, at hiring and after that, you need identity card, birth, marriage certificates, medical certificate, bank account file, qualifications, studies files, labour contract etc. Once you hired, every employee needs different certificates,  requests holiday or medical leaving. Having an HR system helps a lot your business because saves your limited space, you have access to the history of your employees, you eliminate the risk of losing holiday documents and so on.

Recruitee as HR system for recruitment?

Maybe the most important for me is applicant tracking system, used in recruitment. I will test Recruitee and let you know my opinion about that. At my short first impression is very well structured – showing the status of candidates, posting at the same time on multiple platforms, providing reports on candidates (like number of them, stage to hire, applicant conversion), time to fill a job, etc, showing the history of activities on account, allowing to upload CVs.

In order to be sure that a decision of buying any of HR systems mentioned above is a good one, I will consider the following criteria:

• Price and return on investment – because the overall ATS pricing range from around $3,000 (<10 employees) to around $140,000 per year (5,000+ employees), according to this source
• Employees experience with them – they need to be intuitive, to be easy understandable. If our HR employees need to call the implementation team, to adress the system vendor, to read instructions instead of doing their jobs, than we might have wrong chosen the system.
• Powerful reporting – because you, as manager, need to take the best decisions, based on accurate data. So, if tomorrow you want to change the recruitment strategy, you should have in a few minutes the overall performance of your team, their activities and results, the most powerful channels for attracting candidates.
• Web based – in a society that tends to empower flexibility in working, choosing more and more work from home, it is very important that HR systems to be developed on Web, not desktop, so that every employee from company, irrespective of location to be able to access them.

Another great article you may read here: Cum ne ușurează tool-urile de HR munca

Use technology as advantage, but not let yourself manipulated of it

Technology is a great asset in our professional lifes, especially in HR, where we are doing a lot of administrative tasks, but we need to pay attention that HR is about people, not about robots.

So I think it should be a balance between how much we appeal to technology for working easier and still how people oriented we are.

If interviews are hold by robots, we might lose great candidates, we might let ourselves driven by technology power, which is not intrinsically positive. I appreciate the power of her in sourcing and Dora Robot is a great example of it.

But let people to interact with people, keep the human from HR!