Most Human Resources (HR) operations are in the process of digitizing (or have already done so). Modern tools ranging from payroll management to process automation and employee assessment simplify and improve the HR workload.

Beyond keeping track of data, these tools enable data collection, direct interaction with employees, and organizational collaboration. Many HR teams combine several to build a toolkit that improves how they work, the results they deliver, and their goals. Choosing the right tools, however, depends on each unique organization.

What makes a good HR toolkit?

The market is flooded with HR tools, so you’ll have to make choices based on clear value and how well a tool maps to your business strategy and HR plan. Look for tools that most closely meet your organization’s needs. Or, look for HR platforms that deliver a full-service or near-full-service approach.

However, if you adopt too many tools, they’ll overwhelm you and make it difficult to derive any value for your processes. Reduce the number of tools you have to lower costs, decrease data lost in an overwhelming array of apps, and make it easier to manage the HR environment.

When searching for good HR tools, look for ones that:

  • Are relevant and map to your business goals and strategy
  • Fit defined needs
  • Have clear value propositions for the business
  • Can be used in-house with training for internal personnel
  • Are suitable for the business size and near-future growth

Types of HR tools

Most HR tools fall into one of the following categories:

  • Recruitment and onboarding – Recruitment, hiring, and onboarding tooling helps you manage candidates, deliver assessments, map roles (plus the needs for those roles), and compare candidates to find the best fit for the job. Onboarding software helps you identify strong potentials and transform them into great employees. 
  • Culture and rewards – These tools help you share company culture, promote a positive work environment, share feedback, and manage how, when, and why people talk to each other. 
  • People management – This category includes employee engagement, productivity management, payroll, benefits, timesheet tracking, etc. These tools are normally included in full-service HR portals but can be purchased as standalone resources as well. 
  • Development – Development tooling typically ties into employee assessment and feedback tooling, so it’s often part of employee management platforms. They also frequently include specific skills assessments, digital learning portals, and tracking tools to map employee competencies to tests and training opportunities. 
  • Productivity – Productivity management tools enable collaboration, scheduling, remote working, and data sharing. Although only tangentially connected, HR nevertheless strives to encourage and improve personal productivity. 

Most organizations eventually need tools from some or all of these categories. Thankfully, many HR platforms offer most or all of them. However, you may need to supplement a platform with more specific solutions, like digital communication, employee assessments, etc. 

3 Ways technology can help you scale HR efforts

Many HR teams build exemplary recruitment and management processes — only to lose them as their organization grows. Robust operations that last in the long term require the development of sustainable processes that scale with your organization and teams through massive growth spurts, performance reviews, and active recruitment.

Technology offers solutions to help you scale your HR efforts without greatly expanding your team or adding too much work and complexity.

Introducing an HR portal or platform

Managing employee onboarding, providing updates on processes and policy changes, and ensuring employees have ready access to company-related information is time-consuming. A digital platform or portal is an effective option to boost your HR efforts significantly. In most cases, you can integrate an HR portal into other service delivery such as work processes, documentation, and team management.

An HR portal should include:

  • Basic HR information such as work hours, opening times, office locations, and contact information
  • Individual user profiles
  • Company policy (vacation, contract, healthcare, etc.)
  • Contract information
  • Development options and opportunities
  • Career path information
  • Application portal for time off (e.g., sick days, vacation)

You may also want to include information such as team structures, frequently asked questions, tools used in the organization, and how to contact IT support in your portal. This creates a single portal with everything employees need to navigate your organization, make decisions, and submit requests to HR – with no need for manual assistance.

Self-service saves time for both employees and HR since anyone can access the necessary services without waiting for HR to unlock them or provide assistance. Your organization will, however, have to invest in a strong onboarding program that includes teaching all personnel how to use the portal.

Automate processes

From onboarding to logging payment data, HR can greatly benefit from automating processes. You can typically determine what to automate by reviewing which repetitive tasks consume the most time, like data entry.

Automation speeds up small, but necessary tasks, which cuts down on man hours and frees HR for more important assignments. While you should maintain a manual review of every document or process, automation will allow you to scale much more quickly without needing to add team members.

Efficient data analysis

Digitization can speed up and improve many processes. Doing so will allow you to manage operations more quickly and easily, as well as react to sudden changes and share information across your organization.

Processes that greatly benefit from full or partial digitization include performance review and management, employee onboarding, professional development and reimbursement, transfers and promotions, and reprimands such as discipline or demotion.

You can save time and money for your HR team by collecting, keeping records of, and managing data digitally.

Leverage HR assessments

As you scale your business, you’ll have to learn how to hire rapidly and intelligently. This is where assessment technology comes in handy.

Assessments can quickly determine which candidates are a good fit for a certain job based on past performance. Analyze your top performers to create benchmarks, then give assessments to pinpoint potential hires who’ll excel at the role you’re hiring for.

Investing in assessment software will help your HR team make the right hiring choice at a faster pace.

Recruitment tools

Recruitment is often considered HR’s most important process. Recruitment tools allow you to automate, improve, and align recruitment with business strategy and goals – saving dozens of hours of manual labor per candidate.

Descriptive job posts

Writing good job posts starts with what the position requires. Implement frameworks to map skills and requirements and then use them to structure needs for those roles. 

Competency frameworks – An effective competency framework maps hard and soft skills to job roles, showing what success looks like in that position. This helps you clearly define what candidates need to be successful in a role so you can hire more accurately.  

Job fit assessments – Job matching tools from accredited providers also help identify the primary and secondary skills someone needs to succeed at a role. These are vital to obtain an accurate indication of what to include in the required and recommended skills section. If you’re able to assess someone who excelled at the role, you can benchmark their strengths and weaknesses to incorporate into your job post as well.

Recruitment tool recommendations

  • The Profile XT – The Profile XT blends competency and skill mapping with pre-recruitment assessments to develop job descriptions, job performance models, ongoing development, and hiring capabilities. It’s a full-service tool designed to fit into your entire employee and skills management process. 
  • Recruitee – Recruitee is a talent acquisition platform that allows you to build profiles, map skills, and then create a library of talent to filter candidates through. Recruitee uses analytics, automation, and predictive analytics to improve your hiring strategy, including data like how long it takes to hire. 
  • Breezy – Breezy combines employee searching, job profile management, referral management, and candidate comparisons for an almost full-service tool (it doesn’t offer assessments). The result is a user-friendly tool that avoids unnecessary features, providing simple hiring tools.

Assessments

Once you find a great candidate, you’ll want to check their skills and knowledge.

Candidate assessment is an integral part of the recruitment process. By identifying who can perform well in the given role, HR specialists can assign tasks to the right people, speed up onboarding, and reach business goals faster.

Assessments also help gauge an individual’s emotional intelligence, which is an incredibly important skill for employees.

While personal assessment may seem like a manager’s responsibility, automation tools significantly accelerate the process and help HR specialists analyze the results.

Work assessments

Work assessments are one of the easiest ways to determine how an individual actually works. These can be managed in-house or through an assessment center, but typically involve a work assignment. This assignment simulates a task the individual would perform once accepting a job and may be handled remotely or in-office depending on the center, the role, and your goals for it. These assessments are typically paid (especially for short-term roles) but may also be completed as part of the individual’s application process.

A work assessment is proof of performance: It shows how well an individual works under pressure, their work method and skills, and how quickly the person adapts to new situations. However, these assessments can’t measure a person’s full capacity, as they’ll improve in a role as time passes.

Culture-fit assessments

Culture-fit assessments typically involve physical work assignments, tests, and sometimes social events, where a candidate is asked to meet with their prospective team to see how well they mesh. This determines if candidates get along with team members right away, how they react on that team, and how they work in a unit. Many people are awkward, nervous, and unsure of themselves on the first day, so take this into consideration during your testing.

It’s also important not to fall into the trap of matching culture. Someone who pushes ideas and brings a new but complementary culture will be much better for your organization than an exact culture fit.

This is why culture add is also important; if you try to force everyone to assimilate into the same culture, you’ll miss out on new ideas and perspectives that could be beneficial.

Skills testing

Skills testing can include actual skills tests, as well as IQ tests, cognitive ability testing, and other assessments that check for hard and learnable skills. These tests are ideal if you need someone who can quickly step into a role and excel at it.

They also determine how well someone’s skills match their resume and their pitch, which gives you an idea of whether you want to hire them or not before investing money in interviews, assessments, or trial projects.

Skills testing should not be your primary decision-making factor unless you’re hiring for a short-term role, or a position’s major skills include intelligence, cognitive ability, and so on. Hiring someone is an investment; you want an employee who’ll grow with your organization, so personality and behavioral traits may be important elements of consideration in some cases.

Personality testing

Personality testing shows you how well an individual’s behavior, competencies, and emotional intelligence aligns with a role and its requirements. They enable you to hire for growth and personal development, with the knowledge that your candidates will grow by investing in their personal development to step into roles as team leads and managers.

How important is personality testing? Emotional intelligence and soft skills or competencies are increasingly carrying greater weight in the hiring process. Job profiling has revealed they dramatically affect long-term performance, an individual’s ability to work in a team, and their ability to grow and change with the organization.

Structured interviews

Structured interviews incorporate competencies and behavior into the interview process: Recruiters ask candidates questions, give them hypothetical situations, and suggest other potentials to determine how an individual would react in a given situation. These interviews can give you insight into how someone would react, what their motivations are, how their planned behavior reflects their past actions, and more.

Again, structured interviews aren’t a foolproof analysis of an individual’s personality, especially when someone is nervous or agitated, but they can give you a clearer idea of who you’re dealing with than a standard interview.

Assessment recommendations

Employee assessment tools are designed to help you streamline the employee selection process so you can make better decisions when hiring. In most cases, an assessment center can set up any of these processes inside your organization with a minimum of investment on your end so you can start making stronger hires.

  • Profiles Competency Assessment – The Profiles Competency Assessment report provides an estimate of an individual’s competency in areas of interest to the organization. These are the traits that are considered important for career progress and success within a company. The objective is to produce a framework that determines an individual’s potential. Add it to your hiring process to make more reasonable judgments about candidates and employees. 
  • 360° PLUS Feedback System – The 360° PLUS Feedback System is a multi-rater feedback tool designed to guide individuals in professional and personal development. It compares an individual’s self-ratings to those of individuals who regularly interact with and observe the ratee in a work setting. The tool accomplishes this using ratings from different sources, including: their boss(es), direct reports, and peers and key stakeholders, together with the individual’s self-rating. You can select from over 50 competencies to create a customized questionnaire.

Remember to validate

When looking for an assessment tool, you’ve likely heard about validation. This is typically criterion-related and content-related validation, which shows the assessment tool’s methods, criterion, and algorithms used have proven results.

However, many tools either don’t provide validation or only offer pre-validation, which means the tool isn’t validated for your environment. This can save you money, but you’ll miss out in the long run if you skip this important step.

Validation connects assessments to performance

The primary purpose of validation is to use data to prove that criterion and content (such as a competency like agility) connect to performance. It should connect the factors your tool is looking for to real-world performance inside your organization.

For example, a validation study may review factors observed in top-performers and compare those traits to those the tool is programmed to seek. Your validation study will also help you predict return on investment (ROI) by analyzing how well assessment scores correlate to increased performance.

Validation enables you to tailor your assessment

No assessment tool is perfectly suited to an organization. A robust validation study will show you how and where to update or tweak assessment scoring, searched-for competencies, and methods to improve before integrating it.

For example, you can tweak test scores to highlight certain competencies or behaviors, remove those that are irrelevant, and shorten assessments to focus only on the points that have the most impact.

Validation reduces risk

Although there are few risks associated with crafting a selection procedure for employees, validating that procedure will reduce those risks and work to protect the company legally and on a performance basis.

For example, a validation study that shows selection criteria contribute to performance or other desired company traits gives you legal defensibility because it provides a rationale for not choosing certain candidates.

It also ensures that searched-for criteria does contribute to performance. This prevents you from choosing a tool that fits your organization poorly and hinders operations.

Validating your process in advance ensures you hire for the right reasons and can defend those reasons as being legitimate and reasonable.

While some competency frameworks and HR assessment tools claim to be validated, that means nothing unless it’s validated in your environment. Validating for both content and criteria (with a sample size of 100 or more) is crucial to obtaining data that’s relevant and valuable to your company. 

A good validation process will ensure the efficacy of your selection procedure, reveal how and where to update your selection procedure, and help you acquire more value from the assessment.

Culture tools

Your top performers bring fresh ideas, new perspectives, innovation, and more to your company. To help them reach the top though, your company first has to equip employees with the necessary tools. This includes software and hardware, as well as a benefits package that’ll help them remain healthy and productive.

Effective culture tools should be able to track how, why, and when people communicate while providing a safe space for them to offer and share feedback and do their jobs well.

When considering your work culture needs, ask yourself:

  • Do employees have a computer that allows them to perform their role efficiently? 
  • Do they have access to all the software they need for their job? Is it the most efficient, effective, and reliable software available?
  • Do they have a quiet workspace where they can work uninterrupted? 
  • If their job requires regular meetings with clients or other team members, do they have a professional and equipped meeting space?
  • Do they have access to fast and reliable internet?
  • If they’re required to interface with clients through phone calls, do you provide a phone with a plan that includes unlimited minutes?

Also think about:

  • Do employees have a means to get to work? If many of them commute, can you provide bus passes? If they drive, do they have a convenient place to park?
  • If their job requires long hours at a desk, do you provide a gym stipend to encourage a healthy lifestyle?
  • If your employees stay late, do you provide dinner or healthy snacks?

When building a company, culture helps ensure all of your team members have the same values and a strong work ethic. Culture defines the employee experience; it permeates their day-to-day operations.

Defining and fostering company culture is a challenge, and there’s no definitive guide that’s an exact match for your unique company. However, here are some tips to get you on the right track:

  • Ask the right questions. This can reveal what your employees are uncomfortable with at work, if there’s a low-cost solution the company could implement, and any other issues that should be addressed.
  • Hold regular team-building activities.
  • Reward your team for jobs well done. If they finished a big project ahead of schedule, consider buying them lunch or letting them have the afternoon off.

Culture tool recommendations

  • Empuls – An all-in-one employee engagement platform designed to foster communication through feedback channels. It enables team and inter-team or interpersonal feedback as well as feedback loops between HR and employees or employees and upper management. 
  • Culture Amp – Culture Amp is an employee engagement platform that focuses on measuring employee engagement, involvement, confidence, and alignment. It also offers tools to build those processes, to foster engagement, and to create strategies to improve culture. 
  • EQ Training – Strong emotional intelligence (EQ) training, whether delivered digitally or via in-person workshops, can greatly improve culture and communication across the organization. Tools like Genos or the EQ-I assessment can be extremely valuable.

Payroll and expenses

HR specialists know everything about employees’ perks — because they have to manage them. Benefits, vacations, payroll, insurances, and all such expenses require careful tracking.

Calculating precise salaries that include overtime, bonuses, and all applicable deductions is a time-consuming process that demands undivided attention to avoid mistakes.

This is where automation achieves amazing results, considerably cutting the time needed to administer reimbursements to employees while simultaneously keeping errors to a minimum.

A payroll automation tool can greatly reduce the HR department’s workload and allow key members to spend more time proactively analyzing the data, rather than merely crunching numbers. Additionally, employees will appreciate their salaries being paid out quicker and reflecting the hours accurately the first time, making payroll software a win-win for everyone.

Installing software packages for HR management is just the first step; to take full advantage of digital HR, companies need to alter their operating procedures and adopt the right tooling. 

This is an organic process that takes time and effort on the part of top management, while HR managers act as data interpreters and align new, tech-based methods to the overall workforce management strategy. In this way, companies can leverage new technology to gain a recruiting edge as well as a clear competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Payroll and expenses tool recommendations

  • OrangeHRM – This is a complete HR management platform that stands out with its payrolling, expense, benefits, and travel tracking, and linking disciplinary actions to benefits. 
  • TriNet – TriNet is another full-service HR platform that also offers payrolling and payroll outsourcing, which makes this platform more flexible than many others. However, the software and tooling also enable automation, auto-calculation of hours and bonuses, and the integration of performance management into reimbursement. 
  • Gusto – Gusto is a payroll, benefits, time tracking, and benefits platform with full integration into accounting and an accountant portal. It’s also consistently listed as one of the best tools for SMEs seeking HR payroll solutions. 
  • QuickBooks – QuickBooks implements payrolling alongside expenses management in a very simple, stripped-down way. This makes it ideal for organizations that have existing HR management and are looking for more efficient accounting and payrolling.

Learning and development

Although in-person learning is an important offering, distance learning provides many benefits for teachers and learners: Studying online allows learners to further their education anywhere, anytime, and at a lower cost. For teachers, distance learning enables them to reach students from multiple locations, not just those who are in close physical proximity. Distance learning also minimizes the financial overhead associated with physical learning centers.

Video conferencing software

Human interaction is important for distance learning to be successful. Video calls and conferences are powerful tools that can enrich your distance learning program. For example, video call software allows you to host live, interactive sessions for your students.

Holding live video calls can simulate the in-person learning environment by fostering collaboration between students and the teacher. Compared to audio-conferencing, video conferencing significantly improves the quality of communication, which, in turn, can improve student learning and performance.

Nowadays, the market is bursting with video conferencing tools. Although each offers varying features, you’ll find most video call tools let you host webinars for large audience sizes — perfect for virtual lectures.

They also allow you to record your video sessions, which presents a great opportunity to save recorded video sessions for future use: Lessons can be provided to attendees for recap at a later date, or they can deliver pre-recorded instruction to new students.

Video conferencing software recommendations

Whiteboard applications

Not everyone learns best by listening to a teacher. According to the VARK learning styles model devised by Fleming, people prefer to learn through one of four styles: visual, auditory, reading/writing, or kinesthetic. While video conferences are great for auditory and some visual learners, they may be lacking for kinesthetic learners or visual ones who need more concrete instruction.

Whiteboard applications are an effective way to engage visual learners. In fact, research conducted in a classroom-based setting found the use of interactive whiteboards increased learner engagement and participation.

Based on these findings, it could be beneficial to incorporate virtual whiteboard tools into your online learning program. Virtual whiteboards facilitate collaborative exercises, brainstorming, and visual demonstration aspects of teaching, such as calculations or diagrams.

The advantage an online whiteboard has over a real one is that you can save your annotations, use it for collaboration, share it with other people, and combine it with video conferencing. Doing so ensures your distance learning program will appeal to and support a wider range of students.

Whiteboard applications recommendations

Online survey tools

It’s important to understand your students’ opinions of your distance learning courses. With online survey tools such as SurveyMonkey or JotForm, you can collect course feedback from your students, which will reveal the aspects of your course that did or did not work for them.

JotForm, for example, offers an e-learning feedback form template that can gain insights into how students feel about your online course. You can then use this information to make changes to your course structure and improve student satisfaction.

You can also employ online survey tools to engage students in learning by creating polls for them to interact with, or by using surveys to understand students’ learning styles, habits, and interests.

Online survey tool recommendations

Cloud-based storage

When taking your learning online, you need to consider how you’re going to share resources with your students. This usually requires a cloud-based storage solution such as Dropbox that’ll allow you to store course materials, resources, printouts, and worksheets for students to access as they need them. You can even organize course materials into folders to help students find the resources they need based on topic or lesson.

Creating a hub of resources is advantageous for distance learning, as it provides students with easy access to resources they need to deepen their learning. For instance, students with learning disabilities benefit from having more control over their web-based learning, so a centralized resource library can support this autonomy and improve their educational performance.

Cloud-based storage recommendations

Training and onboarding software

Effective onboarding software lets you create candidate profiles, map them to roles, and see where the candidate has gaps. Over time, you can also use the software to identify skills gaps across your organization and determine the training needed to close them. Often, the best tools for this are larger HR management platforms that integrate into other aspects of competency, role, and personnel management. 

Meanwhile, a learning management platform streamlines the tech tools and content that teachers and students need for a connected learning experience. These platforms can make distance learning a smoother experience by providing one solution of integrated products for online education.

Training and onboarding software recommendations

  • SkyPrep – Skyprep is an online learning management platform that enables organizations to build learning programs and a digital portal. You can link courses, create tests with grading, and reuse content across courses. 
  • Workday – Workday is an HR, finance, and planning platform that attempts to take a full-service approach. It also offers a considerable employee training and management platform, which you can integrate into your hiring and training. 
  • WorkforceHub – WorkforceHub links HR management and onboarding into a single personnel management tool, along with handling paper and policy management. Its primary goal is to create a central location for employees to log in and see everything from their performance to policies to pay stubs, making it a simple, long-term work management tool.

Personnel management software

Efficient personnel management is key to robust business operations. This means assigning the right tasks to the right people and making sure they use their time effectively. Automating day-to-day functions can save HR and your company time and money while decreasing manual error for things like feedback and performance management, discipline, benefits, etc.

People management software recommendations

  • Zoho People – Zoho People delivers a 360-degree HR solution, with HR administration automation, employee profile management, operation management, and feedback in one platform. 
  • Zenefits – Zenefits helps employers track people, operations, payroll, benefits, feedback, and much more. It also incorporates attendance and role management, making it a perfect fit for small businesses in need of an all-purpose tool. 
  • Monday.com – Monday.com is one of the largest HR platforms on the market, offering automation, tooling, and solutions for most parts of HR. In addition to time management, operations, and people management, Monday.com creates single views of most apps you might use for productivity and work management while attempting to replace most of them. 
  • Staff Squared – Staff Squared is a small business HR management tool designed around people and productivity management. It includes payroll, timesheet calculations, absence management, onboarding, and much more. 
  • People HR – People is an HR management platform that offers self-service HR, development, insights, analytics, applicant tracking, performance review, and more. It’s also a full-service outsource agency for organizations that have to grow in a hurry, allowing you to outsource specific aspects like payroll or finance. 
  • BambooHR – BambooHR is an automation and work management platform designed to digitize HR hiring, onboarding, and culture management. The platform delivers industry-specific solutions for hiring, but stands out thanks to its people- and culture-first approach to personnel management. 

Employee rewards platforms

Managing how you reward employees is an important part of HR. Luckily, there are numerous tools to oversee this.

Employee rewards platform recommendations

  • Nectar – Nectar offers an incentives platform that combines employee recognition with employee engagement. Colleagues can show each other appreciation, management can give rewards, and everyone can acknowledge performance as an organic part of work, rather than at a few touch points throughout the year.
  • Kazoo – Kazoo is an employee-based reward system allowing colleagues to reward each other. It also lets management view and manage work culture. It’s especially useful for remote and distributed teams and fully integrates into Slack.  
  • Kudos – Kudos handles employee rewards and feedback alongside employee engagement management. You can also add consulting if engagement is too low.

Collaboration and communication tools

Whether you hold meetings virtually or in the office, you can employ helpful software to keep everyone focused. Use these meeting tools to share your screens, take collaborative notes, align time zones, or meet virtually with your colleagues and clients.

Meeting platforms

  • Skype – Skype is a free online instant messaging and video chat platform that allows you to make calls as long as you have an internet connection. You can invite multiple participants to a meeting, share screens, or call a local phone with it.
  • GoToMeeting – GoToMeeting is an online meeting platform built for business and formal use. It has end-to-end encryption, making it one of the more secure meeting platforms. All users receive a unique URL for their meetings, which they can use as a base of operations.
  • Zoom – Zoom is a web conferencing service that supports online meetings, webinars, conference rooms, and video/voice/screen sharing.
  • Slack – Slack is a chat, file sharing, and video/voice calling platform with an app and browser access. It also integrates into numerous data and file management tools, includes channel filters, and has mute and scheduling capabilities to increase the speed at which people communicate. 

Scheduling tools

Good scheduling tools are a critical component of HR’s managing responsibilities. They also enable productive teamwork and keep business operations running smoothly. 

  • Calendly – Calendly organizes meeting scheduling through booking time slots. This lets colleagues book meetings with each other easily at times they know are convenient. Calendly automatically removes booked slots, allows blocked time, and integrates into Google Calendar and Outlook. 

With scheduling, Google Calendar and Outlook already have lots of tools and automation, so you may not need a special tool.

Note-taking tools

Taking notes is crucial to the success of team collaboration, so be picky when choosing a tool; you want one that’ll lift some of the burden of note-taking, not add to it.

  • Evernote – Create and share meeting notes with graphics, web snippets, and minutes included. 
  • Google Keep – Take personal notes, add checklists using color coding, and send emails from meetings.
  • Otter.ai – Automatically transcribe meetings from tools like Google Meet, Skype, or Teams to reduce note-taking. 

Project management platforms

Although project management may seem like a departmental concern, it can significantly impact the aggregate business, including HR and employee management as well as individual employee workloads. Ideally, you’d employ a single tool across front- and back-end processes. For this, Monday.com is a great solution. However, you can also look at other project management tools such as:

  • Asana – Asana takes a full-service approach to project management, with top-level views of projects, sub-projects, assignable tasks, and work management with individual task deadlines. Asana also links to files and apps like Slack, making it easy to collaborate on projects. 
  • Trello – Trello uses Kanban boards for work management with a simple structure and organization and basic assigning and deadline functions. It’s ideal for a less-complex work management solution with no need for an involved process. 
  • Wrike – Wrike is a full-service work management platform designed to manage people, projects, and long-term goals. It also fully integrates into calendars, implements automation, and features task assignments. 

Conclusion

Often, you can find the right HR tools for your business in a base platform that fills most of your needs. Then, you can supplement it with tools and functionalities that your business still lacks, whether that’s work assessments and competency frameworks or specific chat and project management tooling. 

However, less tends to be more, simply because people have trouble keeping up with dozens of programs and their login information. The best way to choose software for your HR needs is to assess those needs and then review software, check trials, and see what best fits your organization while fulfilling most of your set requirements. 

About the Author: Jocelyn Pick