HR Technology for the Small Business - Core HRIS

This installment in the occasional series on HR Technology for the small business highlights some options available to the small business (typically less than 500 employees) in the 'Core' Human Resources Information Systems market.

These are the systems that store the demographic, work history, and sometimes payroll and benefits information on your employees. They form the backbone of your HR Technology platform and strategy.

There is no shortage of competitors in this space, and the below list is by no means exhaustive or a recommendation or endorsement for any particular solution.  This is just a place to start, and a jumping-off point in understanding some of the different solutions and technologies that are available. Your business has it's own unique set of requirements, constraints, challenges etc. that have to be carefully evaluated before making any decisions on core HRIS.

Larger Vendors

Sage Abra

Sage Abra is probably the best known solution in this space. They claim to be the leading provider of HRIS in the less than 1,000 employee market.  Sage has a very robust offering including employee demographics, benefits, compliance related reports, employee skills, Employee self-service, education and leaves. 

Sage also has a Payroll module which is fairly uncommon in solutions targeted to small business.  This solution includes support for tax updates, check printing, and direct deposit.  The tight integration of Sage Payroll with Sage HR would make the consideration of Sage Payroll attractive for a small business interested in keeping or bringing payroll processing in-house.

Sage customers can deploy the software internally on their own servers, or via a hosting arrangement with an authorized provided.  Pure SaaS does not appear to be offered at this time, which might make Sage not a viable option for the very small business, or a business that is not in position for a largish initial capital outlay for software licensing.

SpectrumHR

Spectrum's offering is named iVantage^®, an HRIS that tracks everything from initial application through retirement. This complete HR system includes the key functions such as Absence Tracking, Performance Management, Self-Service, Time and Attendance, Workflow automation, and advanced reporting. iVantage does not have its own payroll engine, but does support the export of data to any of the likely Payroll providers a small business is likely to use (ADP, Ceridian, Paychex, among others).

In fact, iVantage's reporting tool is quite unique and user-friendly as it allows a user to enter a query in terms like, 'Show me all the employees in New York', and the reporting engine is sophisticated enough to interpret the request, and produce a report of the staff in the New York location.

Spectrum offers iVantage in three different licensing models, customer installed, Spectrum hosted, and SaaS.  These options provide great flexibility to organizations in allowing them to choose the option that aligns best with their budget, IT capability, and organizational policies. SpectrumHR is a very strong player in the small to mid-sized market.

EmpXTrack

EmpXtrack is a web-based Global HR product that covers all aspects of the employee lifecycle in an organization - from recruitment to performance management, development and eventual exit. It helps automate all HR processes in the organization and provides information to all stakeholders including HR Managers, Upper Management, Managers and Employees.

EmpXTrack offers their solutions in five different 'editions', ranging from the 'Enterprise' edition that encompasses the full suite of functionality (Employee database, applicant tracking, onboarding, appraisal, succession planning, and more). Other editions of the package include the 'Starter' edition, with just the very basic employee functions, and the 'Professional' version, which adds more in-depth processes like appraisals and onboarding.  Pricing is done on an annual basis based on the number of employees, and varies widely.

EmpXTrack may be a good option for an organization with numerous requirements and no real system of record.  They have such a wide range of functionality, that an organization could start with just a few core functions, then add additional processes as needed.

Smaller Vendors

 OrangeHRM

OrangeHRM is radically different that the other competitors in this space in one key area: pricing.  OrangeHRM is an open-source project that bills itself as 'Free & Open Source HR Management Software'. Essentially, the software is free, it can be downloaded and installed on your own servers, and used by your organization at no cost.  How OrangeHRM earns revenue is by selling support contracts (starting at $60 for one month of 'get on your feet' support) and by offering to host the software on their servers.

OrangeHRM supports the essential processes like employee personal information, time tracking, employee self-service (ESS), leaves, as well as recruitment.  There is a reports module that allows users to define and execute ad-hoc queries on demand.

OrangeHRM might be a good option if you have internal IT resources comfortable working with open source tools or if you have an extremely constrained budget, and the cost savings by going with open source are too hard to pass up.

Zoho People

Zoho is better known for it's online productivity suite, that competed with Google Apps in things like word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.  They have a wide range of applications and seem to be adding more all the time. I particularly like Zoho Polls.

Zoho People is their attempt at cracking the small business HRIS market, with a simple, easy to use application that supports the basic employee demographic functions, recruiting, employee and manager self-service, and an embedded process checklist capability for things like the new hire process.  Zoho People is built on the extremely flexible Zoho Creator platform, making the creation of new forms, views, and taskflows fairly simple for someone with just a bit of technical skill.

Zoho People is targeted at the very small (say 50+ employee) businesses. They offer free accounts for the first 10 employees, then from there pricing plans start as low as $19/mo for 10 employees ranging up to $850/mo for up to 1,000 employees.  Realistically, Zoho is likely only an option for those very small organizations with fewer than 50 employees.

EffortlessHR

EffortlessHR is a purely web-based subscription service that targets the lower end of the small business market, up to about 250 employees. It supports the basics of employee management, time tracking, benefits information, and an employee self-service portal.  The real strength of EffortlessHR for the small business is the pre-bulit support for HR forms, legal posters, and access to Federal and State labor laws.

This is definitely a small business oriented offering, particularly one with single person HR departments. The pricing is published on their site and ranges from a low of $300 annually for a single manager account, to about $1400 annually for up to 50 manager accounts.  If you are a very small organization, with no HRIS in place at all, then EffortlessHR may be worth a look.

That is a quick overview of just 6 (out of probably hundreds) of options for HRIS for the small business.

I would love to hear from any other vendors or readers on other viable options that I should have featured in the post.

HR Technology for the Small Business - Communication

Storefront Corner Bakery
Originally uploaded by Atelier Teee

Every class I have two or three students who are HR Directors or HR Managers at what are typically considered 'small' businesses, that is organizations that employ less than 500 people. As the course progresses, and we cover topics ranging from 'core' HRIS systems, to Talent Management solutions, to collaboration and networking platforms, these HR pros from small business frequently indicate that their organizations are sorely lacking in the area of HR Technology solutions. This is a particularly acute problem for organizations with around 100-200 employees.

This position in the market is a really difficult one, the organization has outgrown many of their original, paper-based processes for employee tracking, performance management, and benefits administration, but they are typically either below the radar of the most popular HR Technology solution vendors, or these solutions are simply priced too high for the small business to manage.

In the area of communication tools, while all the small businesses have email, some don't even have simple intranets to manage employee communications and information.  Fortunately for the small organization, there are numerous, accessible, inexpensive tools that can facilitate employee communication and collaboration.  Here are just a few ideas for the small organization.

Microblogging

The most popular public platform for microblogging is of course Twitter, but for the small organization, the 'enterprise' version of Twitter called Yammer can be a great solution.  Note: If you are not familiar with the concept of microblogging, watch this explanatory video from Common Craft. Simply register your company's domain (your '.com', if you will), send out some e-mail invitations to your employees to join your Yammer network, and immediately folks can begin communicating with each other via short status updates. Yammer also extends the capabilities of Twitter by supporting group creation (the sales folks can have a separate Yammer group from the accounting types), and the inclusion of message attachments. The company's Yammer network is restricted to only those people having a valid email account in the company domain.  The basic Yammer service is free, there are some premium features that can be purchased, but for the small company at least initially these premium features are not necessary.

Blogging

Another free and easy way to facilitate communication is by starting a simple company blog.  Post announcements, events, and company information on the blog, and invite employees to read and comment.  There are numerous free blogging platforms that the small business can utilize to create the blog, and most like Google's Blogger platform and Wordpress, allow you to make the blog 'private', meaning only invited users can view and comment on the blog.  Starting an internal blog, particularly one where company executives contribute is a great way for the small business to open up a new communication channel.

Surveys and Polls

Another great way to have a dialogue of sorts within the organization is through the use of survey and polls.  Once again there are a multitude of options (most of them free), for creating employee surveys and polls.  For simple, yet powerful survey capability check out SurveyMonkey.  With a SurveyMonkey free account, you can create up to 10 question surveys with up to 100 responses per survey.  Once the survey is created, simply e-mail the generated link to all your intended responders, and watch the result come in. You can review the survey results online, but do need to upgrade to a paid subscription at $19.95 per month to be able to download the survey results, create longer surveys, and have unlimited respondents.  Still for most small organizations, the constraints of the free account are not that limiting.

For polling, I really like Zoho Polls. This free service (one of scores from online applications provider Zoho), is a simple tool that allows you to create simple polls, invite unlimited responses, and easily embed the poll on your intranet or blog. Your poll can be 'Rating' poll (like rating a movie with stars), or a 'Voting' poll, where participants can choose one option from a list.  The small business could use these polls to solicit feedback on a new benefits program, choosing the best option for a new ad campaign, or even where to hold the next company party.  A sample Zoho poll is here, where I invite anyone who reads this post to offer an opinion.

In a future post, I will expand on some of these concepts to get into real collaboration tools, like wikis, internal social networks, and community platforms.  While some of these may be beyond the scope of the average small business today, an enterprising small business needs to be positioned for the future.

HR Technology for the Small Business - The Resumator

Small businesses that need to hire traditionally have had limited technology resources available to help Flickr - Nonsequiturlassmanage the flow of applicants and resumes that come in for any of their openings.  For most, they remain stuck on the last 'big breakthrough', that is applications and resumes sent through e-mail, rather than in snail mail or submitted in person on paper.

Once e-mailed resumes start pouring in to the unfortunate HR rep or hiring manager, then starts the tedious process of opening, downloading, forwarding, saving locally, printing, and copying resumes, cover letters and anything else the candidate e-mailed you.  Big companies with staffs of recruiters and (at least once upon a time) hundreds or even thousands of openings long ago implemented full-featured Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), that provide wide-ranging functions like job posting, online applications and resumes, screening and assessment, interview scheduling, and finally offer management. These systems greatly improve the productivity and effectiveness of the recruiting function, but have traditionally only been implemented by, and accessible to the larger organizations.

The problem for the small business that needs to hire is that they need to complete all the same processes as the large company, but usually with no tools (other than e-mail) to assist them.  They spend comparatively way more time that the large organization manually processing paper and resumes.

A new entrant into the HR Technology market The Resumator, recognizes this problem and delivers a simple, inexpensive, yet elegant solution.  The Resumator is a basic ATS in 10 screens.  It allows a company to enter job openings, collect applicants and resumes, engage multiple staff members in the hiring process, and overall streamline and remove so much of the tedious, manual paper-pushing that most small organizations have to endure.

Nothing really remarkable yet, but where the Resumator distinguishes itself from its competition, is the ability, with a single line of code, to embed and include up to date job listings and a form to accept resumes directly on a company's website.  So in a flash, candidates who find your corporate website and see and submit for your open positions.  Very few, if any, 'enterprise' ATS's offer this kind of simple website integration without quite a bit of custom code.

Other beneficial features of the Resumator include aggregated ratings. The tool allows unlimited people to participate in the candidate evaluation, enter their indiividual candidate ratings on a 5-star system, and the Resumator produces an aggregated ranking.  Space is available to enter team comments, and communications with the candidate are also visible to all team members.

Finally, the Resumator offers help to the small business that may not be terribly tech-savvy by recommending local, industry specific, or niche web job boards that may be a good fit for posting the job opening.  And finally, it automates the process of actually posting the job opening to many of these boards and keeping track of the candidate activity that gets generated.  Again, this is a feature I have seen enterprise class ATS's struggle to pull off.

As for the cost, The Resumator is priced at a flat fee of $59 per month for unlimited jobs, applicants, and users. A 30-day free trial period is offered with registration. Even the smallest shop hiring one person a month easily spends 59 bucks of labor passing around paper.

I really like the Resumator, and I would encourage any small organization that is lucky enough to be in position to be hiring to give them a look.

New Series - HR Tech for the small business

The relentlessly bad economic news continued this morning, just a few snippets:

Caterpillar to lay off 20,000

Home Depot axes 7,000

Sprint to hang up on 8,000

Seemingly no end in sight, major corporations shedding workers like my dog sheds in the summer.

Seems like this could be a bad time for folks in my space, HR Technology to be thinking, writing, and talking about new technology and advocating to folks to convince their organizations to invest in new technology.Flickr - cobalt123

But actually very strong arguments can be made that times of crisis are EXACTLY when organizations need to ensure that their HR Technology can support their strategy, yes, even if the strategy is 'let go of thousands of people and hope we survive'.

But I'm not going to try to 're-make' that argument here, I am going in a bit of a different direction.  I am going to kick off a new series of posts specifically focusing on HR Technology solutions for the small business.  I don't know if the small business space is any more healthy than the giants who are hemorrhaging jobs, but since some of the solutions and technologies I am going to highlight are dirt cheap (some even free), I figure they all have a better chance of remaining relevant to the typical small organization than big, expensive, or out of reach talent management or collaboration platforms.

I have not decided how many or which technologies to write about yet, (and actually last week's post about Rypple could be viewed as really the first in this series), but I will write a few technology solution profiles, and let comments and feedback determine how far I go with this.

So, that's my plan, devote some time and energy bringing to light some tools and solutions that are inexpensive, accessible, easy to implement, and possibly beneficial to the small (or medium-sized) organization.

Any suggestions, links to vendors or solutions I should research and write about are really appreciated.