Last updated
February 3, 2024

Best HR Platforms For Your Rapidly Growing Startup, Plus 7 Tips You Should Know, The Definitive Guide

In the early days of your company, you’re probably busy building different strategies and focusing your energy towards investor funding and generating more sales. And when that’s the case, it often happens that you deal with administrative tasks.


While your company is growing you’re always on the hunt to find top talents in their field, and there’s no better way of doing that than using the right technology, in that case we’re talking about the right HR platform that will help you in the evaluation of candidates, follow up with them, and provide with full visibility on the entire candidate experience with the aim to improve from time to time.

With the appropriate HR platform for your growing startup, you can centralize most of your human resources needs, including your benefits administration, timekeeping, performance reviews, project management, and much more.

Today we’ll help you find out how you can choose the best in fit HR software, and what are the other things you should look at, let’s dive in.

What is an HR software and why should you adopt one at the very early stages of your startup?

An HR software is a digital platform for managing and optimizing the daily human resources tasks and overall HR goals of a company. The HR platform was created with the aim of seamlessly allowing HR professionals to make a better use of their time and to make sure their work is as effective as possible.

The vast majority of the HR platforms are cloud-based, subscription-based, easily integrated with other data management programs, and highly customizable to an individual company’s needs, goals, and budget.

When picking the next HR platform you must make sure it’s scalable enough and that it won’t punish you for growth, and by that we mean, make sure it can support you when you grow your headcount both feature wise and budget wise.

HR platforms are a vital resource in a company’s human resources department by being able to automate most of the manual tasks, keeping candidates and employee information organized and centralized, but most importantly, it lives up to the expectations of a growing startup being able to produce reports and support a data-driven approach. HR platforms can also serve employees and managers within a company, helping with numerous projects like time management tracking, updating employee information, and overall performance management. You can often think of HR platforms as the new CRM software for HR professionals.

Here are some other benefits you gain by implementing the right HR solution:

  • Creating workflows and tracking approvals, and basically automating manual tasks.
  • Goal tracking, you know exactly where you’re at and what’s left for you to achieve your HR goal for the particular project.
  • Secure, cloud storage of all employee and candidate data.
  • 360 Degree view of all employee and candidate experience and journey.
  • The ability to gain better insights and understand where to improve.

The different usage of HR platforms

  • Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS)
  • Applicant Tracking System (ATS)
  • Performance Management
  • Employee Engagement
  • Recruitment management
  • Payroll management

Best HR platforms and the reason for their success

PeopleHum

PeopleHum is a leading people management platform built for people. An AI and automation driven Hire to Retire HR software for your Human Resources to drive business results at scale.

Greenhouse

Greenhouse provides recruiting software as a service (SaaS). It allows companies to compare candidates against each other and to compare their hiring metrics against the industry standards. Greenhouse lets you optimize every aspect of hiring with their modern recruiting system.

BambooHR

BambooHR brings a modern approach to hiring, with applicant tracking tools that improve every stage of hiring from applications to offer letters.

BambooHR’s cloud-based system is an intuitive, and yet affordable way for growing companies to manage important employee information in a personalized Human Resources Information System (HRIS). Its software sets HR professionals free to deal with the more strategic side of business.

Comeet

One of the world’s popular collaborative recruiting software for your entire company: It essentially helps you in finding better candidates, automate processes and grow faster.

Comeet is a cloud-based collaborative hiring platform that provides structured, streamlined workflows to enable companies to make better hires, and faster processes. The system is based on a team-centric approach that involves the entire hiring team, not just the recruiters, with a complete visibility on the candidate journey.

GoHire

GoHire makes it easy to attract, manage, select, and hire top talent. An all-in-one talent hiring platform built for Founders & Hiring Managers to hire smarter, in less time, with less effort. Best part is that you can easily start off with a free 14-day trial of GoHire.

Recruiterflow

Recruiterflow is an applicant tracking & CRM software built for staffing & recruiting agencies. Recruiterflow helps you source candidates, engage them and collaborate with your team. Its integration allows you to two-way sync emails to candidates and clients for a more holistic and updated experience.

Breezy

Breezy is a widely used recruiting platform for SMBs. The platform provides functionality for applicant sourcing and tracking, resume parsing, video interviews, and much more. The application is cloud-based and features a dedicated app for iOS devices so recruiters can use the platform on the go, which makes it way more convenient for them.

Workable

Considered by many as the world’s leading hiring platform. Companies of all sizes and across all industries use the Workable software to manage their in-house recruitment and hire the best talent. Through the platform, employers are able to review your applications, communicate with you, schedule interviews and make the final offer.

  1. Compliance & security

Before evaluating different vendors you must make sure that their solution is supporting and comply with all rules and regulations your company requires.
It is highly recommended for you to consult with your legal department to figure out which documents, agreements, and other privacy and compliance information is needed. Doing this will mitigate pitfalls along the negotiation stage.

  1. Talent management & advanced recruitment features

Before you explore all the relevant, cool, and out of the box features the new HR platform has to offer, make sure you know your goals, and what your business needs and wants are. By knowing your goals, and the KPIs you wish to track, and what you would like to improve by implementing the new software it will be much easier for you to focus on the most suitable software for your needs.

  1. Scheduling capabilities and email integrations

Scheduling and email integration especially for meetings is a highly important function when choosing your next HR platform. Make sure that the new software seamlessly integrates with your email provider, CRM tool, and other core systems you’re currently using.

  1. Ease of use, for a complete digital adoption experience

The new HR platform must be easy to use. You and your team are going to use it on a daily basis, before you evaluate a new solution, sit down with your team, understand their pain and what they are looking to solve, than, do the same thing with your upper management – the results will be different, that’s for sure, but as a person who is in charge of implementing a new solution you must make sure to understand the ‘big picture’ and that all parties are happy.

  1. AI reporting and analysis, customized reports and dashboard creation

The ability to easily generate new reports and create customizable dashboards for both your team and upper management is highly important especially in a high paced startup environment. First, figure out what metrics you would like to track, what the goals you would like to achieve, and only then take a deep dive into exploiting a solution that will answer your needs.

  1. Support and employee training

What will be the type of support provided by your new HR software vendor? Does the new product need much support or is it easy to use by anyone?
You must make sure that the new vendor can support you and your team’s questions regarding the software and the support channels the vendor provides. Will it only be phone or email support where you should expect a higher response time? Or they will be providing immediate customer service via more popular channels like WhatsApp, SMS, Facebook messenger, and live chat?

The onboarding process and the different stages it might entail should be very clear from the start and should align with your business goals for a smooth and easy start of your continuous relationship with the new HR software vendor.

  1. Your return on investment (ROI)

This one actually goes to any software you ever buy, not just the HR software, always make sure you use the vendor analysis, industry benchmarks, and your current stats to evaluate when you’ll start seeing some returns on your investment. Let’s say you’re investing $50K on a yearly subscription for this new HR software, what will be the return ratio you’re expecting to see? When exactly will you start seeing any return back, will it be after 4 months? 8 months or 18 months? You must know exactly which returns you’re expecting and when these returns should eventually appear.

Wrapping up

As you can see, the right HR platform can offer HUGE benefits for your growing start up. The core idea behind all HR platforms is to let you have the ability to automate processes by offloading almost all manual tasks to workflows, saving time and resources, and overall to contribute greatly towards the actual business success by providing actionable insights and addressing strengths and weaknesses within the people function of the company.

However, before choosing the best in fit HR platform it is better to take a close look at your current HR challenges as well as the strategies and choose a software that not only aligns with your HR processes but also prioritize other processes and is actually build for the future of work, especially nowadays when things are moving lightning fast in multiple industries.