HR and recruiting

What this shelf covers

Software for the employment relationship from first application to final day: hiring, onboarding, records, absence, reviews and the documents that accumulate around all of it.

Two distinct products live here. Applicant tracking handles people who might join. Core HR handles people who have. Suites cover both, and almost every suite is noticeably better at one side than the other.

Paying those people belongs in payroll. Rostering by shift is workforce management, and training sits in learning and LMS.

Hiring, and what a tracker is really for

An applicant tracker exists to stop candidates disappearing between inboxes.

Look at the pipeline first: how stages are defined, who sees what, and whether feedback is collected in a structured form rather than as opinions in a chat thread. Scheduling matters more than it sounds, because coordinating four interviewers is where hiring processes lose days.

Then check the candidate side. The application form is a conversion problem: every unnecessary field costs applicants, and requiring an account to apply costs more of them. A careers page that loads slowly and cannot be indexed costs the rest.

Compliance requirements vary by country, from equal opportunity monitoring to data retention limits on rejected applicants. Ask about the markets you hire in specifically.

Records, absence and the daily work

Core HR earns its place by removing questions from someone’s inbox.

• Employee records, with contracts, documents and history in one place.
• Absence, with local holiday calendars, accrual rules and approval routes.
• Self-service, so people book leave and update details without asking.
• Org structure, which drives approvals and reporting more than it looks.
• Onboarding and offboarding, as checklists that reach IT and finance too.

Offboarding is the one most often neglected and the one auditors ask about. Access that outlives employment is the standard finding in a first security review.

Reviews and the performance module

Performance features are the most commonly bought and least used part of this category.

If your organisation has a working review rhythm, software makes it lighter: cycles, reminders, notes gathered through the year rather than invented in the final week. If the rhythm does not exist, buying a module will not create one.

Ask whether review data can be exported and whether it is separable from compensation decisions, since the two frequently need different permissions.

Data protection is not optional here

Employee records are among the most sensitive data a company holds, and this is the system where it lives.

Ask where it is stored and processed, which vendor staff can access it, how permissions are structured for managers versus HR, and what the audit log records. Then ask about leavers: how long records are retained by default, and whether deletion removes them rather than hiding them from the interface.

Local law often sets minimum retention for employment records, so the answer needs to be configurable per country rather than a single global switch.

How the money works

Per employee per month is standard, usually with a minimum headcount that makes small teams pay for people they do not have.

Modules are the thing to check. Recruiting, performance, payroll and time tracking are frequently separate purchases, and the quoted price often covers core records alone. Implementation fees appear at the larger end, as does charging for the interface you need to connect payroll.

Ask what happens to the price as headcount changes in both directions, since plenty of contracts ratchet upwards and never down. Related habits across software pricing are described in what pricing pages hide.

What to buy at each stage

Under twenty employees, a spreadsheet and a shared folder genuinely work, and the first real purchase is usually absence tracking because that is what generates the most questions.

Between twenty and a hundred, core records, self-service and onboarding checklists start saving meaningful time, and the absence of them starts creating compliance gaps.

Above that, the questions become structural: reporting lines that drive approvals, several countries with different rules, and integration with payroll and identity systems so that joining and leaving are one process rather than five.

Recruiting software follows its own curve. It becomes worthwhile when you are running several open roles at once, not when you are filling one, and buying it early usually means paying for a pipeline with nothing in it.