Sometimes it seems as though there are as many different HR tools and apps as there are businesses out there. There are so many that it’s difficult to contain them all in a single list, but we’ll try.
No matter what size business you run, what the needs of your HR team are, or what your budget is, you’ll find something on this list that will help you achieve your goals. We have something for everyone; applicant tracking, payroll management, employee engagement, onboarding, it’s all there.
Keep in mind that the world of HR software is constantly changing. Many of these apps and tools have cross-over between different categories. Some may add new features, some remove old features, some may merge, and some of them will close down. We rely, at least in part, on our audience to help notify us when something changes.
We’ve broken up this list into the major categories, so if you have specific needs you can browse to that category to see what’s out there. Remember, though, that this list isn’t entirely comprehensive, and some of the entries could fall under some (or even all) of the categories because of how robust they are as tools. Consider this list as a starting point for your research.
Without further ado, let’s get into it!
Internal Communications
These tools for HR and talent acquisition will help your company communicate and share documents more effectively. These are especially important for a remote workforce, where things like screen sharing are more important than ever.
Candidate Sourcing
These tools are focused on helping your organization find candidates wherever they are, with an emphasis on locating and engaging passive candidates. After all, sometimes the best employees you’ll find aren’t actively looking for a new opportunity.
Avature. A broad set of tools focused on contact information and relationship management, application tracking, and recruiting.
Entelo. A platform with candidate tracking and management, a search engine for candidates, and analytics for your application process.
Hiretual. A robust sourcing platform with AI-driven data systems meant to optimize everything from candidate sourcing to rediscovery of lost leads.
Seekout. A candidate sourcing platform with a built-in pool of candidates readily available when you sign up.
Sourcing. A candidate pool search engine with a specialization in software engineers, with a variety of filtering and sorting options to hook into your ATS.
TopFunnel. A platform for candidate search and relationship management, focused on engaging talent when you find it rather than finding it alone.
vsource. Talent sourcing solutions provider for organizations that are facing complex hiring challenges and looking to transform their sourcing function, enabling adaptive and less-biased hiring processes.
WayUp. A candidate platform full of recent college graduates and others new to the job market, looking for entry-level positions.
Robin. An AI-driven candidate sourcing platform where you post a job description, allow it to source and pre-screen candidates, and walk away with a file of contact information.
Email Harvesting
When you find a promising candidate and want to reach out to them, it’s important to be able to find a way to contact them. Harvesting email information about a user can be tricky, but there are tools to help you do it.
ContactOut. A small tool that harvests publicly available contact information for anyone based on their name.
Hunter. A contact information scraper and search engine. Plug in a company name and get a list of the people attached to it.
Snovio. An email address verification tool that can check the validity of individual email addresses or bulk lists from a candidate pool.
Norbert. A platform that can find email addresses based on a variety of specific pieces of information, for lead generation and talent searching.
Applicant Tracking
The core of any good hiring system is the applicant tracking system (or ATS). As a platform, a good ATS manages everything from job listings to candidate data aggregation to interview results, following them from application to hiring decision.
Bamboo HR. An applicant tracking system with additional features to support hiring, onboarding, compensation management, and culture fit.
Zoho Recruit. Part of the overall Zoho ecosystem, Recruit is their applicant tracking system. It links up and plays well with their CRM and other products.
Workable. A broad range of applicant tracking tools and access to premium-level job boards largely specialized in working with small and mid-sized businesses.
Bullhorn. A broad platform with features ranging from recruitment to automation to pay management.
SAP HR. SAP caters to large enterprises, but their HR platform works just as well for SMBs, with a full human capital management suite.
JobScore. A full applicant tracking system with different platform levels for different sizes of business and HR teams, as well as hiring needs.
WebHR. A broad applicant tracking system with a variety of modules to expand features and complexity to suit your needs as a growing organization.
Employee Referral
One excellent source of candidates is your existing employees. Who could know your company culture, job requirements, and policies better than the people who work within them already? Getting your employees to refer the talented people they know can help build a workforce at a fraction of the cost of traditional recruitment channels.
Teamable. An employee referral system with features to engage and gamify the process for your existing employees.
EmployeeReferrals. A robust referral system with great analytics, engagement features, and recommendations. It also links to LinkedIn’s recommendations.
RolePoint. An employee referral engine focused on recommending roles to specific applicants regardless of the role they wanted and the person referring them.
Referagig. A platform for employee referrals with additional social media features, internal mobility options, and optional employee rewards.
Boon. An employee referral platform with a strong emphasis on gamification and employee rewards for referrals.
Candidate Assessment
How do you know when a candidate has the skills to succeed in the role you have for them? A resume can only tell you so much. Assessment platforms, from theory tests to practical exams, help you filter out your candidates and leave only the best.
HireArt. A staffing analysis tool that focuses on predictive analytics and skills assessments to filter and evaluate candidates.
eSkill. A platform for cognitive assessments, interviewing, skills tests, and filtering for the most talented candidates.
DevSkiller. An assessment platform focused specifically on software developers, with unique tests for different development platforms and languages, from PHP to Android.
Psycruit. An assessment platform with tests for cognitive ability, skill assessments, personality tests, and onboarding processes.
Kand.io. Another tech and developer-focused skills testing platform with a huge array of different technical tests for front-end, back-end, web, and other development environments.
TestDome. Similar to Kand.io, this is a developer-focused testing platform with a huge array of tests accessible to both companies and job seekers. It also has some more general technical tests for things like reasoning, marketing, sales, and service.
Video Interviewing
Whether you’re adapting to the global pandemic or you’re just recruiting from across the country or around the world, being able to interview candidates via video allows you a lot more flexibility than you would otherwise have in your recruiting process and opens up your candidate pool to skilled candidates who wouldn’t otherwise apply due to the distance.
Xobin. A remote hiring platform with skills tests and a video interview platform aimed at speeding talent acquisition.
Cammio. A video interviewing platform with a focus on customization, personalized stories, and AI-driven analytics.
HelloCecil. A one-way video interview system that asks candidates to submit video answers to your questions as an initial application.
SparkHire. A robust video interview platform with a wide array of tools to help analyze and filter the videos you receive as part of applications and interviews.
HireVue. A combination of skills assessment platform and video interview system meant to optimize hiring and assessment at the same time.
Background Checks
A key part of every hiring process is the background check. You might trust your applicants, but you still need to verify that what they say is true and they are who they say they are.
Pipl. A cross between a search engine and a background check platform, which allows you to locate individuals, scope out their relationships with others, and verify information about them.
BackgroundChecks. A simple background check platform aimed at researching criminal convictions and past aliases. It can show you drug screening, credit reports, and driving records as well.
TrustedEmployees. An employee background check platform with credit history, criminal records, education, and employment verification, identity verification, and reference verification.
Intelifi. A systemic background check platform that emphasizes same-day results and universal integration with other platforms.
GoodHire. A background check platform with a focus on specific industries, including construction, healthcare, retail, technology, and nonprofit.
ClearStar. A background check system that also handles pre-employment screening, drug testing, employee monitoring, access control, medical screening, and compliance.
Onboarding
Once you’ve made the decision to hire a candidate, you need to bring them up to speed within your organization. A good onboarding process can be the difference between an employee bouncing within a year and one settling in as a long-term asset to the company.
Talmundo. An onboarding system that focuses on a unique employee journey above all.
Kin. An HR platform with an emphasis on onboarding, but additional features for data management, feedback, and time management.
HR Onboard. An onboarding system with various job offer features and induction features, internal transition support, and offboarding systems.
Sapling. A remote onboarding platform with links to other HR tools and cloud platforms.
WorkBright. A 100% remote and online onboarding system with full-featured mobile apps.
Performance Tracking
Are your employees living up to the standards you set for them? Are they achieving their goals? Are any of them going above and beyond? How do you know? A performance tracking system allows you to monitor employee performance on as granular a scale as you need, so you can make administrative decisions.
WorkPuls. Employee monitoring, time tracking, and automatic mapping for employees.
Work Examiner. An employee monitoring platform that handles time tracking, activity monitoring, search monitoring, and screenshot captures.
GAO RFID. A physical radio frequency ID tracking system for complex workplaces.
15Five. A unique feedback system meant to give employees a route to communicate with their managers in bite-sized pieces.
AssessTeam. A platform for monitoring employee performance, cyclical feedback, project profitability, and goal setting.
Heartpace. An employee performance monitoring platform with additional engagement features.
Trakstar. Employee performance management and monitoring with goal tracking, succession planning, and 360-degree reviews.
GroSum. Small-scale performance management and optimization platform with goal tracking and feedback systems.
Personnel Management
Small companies and startups might be flexible and work on a project-based or goal-based system, but larger enterprises need a more rigid structure to keep track of everyone on the payroll. Personnel management tools help you with everything from attendance tracking to vacation, sick day, holiday, and overtime tracking, to even GPS tracking for remote or mobile workers.
Kronos. A robust platform with a range of features for workforce management, attendance, engagement, scheduling, payroll, onboarding, and administration modules.
Time Doctor. A system with payroll, time use alerts, time tracking, screenshot systems, and other features for work from home employees.
OnTheClock. An automated system for tracking time, time usage accuracy, and business policy compliance.
MyHours. A platform for broad overview time tracking or specific time tracking within teams and projects.
Humanity. A platform for scheduling and time management to ensure shift coverage and conflict-free scheduling.
WhenIWork. A semi-DIY scheduling and time management platform with time tracking and schedule management.
Shiftboard. A powerful and customizable shift management platform.
Employee Engagement
As a business, you have responsibilities to more than just your bottom line. You need to make sure your employees are engaged and valued. Soliciting feedback and analyzing it helps you improve everything from your overall goals to your internal processes, to optimize your workplace for productivity and employee satisfaction simultaneously.
Smarp. A platform meant to engage new and existing employees with a variety of benefits.
Bonusly. An employee bonus system delivering recognition and rewards to employees who enrich your workplace.
Bonfyre. A platform to open communications, recognize employees, support events, and measure engagement.
Peakon. A platform for employee engagement, retention, and inclusion with an eye for diversity and leadership development.
VantageCircle. A rewards platform with employee perks, discounts, benefits, and feedback systems.
Fond. A simple rewards and perks system for small businesses and healthcare systems.
6Q. An employee survey and feedback system.
TinyPulse. A simple system for communication and transparency aimed at reducing employee turnover.
Ezzely. An employee engagement system they can use to recognize each other, deliver training, offer rewards, send out surveys, enter raffles, and swap shifts.
Payroll and Benefits
Managing payroll is a task large enough that many enterprises have departments dedicated to it, so it’s no surprise that a wide range of tools exists to help. Whether you’re a small startup or a national enterprise, you’ll want something to keep track of where the money is going.
Xero. Accounting software aimed at small businesses, with cloud-based accessibility from anywhere your business needs.
Wave. A set of apps for accounting, invoicing, payments, payroll, and receipts management.
PrimePay. Payroll management with additional solutions for timeclocks, benefits, compliance, and HR.
ADP. One of the largest and most well-recognized payroll management platforms for mid-to-large businesses.
Compport. A payroll system that also works as part of the hiring process to use pay and benefits as negotiation and leverage tools.
PeopleKeep. A platform for managing healthcare benefits for your employees.
BusinessSolver. A benefits management platform with healthcare, retirement plans, and other beneficial features.
ThrivePass. A holistic management platform for benefits from retirement, healthcare, education, and other potential benefits.
Sage. An overall accounting and management platform with specific sub-platforms for different industries and needs.
Robust Platforms
To round out the list, these final platforms are the most robust platforms out there, which have enough different features on offer that they would be listed under most of the categories above. To save space, if a platform can do more than four or five of the features above, we’ve listed it here instead.
Beamery. A platform with three main segments; one to attract and recruit candidates, one to market and engage with candidates, and one to retain and manage employee engagement.
Fetcher. An AI-drive automation platform meant to streamline the initial application process, from candidate sourcing to employee engagement and everything in between.
Gem. A broad tool meant to aggregate information from other tools, for relationship management and predictive analytics.
Greenhouse. A robust platform that covers the entire hiring process from start to finish; one of the best in class options available.
Recruitifi. A platform meant to serve as a centralized aggregator for data from other platforms you use, as a core hub for your recruiting and employee management tools.
Jobvite. An overall end to end talent acquisition platform with an emphasis on employee referrals, adaptive onboarding, and relationship management.
Harver. A robust platform aimed at high-volume recruitment, with built-in skills tests, culture fit tests, and AI-driven optimizations for the recruitment process.
TalentSorter. A hiring platform that covers everything from posting job openings to providing you with pre-assessed and filtered candidates for each open role.
Cezanne. A UK-based but globally available platform with a core system and optional modules for everything from onboarding to payroll to recruitment.
HubStaff. A set of platforms with time tracking, project management, and talent acquisition features linked together between them.
Humi. A powerful overall HR system that manages payroll, benefits, onboarding, recruiting, and training.
Gusto. A platform focusing on payroll, benefits, onboarding, and time tracking for SMBs.
Knit. A powerful platform for managing payroll, HR and team management, time tracking, and performance monitoring.
Dominion. An HR platform for tracking time, payroll, ACA reporting, performance reviews, and self-service options.
HR Cloud. An overall HR system in the cloud with onboarding, human resources, and intranet features.
KissFlow. An HR management platform with workflow management, collaboration tools, training, and onboarding.
Namely. An end-to-end platform for employee management, onboarding, payroll, compliance, analytics, recruiting, and more.
Conclusion
The landscape of tools for HR and talent acquisition is vast and dynamic, with solutions tailored to meet the diverse needs of businesses of all sizes.
This comprehensive list offers a glimpse into the array of tools available, each designed to streamline various aspects of HR processes, from internal communications and candidate sourcing to onboarding and performance tracking. As the HR technology arena continues to evolve, staying informed and adaptable is key. Embrace these tools not just as software solutions but as strategic partners in your journey to optimize HR functions and enhance employee experiences.
Whether you’re a small startup or a large enterprise, the right HR tool can significantly impact your organization’s efficiency and success. Remember, this list is a starting point – the best tool for your company will depend on your specific needs, goals, and workforce dynamics.
Keep exploring, stay updated on new developments, and reach out to us today if you need help growing your team.
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