How important are human resources management systems (HRMS) to organizations?
It is fitting to begin this article with a question. After all, according to the story of how peopleHum began, the company kick started its journey guided by the following questions:
- Why is software so cumbersome?
- Why is it expensive, complex and takes 18 months to onboard?
- How can anyone access my software from anywhere?
- Why is technology so complex rather than easy to use?
- Why can’t customers only use what they need?
These are the problems that have driven the company and have brought about the HRMS product, peopleHum.
Going back to the original question, what really is the importance of HRMS?
Human resources management is very crucial to an organization; it aids in ensuring that a company is effective as an organization and that various HR functions and activities are consistent and promote efficiency, transparency and employee growth and engagement.
With human resource management systems, companies can be properly equipped to hire, train and engage employees, while ensuring that the organization would always have a healthy, rewarding and tolerant work culture and environment.
This often overlooked but nonetheless daunting task has necessitated organizations to employ an automated and reliable and efficient software that could cover all HR functions and cater to all the needs of the employees and the organization. Undoubtedly, the benefits of using an HRMS software has been amplified exponentially in parallel to technological advancements, workplace innovation and ever growing business needs. This review will focus on peopleHum, one of the top-rated HRMS software offering a one-stop solution for HR functions.
What is peopleHum?
peopleHum is a complete functional solution for employee engagement and employee management. With this platform, the focus is on the employee: from hiring, onboarding and managing to engaging and nurturing a company’s workforce. It is a user-friendly and comprehensive human capital management platform that manages and elevates almost all of the aspects of an employee’s journey and a perfect aid in streamlining all HR needs.
To say that what peopleHum has to offer is very extensive and all-encompassing is an understatement. All the functions that would cover HR responsibilities and the relationship between HR partners and employees have been incorporated into a well-designed platform, with the goal of automating processes, breaking down silos, especially those that cause friction between HR and employees and management with employees promoting efficiency while ensuring that employees are well taken care of.
peopleHum is rich in features and functions boosted by AI and machine-learning capabilities. The platform is easy to use with an intuitive interface. This is very remarkable for a tool that covers all facets of HR and employee management operations. This powerful platform proffers features covering core HRIS timesheet and attendance and appraisal, among other HR functions.
peopleHum has the following capabilities:
- Cloud-based Hiring and Recruitment Function
peopleHum can take care of applicant tracking, recruitment process and employee onboarding, providing the means to hire the ideal talents for a company using a collaborative talent acquisition method, enabling all concerned teams to become involved and ensuring that newly-hired employees will have a pleasant onboarding experience. This end-to-end procedure will empower the company’s HR partners to expertly curate the organization’s talent pool.
The hiring and onboarding process is backed up by AI, analytics, efficiency metrics and a scoring system to aid an organization assess the efficacy of the selection, hiring and onboarding process.
These functions are also available in peopleHum’s mobile platform. With features like viewing of ongoing hiring activities, resume reviews and provision to discuss and provide feedback on applicants, hiring can be done on-the-go.
- Comprehensive and Employee-Focused Personnel Management
This serves as peopleHum’s core HRIS solution, providing an extensive repository of employee information and employee requirements and documents management system.
Part of peopleHum’s core HRIS functions include shift management, time-off application, approval and tracking, as well as attendance and clock-in management. This platform also allows everyone to view the company’s org chart promoting transparency and ease of determining team leaders, responsibilities and chain of authority.
Most of the employee services come with self-service tools enabling employees to take some administrative matters into their own hands, while offloading these tasks from HR partners, fostering efficiency and saving valuable time.
Finally, peopleHum also offers a guided off boarding process that aims to make this procedure structured and comfortable for both line managers and employees.
- Performance and Employee Engagement
peopleHum’s HR solution does not only enhances an employee’s entry to and exit from a company, but the employee’s professional growth as well.
For performance evaluation, peopleHum has features like setting up of regular review cycles, goal setting, metrics definition. This also includes configuration of competency measures, an exhaustive feedback system, one-on-one appraisal and an employee-focused evaluation process. This approach and design can aid a company in ensuing that its employee’s career paths are well-defined and that both the employees and managers are well-informed and well-equipped to help with the realization of these goals.
peopleHum also supports posting of announcements and display of recognition boards to highlight employees’ achievements and company milestones, and a system to crowd source ideas from all members of the organization. These employee engagement tools help the organization promote active participation and collaboration among all employees by empowering them with the proper channels to voice out feedback, opinions and suggestions.
- AI and Analytics
Almost all of the domains and functions highlighted above are supplemented by peopleHum’s AI and analytics capabilities, from hiring and recruitment to employee performance appraisal and engagement that could provide management with insights and views on trends with the goal of having the knowledge on what works well and what needs improvement.
- Other Notable Features
peopleHum features other functions that elevate the employee experience and aid the organization to continuously improve processes and employee management.
SignMe, peopleHum’s document signing tool, allows document management and e-signature solution.
This platform also offers a learning module that allows companies to design, configure and customize tests and assessment for employees.
Chatbot, peopleHum’s bot application, can be utilized to function as an intelligent assistant bot tool and service desk solution. Company policies and compliance documents can be uploaded to Chatbot to offload some of the requests and queries from HR and aid in an automated and more efficient way of disseminating important company documentation. Finally, this tool can be configured to automatically send out marketing campaigns and employee surveys.
peopleHum also comes equipped with ChatHum, its internal messaging and communication tool to make it easy for teams and employees to interact, collaborate and cascade information.
How Does It Work?
Creating an account and signing up to peopleHum is a breeze. What’s nice about it, just like most apps and solutions nowadays, is a free trial and demo.
As soon as your access to the platform is granted, one will receive the extremely helpful welcome pack from peopleHum, containing an overview of the software the company is offering, a brief list of features, selected customer testimonials, partners and notable clients, the achievements that the company has garnered and the company’s corporate profile. This is true to the company’s goal of making information accessible and all partners empowered with the access to all pertinent data, even from the get go.
After a simple and straightforward signing up process, the main landing or dashboard page will be launched. The homepage, or dashboard, looks and feels like a social media page; its interface is simple, clean, uncluttered and looks and feel very familiar. This familiarity is very beneficial because it aids in letting users quickly learn how to use and navigate through the application. Even the color scheme is very reminiscent of social media pages; simple colors and minimal graphics but not too dull and drab.
The layout of the dashboard demonstrates how well-thought of peopleHum is. From the design to the functions. The header contains the main toolbar where the main functions of the platform could be found: hire, engage, perform, manage and reports. The main dashboard contains a quick actions section located prominently with commonly performed function like goal setting, leave application and post creation. There are widgets for policies and documents, pinned items marked for easy access, individual and company-wide goals presented as a scoreboard, a task board and to-do widget, leave tracker and interview appointment list. The main section is allotted for a feed displaying announcements, important information, milestones and events like info on new joiners and recognition posts. Still reminiscent of social media pages, each post allows reactions and posting of comments.
The administrative functions allow configuration of user profiles, notification settings, company and organization parameters, integration, email domain and a tool to monitor file-upload status; this upload tool is used to upload a list of employees from an excel worksheet or CSV file. In terms of personalization and customization, peopleHum only offers options of specifying the company name and changing the logo that is displayed at the header section.
Hire
First main function is for hiring and recruitment. There are quick links for job posting, referral and applicant information entry. All of these functions have intuitive pages, with clean and well-organized input forms. For the new application and referral caption pages, a facility to attach a potential candidate’s resume is provided.
For job creation, which is a multi-step process, the steps necessary in completing the data entry are shown and the workflow is elegantly designed, offering a guided approach to the task.
Under the hire menu, cognizance on the hiring and recruitment processes are presented – an intelligent display of statistics on the organization’s hiring trends, job listing, and source of applicants. This could serve the company well, allowing view on how to measure the success of hiring.
Capturing applicants’ and referrals’ data have separate functions, probably for clarity and to clearly differentiate one process from the other, but both functions would populate the applicants’ database.
The applicants listing is well-organized, displaying applicants by hiring status. With the categorization, it is easy to identify how many applicants are in a certain stage of hiring. In the applicants’ details view, complete applicant details, job application, interview schedule, evaluation history and audit on all updates and actions that were made on the applicant date can be perused. Comments can be placed by all stakeholders involved in the hiring to aid in further evaluation of the applicants. The audit history can give a clear picture on all the events that have transpired for a certain application. The applicants can then be scheduled for interviews or screening.
Data on uploaded resumes can easily be retrieved using the resume parser. Scheduling an interview for an applicant can easily be done with customizable email templates and interview stages. The process and options that are needed to post a job, create a record for an applicant, schedule interviews and proceed to hiring are facile and effortless, thanks to the manner by which the user experience has been designed.
From the applicants list view, after screening, assessment and interviews have been conducted, employment offer sending and hiring an be performed for candidates who have successfully passed and have undergone all the required procedures for recruitment.
Manage
The manage menu offers functions relating to employee management, attendance checking, asset maintenance, approvals, survey creation and maintenance, task creation and group creation. Quick links are available for leave application and new task lodging.
The people module shows a complete listing of all employees and personnel in a grid format, showing all pertinent information. A separate view is available for newly-hired employees who are undergoing onboarding but do not have access yet to their peopleHum accounts. From this utility, invites can be sent out to such individuals. Clicking on an entry in the main list will quickly pull up the complete employee date sheet including data that has been captured during recruitment, professional timeline, line management, documents and attendance information. From this page, HR partners can input employee recognition, deactivate an employee’s account or mark an employee for termination.
The manage menu also contains the attendance and org attendance modules. These utilities show clock-in details, leaves balances and usage history including options for time-off application for each type of leave, team attendance for team leaders, leave request and approval functions.
Asset management and maintenance offers a simple inventory system to keep track of devices, tools and a few peripheral devices. A few number of asset categories and types are available in the input form, the basis for which looks hard-coded into the platform.
The approval module shows all historical and pending items for approval, including leaves, resignation filing, job requests, clock-in and updates on user profiles.
There are modules for defining groups to logically group employees together based on configurable rules, as well as task creation and assignment management.
Lastly, the manage menu also includes a survey module that allows an organization to design custom surveys or choose from pre-built in templates covering a wide range of topics including employee engagement, interview feedback and leadership feedback. The survey design and templates allow creation of simple survey forms, setting of timelines and assigning of target audience.
Engage
Under the engage menu, the following modules are available:
- Posting of announcements where target audience can be configured
- Granting of individual or team recognition
- Posting of employee suggestions which can be done anonymously
- Publishing of ideas for the company or a specific team
- Setting up of games or missions for employees
- Creation of quizzes for team building and socialization
Perform
The perform menu takes care of all functions relating to performance appraisal. What’s nice about this utility is how it lets an organization design and plan appraisal by defining targets and tasks for completion, metrics for competency, goal setting and a comprehensive process of creating review cycles. Just like other functions which involve multiple actions, this utility is provided with a guided configuration including definition for feedback flow, competency ratings, scoring, timelines, reviewers and templates for capturing appraisal data and feedback.
This menu also offers scheduling and monitoring of one-on-one meetings for performance evaluation.
Reports
The reports utility provides insights on data for each of the main functions: hiring process, employee engagement based on surveys, and performance appraisal.
A reports designer is also included in this menu, allowing creation of line, bar, pie or donut charts based on employee info, hiring, attendance, time-off and survey data. The data and reports are driven by the four main functions: hire, perform, manage and engage.
Ready-made reports are available, for functions like leave request transactions, recognition and applicant activity tracking. Data from the reports can be generated into CSV or Excel sheet formats.
Integrations with Other Platforms
peopleHum allows integration for the following functions:
- Payroll: peopleHum does not support any native functions for payroll, but allows integration with local payroll vendors and is quite open to gaining more payroll partners. Some of the payroll vendors with which peopleHum is already in partnership with are ConqHR, PaySpace, greytHR, PayBooks, PayGlobal and PaySquare.
- Communication: peopleHum allows integration with Slack and Microsoft Teams for more options when it comes to chat and communication management.
- Calendar: Important scheduling functions relating to interview appointments can be done through Microsoft Outlook, Slack or G Suite.
- Biometrics: Different biometric systems employing a wide array of modes of clock-in can be integrated with peopleHum.
Pricing
peopleHum has a very basic pricing plan. Subscription could be specified as monthly, quarterly or annually.
Under the peopleHum core package, rate is at US $6.00 per month per user. This includes the following modules: hire, engage, perform, manage, analytics and reports.
For the full suite, rate is at US $9.00 per month per user. This includes all the modules that are included in the core package, plus huddle, OKR, ChatHum, Phia, learn and plan.
peopleHum also allows customized plans where the organization can select only the modules that will be used instead of going with a full suite subscription. Under this scheme, bast rate is at US $3.00 per month per user. Modules like ChatHum, Analytics and Reports are free. The rest of the modules’ prices range from US $2.00 to US $19.95.
Who is the Product for?
peopleHum is an excellent tool for companies who want to empower their HR partners, and employees, with an HRMS tool that could cater to most of the needs with respect to HR functions. It is ideal for small, medium-sized and large enterprises.
The product is designed for HR partners that can guide and train employees in an organization to use a tool that can centrally manage all HR and employee management functions, with the option of employing self-service utilities.
This tool can also be useful for recruiters of an organization aiming to streamline and strengthen their hiring procedures, allowing them to ensure that the recruitment process can be efficient for both recruiter and candidate, allowing teams in the department to have inputs in the process.
peopleHum is also a superior tool when it comes to providing the proper channel for employees to voice their concerns, suggestions and inputs for their colleagues and for the company.
Pros and Cons
Here are the factors that makes peopleHum an excellent tool:
- A clean interface that is reminiscent of social media pages, making lit east to use, understand and navigate
- Functionally-rich platform
- Functions that are supported by AI and analytics
- Comprehensive employee management and performance appraisal procedures
- Presence of a learning module
- Option for importing of data
- Pricing options are affordable
- Customizable reports
On the other hand, these are the possible flaws of this platform:
- Limited integration options
- Lack of payroll function
- Missing customizable workflow automations
Conclusion?
peopleHum is a very powerful tool with a variety of features that covers most of the bases of HR functions. Despite of this fact, the platform has a simple interface, which makes it very easy to learn and navigate.
When it comes to the scope of functions that peopleHum covers, there are a lot of aspects that would attract an employee and just as much reasons, if not more, to attract HR partners and/or management.
In addition to the core HRIS features, there are modules designed to keep all employees engaged and informed; this focus on the employee champions peopleHum’s cause of aiding organizations make the workplace into an environment of collaboration and initiative.