How to choose your HRIS: 12 criteria to assess
Director of Human Resources's Blog
# HRIS
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How to choose your HRIS: 12 criteria to assess

12/9/2024
11/9/2024
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Choosing the right Human Resources Information System is a strategic decision for a company. The HRIS will support and drive its HR policy, and enable it to be put into practice for the benefit of the company and its employees.

Choosing an HRIS means choosing much more than just ‘HR software’.

The HR team has many tasks. They can be supported by different software packages, each dedicated to a specific task, or they can be centralised within a single tool, for greater fluidity and security: the HRIS.

‍HRIS: A large purpose than just a “HR Software”

To simplify the various tasks carried out by the HR team, companies can use payroll software, time planning management and skills management software and so on.

It can also opt for a Core HR. This integrated software suite centralises and processes the company's personnel data.

The HRIS gather all employee information in a single database, avoiding duplication and inconsistencies. Using a single interface, it allows all the tasks involved in managing employees to be managed efficiently:

  • Payroll, distribution and archiving of payslips ;
  • Drafting and signing employment contracts and amendments;
  • Managing employee schedules, holidays, RTT, hours worked, etc;
  • Talent and career management, recruitment, etc.

12 key criteria for choosing an HRIS solution

There are numerous of HRIS solutions on the market, each with very different functions and features. How to select the most suitable HRIS tool ? Here are 12 key criteria that should be considered during this process.

1. Integration and compatibility

Managing the entire relationship between the company and the employee goes beyond HR, and involves other company functions. For instance, accounting and payroll management are closely intertwined.

The HRIS must therefore be able to communicate effectively and seamlessly with the company's other software solutions, such as accounting and financial management, to share key indicators.

This integration must be simple to manage, and based on an automated exchange of relevant information. Such as, the net amount to be paid to the employee activate salary payment.  

2. Ergonomics

Because it is designed to lighten the workload of HR teams, the HRIS must be easy to use.  
Its interface must be intuitive and easy to learn.

Of course, the HRIS software editor must support the company during deployment and daily use: advice, training, technical support capable of answering any questions without delay.

3. Data security

HRIS software must guarantee the security and confidentiality of the data handled and stored, especially personal data relating to employees.

Cyber-attacks are increasingly targeting companies' HR data, with potentially serious consequences:

  • Breach of confidentiality of employees' private data, with the risk of identity theft, phishing, etc.;
  • Breach of trust with employees, as the company is the custodian of confidential information;
  • Cost of recovering and/or restoring data, technical changes to raise the level of security (which may also cause a delay in HR operations);
  • Legal liability of the company for failure to comply with its data protection obligations and regulations.

In order to provide reliability and security to its users, the HRIS must offer secure data access and storage, as well as encryption, and automate tasks as far as possible to avoid errors:

  • Automated payroll, payroll controls and employee benefits,
  • Automatic dispatch of payslips,
  • Automated management of working hours, etc,
  • Etc.

4. Compliance

The Labour Code is constantly evolving: every year, new laws are passed and articles are amended. Contribution rates and the minimum wage are regularly revised. Most importantly, new regulatory requirements are impacting HR functions, such as the RGPD...

When choosing an HRIS, it is essential to take into account the solution's ability (and that of its publisher) to keep pace with any changes in real time, in order to ensure that HR processes are fully compliant with legal and regulatory requirements.

5. Support for the entire employee relationship

An embedded HRIS supports the link between the company and its employees by centralising all HR processes. The more these processes are integrated within the same tool, the more the HR team gains in performance and reduces the risk of error. In addition, centralised data is easier to protect than dispersed data.

It is therefore important to ensure that the HRIS is functionally rich, so that it can support as many processes as possible (even if these are progressively activated in the software suite). This includes payroll and time-management, but also recruitment, onboarding, training and career development.

For the teams involved in this project, this means greater efficiency, fewer administrative errors and more time to concentrate on higher added-value tasks. What's more, an embedded solution facilitates collaboration between the company's various departments.

6. Payroll flexibility

Payroll is undoubtedly the HR process that undergoes the greatest number of changes over the months! These changes may mainly involve:

  • The format and information on the payslip (with a new simplification of the payslip announced by the government for 2026, after already 5 laws or decrees published since 1998 in this vein) ;
  • The calculation of contributions or rates;
  • The appearance of new deductions or new information on the payslip (such as the ‘net social’ figure from July 2023);
  • And much more.

The payroll management solution must flexible and scalable, to seemingly adapt to these evolutions to these changes in real time and without changing HR teams' working habits.

7. Simple, reliable time-management

Managing working hours, absences, holidays, leave and other forms of time-off can be particularly tedious.

HRIS-systems can now give employees greater autonomy, by allowing them to enter their own requests for leave or attendance time via a secure interface.

This digitalisation of processes, including holiday requests or calendar management, must be offered by the HRIS. This kind of system provide genuine convenience for both the employee and the HR staff, as well as more fluid, traceable and transparent time management. These benefits also translate into improved QWL.

8. Skills management and planning

Quite often, the HR department is swamped by recurring tasks such as payroll and time-management. As a result, high value-added tasks including as recruitment, training and anticipating skills requirements are neglected.

By choosing the right HRIS, not only are time-consuming tasks automated, but the whole process of managing and planning skills is much easier.

A high-performance HRIS-software package must therefore also simplify talent management, mainly by facilitating the recruitment process, guiding training management and performance monitoring, identifying high-potential talent, etc.

9. Reporting

HRIS-software must support HR staff in their daily tasks, but also allow them to assess their performance enable them to assess both their performane and the HR policy.

For this purpose, it must provide understandable, customisable reporting, with à la carte indicators, to help HR practices evolve.

10. Remote access

Choosing an HRIS-solution in SaaS mode is an additional advantage for the company: by offering secure online access from any type of IT terminal, it simplifies the organisation of users' work. The possibility to work remotely from the office can be a pertinent example of the benefits of an HRIS saas solution.

Under certain conditions, this flexibility of access can even become essential: during the periods of confinement due to the Covid pandemic, companies with an HRIS in SaaS mode were able to continue supporting their employees, and managing payroll, among other functions, with complete fluidity.‍

11. Scalability

An HRIS-software must be scalable in two ways:

  • Its various functions must be modular, so that they can be easily activated as and when required, in line with the company's HR strategy ;
  • It must be able to cope with variations in the number of employees such as meeting one-off or seasonal recruitment needs, without hampering the company's projects or growth.

In SaaS mode, HRIS-software will meet these scalability needs.

12. HRIS cost

The cost of the HRIS-solution  remains a criterion to evaluate to help you in your choice. It's not a question of finding the solution with the lowest price, but the one that meets your current and future needs, and that will bring gains in HR productivity and QWL for employees and HR staff alike. With this kind of fit, it becomes a productivity tool that quickly pays for itself.

The cost of the HRIS-solution remains an essential criterion (/indicator) to consider, helping you benchmarking during the research phase.  
However, finding the right HRIS software isn’t directly correlated to the least or most expensive on the market. Your choice must rely on a solution meeting your current and future needs, that will bring gains in HR productivity and QWL for your employees, HR staff alike.

It has been noted that a tool that becomes an asset of productivity quickly pays for itself.

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