• Successful HR is so much more than finding the best talent. It's about creating a positive, diverse and respectful company culture, helping your staff develop their skills, building strong employee advocacy and more.
• In order to be a great HR department today, you need great staff above all else. But you also need to use the right HR software to help you manage core HR functions- and make the lives of your dedicated HR team much easier!
• There's a huge range of HR software on the market, from payroll tracking and success planning tools to personnel tracking and compliance management. 
• Read on to learn the top 5 HR software and trends you should be watching to drive your business forward.

Technology is quickly transforming the modern business world in a number of ways and across entire industries.

It seems as though every department in a growth-oriented company stands to benefit from integrating leading tech solutions. HR is definitely one of them if your goal is to take your recruitment to the next level and attract the top talent to your doorstep.

However, successful HR is not just about finding amazing employees, it’s also about building an amazing company culture, a passionate and productive employee collective and creating a thriving employer brand.

To achieve all of this, you not only need to have some talented HR staff, but you also need to give them the tools they need to achieve better results without burning out.

That’s why today, we’ll be going over the best HR tech trends, tools, and best practices to drive your whole company forward - in 2022 and beyond.

1. Success planning tools

Many business leaders and gurus will try to convince you that millennial employees are not interested in money so much as they are interested in the company’s culture and personal growth in their field.

The truth is, as always, somewhere in the middle of that statement.

Money definitely does matter to the millennial employee, and you should offer a competitive salary along with numerous perks and benefits to attract the best among them. But first, you need to focus on their career paths and their road to success.

Employee success is the foundation of a thriving and happy workforce, but planning it can be a difficult task as the number of employees you have under your brand grows. 

This is why it’s important to give your HR staff a robust success planning tool that will aid them in mapping out employees' career and growth paths, making personalisation easier and much more effective.

Needless to say, your employees will love this approach. 

There are many tools on the market for fostering great employee development. Cornerstone OnDemand is a complete succession planning tool that promises to develop leaders and upskill your entire workforce. This software's user experience is set up with intuitive visualizations, and its goal is to spot the right talent for the right role.

Once you get the right talent identified, you can create a personal development path for those individuals and ensure leadership continuity. 

Plum uses AI and Industrial/Organizational Psychology to achieve strategic workforce planning. Its Talent Recommendation Engine matches every team member's talents to behavioural job needs across the company's teams and departments. 

This way, your employees can get individualized and transparent career paths. 

Plum combines an employee-centric approach with professional development guides, so individuals and managers can create career path roadmaps together. 

CompetencyCore Career Path Navigation will provide your employees with a visual roadmap to better navigate your company's advancement opportunities. Encourage your staff to select their career paths, and the Path Navigation will help them with a visual overview of advancement possibilities within your organization. 

Career Path Navigation gives you tools to help your employees develop and grow, and determine the exact steps they need to take to get their dream jobs. 

2. HR compliance management tools

Staying on the right side of the law is essential if you want to minimise risks and legal liabilities, improve and maintain your brand’s reputation and build a satisfied employee collective.

Given the fact that legal compliance is a complex and intricate field, your HR and legal staff are tasked with making sure that you follow and abide by all of the regulations in your industry, country and the market at all times.

Of course, this is yet another needlessly complex task now that there are many HR compliance tools on the market that help your HR leaders perform everything from background checks and optimising payroll regulations, all the way to optimising company-specific policies.

In turn, this helps minimise time and financial waste and protects your brand on numerous fronts. 

Zenefits will save you lots of time and effort by automating many of your compliance tasks, like payroll compliance. This HR software will collect new employee tax information for you, confirm eligibility, and send required notices. 

With custom deadline reminders, you can easily stay on top of federal compliance deadlines for HR, Payroll, and Benefits. This tool also allows you to monitor your compliance status at all times using the Compliance Assistant.

It will keep all required employee documents in one secure place, too. 

ComplianceHR is the software that assists employers to onboard their new workers with customized federal and state by state-compliant documents. Stay up to date with the ever-changing and increasingly complex federal and state regulations regarding employment with this useful tool.

Cezanne is a modern HR tool that aims to reduce the regulatory compliance burden for businesses by helping employers keep in full compliance. This tool will ensure all necessary data are tracked and updated, including certifications, health, and safety. 

3. Cloud-based communication tools like VoIP

Communication is a foundational pillar of long-term success nowadays, and it is a crucial element in any thriving HR department.

Your HR experts are tasked with continuously communicating with other employees and departments, but also with communicating with applicants, partners, and other external parties, which means that the traditional phone system simply doesn’t cut it anymore.

Not only is the traditional phone system expensive, but it lacks the digital features you need to make HR more efficient and effective as a whole.

For this and many other reasons, you will see companies rapidly switching to VoIP. If you’re unsure what VoIP is and how it works, it’s is essentially a cloud-based phone system that functions over the internet instead of a traditional landline.

VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol, and it brings numerous handy features to the table like low-cost national and international calls, comprehensive dashboards and analytics, video conferencing and call scheduling, screen sharing and file management.

Combined, these and other features allow your HR staff to become more productive while you minimise the long-term financial costs. 

Nextiva, a multiple award-winning VoIP provider for excellence and innovation, is one of the top vendors for internet telephony. What differentiates this company from its competitors is impeccable customer service with 24/7 support, reliable network, and easy setup, with experts guiding you through each step. 

Besides up to 60 per cent cost savings on your phone bill, you get unified communication with VoIP, video, and chat.

Nextiva's comprehensive set of features like analytical tools will help you understand your customers on a deeper level and boost productivity. It allows you to easily track and share customer information in real-time to make better decisions and personalize interactions. 

And as a bonus, virtual voicemail and auto-attendant features are toll-free! 

RingCentral Office is another great VoIP solution for businesses. It offers one of the leading cloud-powered VoIP platforms, an abundance of features, and available customizations so you can integrate Ring Central Office into other applications.

Integrated messaging, video meetings and phone calls on any device will make your team collaboration easier and more personal. You can organize workflows more efficiently with task management, team messaging, and file sharing. 

4. Advanced onboarding solutions

We all know how stressful the first few months at a new job can be, and HR specialists know that this is a crucial period in any employee’s journey.

You can either provide the basic onboarding process and tell them to reach out if they’re having any trouble adjusting, or you can really devote time and attention to the individual and provide them with an amazing onboarding experience. 

Of course, the latter is always the better option.

Digital onboarding tools allow you to automate the process without wasting time or money while the new employee gets a better overall experience. This also helps them to become a productive member of the team much faster.

When welcoming new employees to your company, the ClickBoarding tool can help you elevate their experience with seamless, step-by-step onboarding. It also increases retention by 50 per cent and simplifies the HR process. 

You can use Click Boarding's process suggestions, or customize the onboarding process and create unique journeys for your new talent. It allows you to easily understand where your new worker is in their process, promptly notifies you when they need attention so you can take timely actions. 

Talmundo is another great solution when looking for new hires to hit peak performance faster. This is a cloud-based, mobile-friendly, and intuitive onboarding platform that will help you reduce time-to-productivity for new hires.

Talmundo provides engaging quizzes, interactive modules, and multi-media training. And you can seamlessly integrate it with other HR admin systems. 

One of the most popular digital tools that ensure a delighting onboarding experience for your new external employees is Shortlist. This amazing tool helps you create a better onboarding process with automated and personalized onboarding.

And as a bonus, it organizes the entire process of managing the external workforce, from hiring and rating to paying them. 

5. Comprehensive payroll automation tools

Payroll is not just about handing a paycheck to your employees every month, it’s also about carefully managing every employee’s performance to calculate their bonuses, perks, and rewards to keep them motivated and happy.

This is a nuanced task that is best handled by a smart payroll automation tool. Automating the payroll process helps your HR staff make better payroll decisions and deliver the wages straight to the employees’ bank accounts with ease. 

If you are looking for the best compensation management software that will help you set the right rewards for your team members, try out Workday. With providing you with deeper insights, this software enables you to make informed decisions and design compensation programs that work for your workforce. 

To keep your best talent on board, Workday allows you to create your unique programs and mix compensation components from regular salary to merit awards, bonuses, and stock. Intelligent finance process automation detects any anomalies, so your business can operate more efficiently, at a lower cost. 

Another software worth considering is Paychex, a cloud-based payroll management system. It provides payroll, HR, and benefits management system for businesses of any size. From payroll and taxes to benefits, insurance, and accounting, Paychex will have your company covered.

It will even take care that federal state laws and local regulations are respected. 

Wrapping up

Leading HR industry and job market trends are constantly evolving. To ensure long-term success, you need to adopt the most effective tech solutions.

Use these tools and best practices to make every HR process more efficient and effective in 2022 and in the years to come.