Every HR group in every online social media platform has this question popping up daily in some form or another, whether asking for a recommendation or just looking for ideas.
The value of the responses is pretty patchy, but I am going to drill into the ‘Good’ part.
My starting point, predictably, is Chat GPT-4, where the response starts promisingly enough with:
“A good HR system is a software application that helps businesses manage their human resources functions and processes.”
It then goes on to list a all the things that a ‘Good’ system should have, rather like a job description tells you how a job should be done rather than what the job should achieve.
On one level, all HR systems can be considered ‘Good’ but this depends on which point of view is applicable. Is it price? Rapid deployment? Easy to use? are popular features, descending all the way to Is it whizzy? (yes, really!) and Have I heard of it?
This renders the word ‘Good’ meaningless when applied in this context.
Rather than go for an exhaustive list of features a useful system should have, I would apply the word Good to:
- You can make a clear business case for it
- It is in scale with what you need from it
- It fits inside your price budget – preferably
- It is fast to set up and get running
- It is intuitive, easy to use and requires minimum training
- Reporting is simple to build for everyone who may need it
- The vendor will update the product whenever required
- It will last you for at least five years, within reason
- To this I would add, somewhat unfairly but very practically, the vendor is unlikely to sell out or get bought out. Why? you may ask. Well, sad but true, it could happen that your HR system will get phased out or replaced by a flagship product you would never have chosen in the first place. That’s progress, folks.
You might want consider things that will stop even the best system from being Good:
- Your data is incomplete or inaccurate
- Your data is outdated
- Your users have been insufficiently trained on the system and new users are not given full training on the system
- To save money you failed to configure the system to harness its full capabilities
So ‘Good’ after all becomes a very personal experience and can’t always be relied on from other sources.
Here’s to making Good choices in our HR software!
INDEX TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Good’ is not an objective word to be applied to HR systems (HRIS)
- Some general features of HR software that every user can consider ‘Good’ for their purposes
- Some items that would cause any HR system (HRIS) to be not so Good
