HRD 5-Star HR Software 2021

SPECIAL REPORT

2021

HR SOFTWARE HRD celebrates the HR software firms that are transforming businesses and placing people leadership at the heart of their mission

CONTENTS

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Feature article .............................................. 2 Methodology ................................................ 3 2021 winners ................................................ 5

SPECIAL REPORT BUSINESS STRATEGY

5-STAR AWARDS 2021: HR SOFTWARE

TALENT DEVELOPMENT THROUGH INNOVATION AS THE ECONOMIES of Australia and New Zealand rebound from the COVID-19 health and financial crises, organisations in the region are evaluating their approach to attracting, retaining and developing talent as a key asset for business recovery. At the heart of this strategic shift is the adoption of innovative HR software solutions that respond to the changing needs of the workforce in the wake of the pandemic. The lessons of the past year have prompted HR and business leaders to examine not only their crisis response strategies but also their recovery plans in 2021.

An important aspect of this is their investment in HR technology (89%), a key decision that drives impact across different stages of the recovery cycle, research for HRD’s 5-Star Awards for HR Software has found.

Winning the talent war The job market is one economic sector that’s exhibiting signs of recovery. As communities

emerge from lockdowns, job vacancies in the region have also increased. In June 2021, data from the Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) Banking Group showed a 129% yearover-year rise in job openings.

The finding supports what workforce analysts today call the “great employment shuffle”, or the new war for talent postCOVID. This year, employers are likely to see an exodus of talent in pursuit of a better work environment and better employee benefits, such as flexible working, health insurance and paid leave, according to HRD’s research.

“The latest research [indicates] that 40% of employees are thinking about resigning in the next year,” says Dave Johnson, corporate sales manager at JobAdder, one of this year’s recipients of the HRD 5-Star HR Software award. “HR technology will need to support HR leaders to increase their retention and avoid that sort of brain drain, but also to give them the ability to secure high-calibre candi-

NUMBER OF PEOPLE INVOLVED IN DECIDING TO BUY HR SOFTWARE

10 or more

Between 5 and 10

Less than 5

according to 18.9% of respondents

according to 35.8% of respondents

according to 45.3% of respondents

“The organisations that can adapt to the digital shift and are enabled by their technology and culture will be the employers of choice in the future” Stephen Moore, Ceridian

dates and a salary report – and all of that without actually increasing the workload of the HR team,” Johnson says.

Organisations that invest in HR tech are staying ahead of a possible brain drain in the region by keeping an eye on talent trends and preparing for these shifts even before they occur within their own teams. The latest HR software solutions capture the entire employee life cycle, giving HR and business leaders visibility into their talent pool in this next phase of growth. In fact, nine in 10 HR leaders (89%) surveyed by Reward Gateway, one of HRD’s 5-Star HR Software award winners, believe technology will be critical to employee retention after the crisis.

Driving business impact with AI Machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence, emerged as one of the top technology

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investments driving the most impact in HR in the wake of COVID-19. Employers in the past year have turned to tools, such as predictive analytics, that are built into a number of human capital management software systems today. These tools can purportedly make predictions about talent activity – or “at least suggest where there might be potential issues”, says Gordon Starkey, chief operating officer at ELMO Software, which won two HRD 5-Star HR Software awards for 2021.

With an integrated AI analytics platform, modern software solutions enable organisations to intervene before concerns become actual risks. “This has definitely brought the need for AI forward,” Starkey says. “To have the data accessible to be able to make those decisions in an educated way is certainly [an] important part for people management to move that to the next level.”

AI-powered HR software gives employers data on their talent pool – data that is essen-

they’re enabled and they’ve got the right support,” Starkey says.

Leading the hybrid, mobile workforce There has never been a more challenging time in the post-industrial age for talent acquisition, retention and development than now, says Stephen Moore, Ceridian’s head of AsiaPacific and Japan. The HCM specialist also won a 5-Star HR Software award.

“We have to learn to collaborate virtually, yet we still need to be connected and draw from our organisations those values that are important to us collectively and individually,” Moore says.

For the HR tech leader, the COVID-19 crisis has allowed employers to examine the value that their workers bring, even when they are not in a shared physical environment.

“We were once paid to attend work, but we weren’t valued for our outputs,” he says.

The challenges of hybrid working, however, prove how HR software, particu-

“Organisations are now focused on how they can find new ways to keep employees connected, new ways to recognise employees who may not be sitting side by side in the office” Kylie Green, Reward Gateway tial to managing a hybrid, remote or mobile workforce. In the new era of work, each workforce segment faces unique challenges, such as the need to stay connected with managers and colleagues and to stay focused on tasks even as they work offsite, HR leaders tell HRD. Workforce analytics software, for example, provides an overview of talent movements and employee sentiments within an organisation.

“You won’t be seeing your staff every day or having that face-to-face interaction, yet you still need to make sure they’re engaged,

larly cloud-based solutions, have created value for organisations by empowering employees to contribute to their teams and access their tools securely regardless of their physical location, he says.

Most organisations are also “not going back to the old way of working – that time has gone,” Moore says. “The organisations that can adapt to that shift, those who are not just enabled by the technology but by the culture that underpins the organisation and is enshrined in their technology, will be the employers of choice in the future.”

METHODOLOGY Over the past few months, HRD’s research team surveyed and conducted in-depth phone interviews with hundreds of HR professionals and enterprise software customers regionwide to compile this list of 5-Star HR Software award winners.

HR professionals were asked to rate software vendors they had worked with in the past 12 months. In addition, HRD sourced recommendations from employers by asking them which HR software firms they would most likely recommend. The HR software firms that are rated the best for the quality and range of their technology solutions, specialist expertise and client service are recognised as 5-Star HR Software award winners.

Keeping teams connected to the mission For Gordon Starkey of ELMO Software, the challenge for HR software vendors is to make sure they can “cover all bases and really bring people together, irrespective of where and how they’re working”.

“We’ve seen a really big shift in terms of HR software being potentially seen as just the automation of process, but, in this new digital and remote world, it’s also playing a big role in terms of the employee experience [EX] and employer brand,” he says.

Modern HR software solutions support cross-functional communication within their environment, especially when managers are tracking, reviewing and approving documents, or facilitating performance reviews, promotions and succession planning. This tech-driven approach to strategic HR functions helps improve the overall EX, a survey for HRD’s 5-Star HR Software awards shows.

Innovative HR solutions enable organisations to update staff through automated emails and in real time via push notifications on their desktops or mobile devices. They

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SPECIAL REPORT BUSINESS STRATEGY

5-STAR AWARDS 2021: HR SOFTWARE

SURVEY RESPONDENTS BY COMPANY SIZE Large companies (over 1,000 employees)

24.4% Midsize companies (100–999 employees)

52.7% Small companies (1–99 employees)

multiple tools but also provides employees with a positive user experience. “Instead of having five apps, five different logins and remembering different passwords, we want to provide all that under one login,” he says.

Ease of integration and cost-effectiveness were two of the most popular features HR leaders wanted in their choice of software, according to HRD’s research. This suggests a growing interest in all-in-one HR tech solutions that offer value for money in the long run. “We’ve seen a greater drive towards single-vendor solutions rather than trying to implement many different solutions across multiple vendors,” Starkey tells HRD.

Award insights

22.9%

can hold pulse surveys on a daily, weekly and monthly basis; communicate the company’s employee value proposition across channels; and drive engagement with staff members even when they cannot interact with them face-to-face.

These solutions level the playing field for all segments of the workforce. “It’s very difficult to recognise a colleague who doesn’t have the advantage of attending a town hall meeting,” says Kylie Green, SVP of global sales at Reward Gateway, a winner of the 5-Star HR Software award.

“Organisations are really now focused on how they can find new ways to keep their employees connected, between the organisation and their people; new ways to recognise employees who may not be sitting side by side in the office,” she says.

In a recent survey, Reward Gateway found that almost 40% of HR leaders said meeting the unique needs of a hybrid workforce would continue to be a challenge in 2021 and beyond. While technology plays a role in how employers “communicate and connect with all employees, whenever and wherever they

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are working”, a culture of reward and recognition also underpins employees’ level of engagement in a hybrid work environment.

Digital solutions must therefore align with an organisation’s strategic goals, and this entails “shining a spotlight on the values and behaviours employers want to see repeated” and “recognising employee contribution, whether they are working in person or as a frontline employee”, Green says.

All-in-one platforms versus point solutions Software accessibility and integration are two trends that go hand in hand in the workfrom-anywhere revolution, HRD’s findings show. “While the trend has been happening for some time, it’s just completely accelerated with what we’ve all had to cope with in the last year or so,” says Zane Knight, director at ConnX. This year, the company won two 5-Star HR Software awards for its all-in-one HR platform.

Knight says having a single integrated platform for all managers and employees not only eliminates the hassles of working with

HRD’s 5-Star Awards for HR Software recognise the most innovative HR technology companies that are responding to the changing needs of employers and employees in the new era of talent management. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s winners prove how investing in the right technology can directly impact an organisation’s ability to recover from crises.

Disruption in the past year has opened a new business and talent development opportunity for employers in the region.

No longer is enterprise technology, such as HR software, restricted to use within the workplace, as seen in the case of outdated on-premise legacy software, but it is instead made available on cloud and hybrid platforms that serve the needs of a mobile workforce. The emergence of a technology stack that is accessible any time, anywhere enables talent on multiple fronts to perform their tasks without being constrained within a geographic location. Meanwhile, employers are also turning to modern HR software to look after the wellbeing of their staff and better prepare for future crises.

The 5-Star winners of 2021 are on the forefront of innovation, developing digital solutions built for this new era of business, simplifying and streamlining tools and placing them in the hands of a hybrid workforce.

2021 RECRUITMENT ConnX Phone: 1300CONNXHR Email: info@connx.com.au Website: connx.com.au

HR SOFTWARE HRIS Ceridian Phone: 1 800 324 928 Website: ceridian.com/au

JobAdder

BetterHR

Phone: 02 8005 5711 Email: contact@jobadder.com Website: jobadder.com

Phone: 1300 659 563 Email: sales@betterhr.com.au Website: betterhr.com.au

BigRedSky (Thomson Reuters) ELMO Software Expr3ss!

ConnX Phone: 1300CONNXHR Email: info@connx.com.au Website: connx.com.au

BambooHR BrightHR

LinkedIn PeopleScout QJumpers

ELMO Software Frontier Software SAP SuccessFactors The H Factor

SAP SuccessFactors

Workday

REWARD & RECOGNITION

PAYROLL

Achievers

ELMO Payroll

Phone: 1800 875 057 Email: memberexperience@achievers.com Website: www.achievers.com

Frontier Software KeyPay MYOB

Reward Gateway

Sage MicrOpay SAP

Bonusly

Xero

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SPECIAL REPORT BUSINESS STRATEGY

5-STAR AWARDS 2021: HR SOFTWARE

CERIDIAN

T

he future of work isn’t simply hybrid – it’s also mobile. For Ceridian, one of the world’s leading HR technology firms, there is more to talent management post-COVID-19 than a mere dichotomy between working from home and working on site. Ceridian offers a comprehensive suite of human capital management (HCM) tools that empower workers who desire the freedom and flexibility to move between traditional workspaces. After all, today’s talent bring value to their teams regardless of their physical location, said Stephen Moore, head of Asia-Pacific and Japan at Ceridian.

Access to talent solutions on a desktop or mobile device proves that employees can do as much high-impact work “virtually and via mobile means” as in a physical office, Moore says. “Employees shouldn’t lose anything from that experience; they should be just as enabled in a virtual way as they would be in a physical way.”

Innovative talent management isn’t a matter of adding a mobile strategy to an

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Phone: 1 800 324 928 Website: ceridian.com/au

organisation’s people initiatives. Instead, an organisation’s talent initiatives should be engineered for the mobile age right from the start, the HR tech leader says.

Employers who see digital transformation as mission-critical invest in HCM apps that their workers can access any time, anywhere.

Advanced software solutions, like Ceridian’s award-winning Dayforce HCM platform, enable people leaders to support workers through a full range of core and strategic HR functionalities.

“We have a unique value proposition whereby our customers enjoy end-to-end functional deployment, from onboarding right away through to payroll in a single database in real time – fully mobile and fully in line with contemporary industry requirements,” Moore tells HRD. Investing in a comprehensive HCM solution underpins today’s technological and cultural shift in the world’s top employers.

“How do you – in a virtual world – ensure that you’re attracting and retaining the right talent

and you’re harmonising employees to the purpose of your organisation?” Moore says.

“The first step is simple: be an attractive employer. You have to offer your staff the employee experience that they’re seeking.

One of the means by which you can do that is via the human capital management solution that you deploy as an employer.”

Ceridian aligns its technology with its own core values. The company’s HCM platform helps other organisations nurture and celebrate their employees, fostering a diverse workplace. The software also ensures orderly day-to-day processes, such as compensation and benefits, or document management.

Being an attractive employer is about “[providing] contemporary solutions,” Moore says. Employers need to be agile and responsive to evolving business needs when selecting HCM solutions. “The value of an organisation to employees and shareholders will be largely determined by how it reacts to that shift in workforce dynamics in the future,” he says.

CONNX

L

ong before smartphones hit the mainstream market in Australia, HR software firm ConnX was already ahead of the curve in empowering businesses with intuitive and easy-to-navigate technology. The firm has gained a loyal following among hundreds of businesses that aimed to streamline their HR workflow into a single platform.

Fast-forward to 2021, nearly two decades after ConnX launched, the company remains one of the most trusted brands in the HR tech space in the region.

The platform covers core HR, self-service, recruitment, onboarding, performance management, and learning and development, among other HR functions.

ConnX serves over 500 businesses and eliminates the pain points commonly associated with managing HR operations, against the backdrop of Australia’s everevolving workplace regulations.

For Zane Knight, director at ConnX, the solution they have developed helps

Phone: 1300CONNXHR Email: info@connx.com.au Website: connx.com.au

reduce the burden of administrative HR. “We want to remove the administration frustration so that you can act, think and work more strategically to achieve your business goals,” Knight tells HRD. “You might be a 100-employee growing business focused on recruitment and onboarding. Or you might be a 400-employee school looking to improve your information system or people management. Or you might be larger or smaller looking to improve annualised salary reconciliations for compliance. Those are three very different businesses with all very different needs, and we can help in different ways,” he says.

“Our first client is still with us. They joined 18 years ago. They’re still using ConnX today, and in those 18 years we’ve never charged additionally for a software upgrade,” Knight says. “We continue to help new and existing clients with all their workflow automation, centralising their HR operations.”

As the region recovers from the busi-

ness impact of the COVID-19 lockdowns, employers are learning the importance of having agile HR apps accessible to all.

“You need to be able to access information from anywhere now, with people no longer coming into the office to work. While the trend has been happening for some time, it’s just completely accelerated with what we’ve all had to cope with in the last year or so,” Knight says.

ConnX is known for its easy-to-navigate UX/UI. “We consider ourselves an HR software solution, but our vision is to have one single integrated platform, just one login, for all managers and all employees to be able to access their people operations through that one platform. Instead of having five apps, five different logins, we want to provide all that under one login.

“We try to simplify employment changes – promotions, transfers, changes in staff. Making those complicated things seem easy is where we really excel and why our clients love our workflow,” Knight says.

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SPECIAL REPORT BUSINESS STRATEGY

5-STAR AWARDS 2021: HR SOFTWARE

B

BETTERHR Phone: 1300 659 563 Email: sales@betterhr.com.au Website: betterhr.com.au

etterHR is a cloud-based HR platform that empowers clients to successfully manage their workers, giving them smart cloud-based tools and guidance to navigate each stage of the employee life cycle – from hiring, managing, paying and performance to compliance, safety and exiting.

BetterHR has a simple and straightforward design and offers valuable phone or email advice from experienced HR consultants and employment lawyers. Unlike most providers that offer complex pricing based on head count or hours, BetterHR ensures clear and transparent pricing based on an annual subscription fee so that clients can easily understand the value they’re receiving and do not have to constantly recalculate cost as they resize their workforces.

The company has continued to grow from 2020 to 2021. A large increase in product usage and service engagement has been observed due to improvements in its core features, the launch of a manager dashboard, the self-service employee mobile app and COVID-19 toolkit.

“BetterHR is honoured to receive this award,” says Sean Wilson, CEO. “Our team has worked hard over the last 15 years to build better-value HR software and resources to help our clients achieve better results. This award inspires us to keep striving towards ‘BetterHR’ to maximise our shared success.”

J

JOBADDER Phone: 02 8005 5711 Email: contact@jobadder.com Website: jobadder.com

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obAdder is a cloud-based recruitment management platform that streamlines all jobs, candidates and tasks through one centralised dashboard, empowering staffing agency and in-house corporate recruiters to work smarter and simpler.

The recruitment software provides sourcing capability, candidate relationship management and talent pool functionality.

JobAdder’s easy-to-use interface, AI search and advanced database search capabilities and partner integrations with over 250 job boards and 200 third-party apps, as well as with SEEK and LinkedIn, are also major benefits for the platform’s users.

JobAdder’s key features include the Hiring Manager Portal, which helps reduce the friction of approvals, allows for faster recruitment with increased visibility, and automates candidate flow to hiring managers. The Agency Portal enables hiring companies and recruitment agencies to work together more effectively.

During the pandemic, JobAdder supported customers and the recruitment industry by suspending clients’ fees until lockdown passed, providing increased training sessions and sharing real-time metrics with the market. JobAdder also worked with the New Zealand government to “keep NZ working” by connecting jobseekers with employers who were hiring. Due to these efforts, JobAdder was awarded Outstanding Supplier 2021 by the Recruitment, Consulting and Staffing Association Australia & New Zealand.

2021

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