Why did we create our own HR management system?
If you google „HRMS” (Human Resources Management System or HR Management Software) you’ll get about 359 000 000 results. But how do you choose the right one for your needs?
When we were in this decision-making process at INLOOPX, we found that there are three main options — to buy one, to use an open-source, or to create one. All of these options have their pros and cons, so it depends on what are your company needs. You have to consider how big it is, what other tools you use and what laws there are in your country — because not all of the systems can be used in every country given all the different privacy laws. This article is about our search for the best option, and why we decided to create our own HRMS in the end.
There are so many good HRMS across the world. If you have budget that is big enough, and you can’t create a system of your own, the best way is to buy a system that is already pre-made and working well. During our research, we found some really good ones, which can also be linked to other internal systems. You just have to choose whichever supports your company needs the best. Whether it is, for example BambooHR, BobHR, SAP, etc…
The open-source variety is a great option if you don’t have enough money but you have people capable of developing changes in there. With these, you can also have all the information in one place. A lot of open-sources have the possibility of buying additional tools and systems, but you might also develop this sort of things yourselves. There is also a long list of options here: for example OrangeHRM, Sentrifugo, etc…
When I came to INLOOPX, all the data was stored as a paper archive in the HQ and on excel sheets. I found out what an advantage is it to have an electronic database set directly from the start:it can grow and change together with the development of the company. But it’s quite normal to forget about this, as you are focusing on other more important things whilst starting your company. As Martin (our CEO) says : “Over time you just get to the point, when accessing and managing the data becomes slow and frustrating. As programmers say: It’s time for cleanup and refactoring.” At that time, when we needed information about our employees (their address, start date, salary, etc.) we had to ask our back-office every time. So, to have an “HRMS” based on excel sheets was ok while we were still a small company. But the bigger we grew the more insufficient it became. We discovered that a professional HRMS will give us more info in one place, better summary and better orientation there. And also give all the people working on it access to this information on daily basis.
Even though the decision-making process wasn’t easy, we came to the conclusion that it was necessary to create our own HRMS based on JIRA This was because we wanted a tool for our superiors, back-office and HR. We didn’t need nice graphics and coloured links. We were in need of reliability and easy management. And we found out that JIRA was the most apt provider of these qualities.
Our decision was also supported by the fact, that we had already using Jira for our recruitment process. For this purpose, we had a project named Recruiting, so we extended this by several new boards, new issue types, custom fields and statuses, and thus our new shiny HRMS was born. Using this system allows us to have all the data stored from the first contact with a person right up to the end of our cooperation. The communication between the hiring and onboarding teams is much smoother now, as we just change the status to “accepted” and the person who takes care of onboarding knows, that their time has come :) Among other structured information we have in the HRMS, we store the salaries and full costs of our employees, which allows us to create various cost view dashboards and reports.
Currently JIRA is not only a software project management tool for us, but has over time, become a business intelligence system that we are using for our cost evidence, attendance, project management and portfolio management as well as CRM.
Hint : Link HRMS to your cost system, hiring tool and have it all in one place. It’s worth it! (Anytime you´ll want to create a report — Cost, Revenues, Headcount — or have a closer look at your employee’s history, you’ll find everything here and you’ll be able to connect all the systems together.)
Because we centralised all our business intelligence into JIRA, we began searching for a plugin that would allow us to create various dashboards and reports, and that we could utilize for our day-to-day business operations. We found EazyBI, which is a perfect fit for our needs. With it, we can easily see how many people are working for us, where they’re working from, and any other information that we might need.
In Slovakia and within the broader EU, there is a really strict law about the protection of personal information. In JIRA, you can avoid unauthorized leakage of this confidential data by simply restricting access to only the people who need to have it.
There are currently 135+ people working for INLOOPX and JIRA has proven to be the right system for us. Maybe we´ll have to rethink and go for another option as we grow bigger. But until then, we are completely satisfied and happy to improve our own HRMS.
Which systems do you use? Share your opinions in the discussion below the article.
