12 Powerful HR Tools for a Rapidly Growing Business

Half of the startups survive the first five years, but only 1 in 200 become scaleups, growing quickly in size and value. 

But with rapid growth comes a range of people challenges, which Rafal Mlodzki, CEO and Co-Founder of Passport Photo Online, understands only too well. He told us:  

"As a CEO of a 70-people-strong company, navigating the complexities and nuances of human resources can become overwhelming. From onboarding and recruiting employees to maintaining positive employee relations and setting clear goals, it's important to nurture an environment that caters to the growth of our business as well as our employees.

While small to mid-sized businesses may have coped without a dedicated people team until now, it pays to get the right HR team and tools on board as you scale. 

Fortunately, with modern HR software, scaling your people function doesn't need to be a headache. 

In this guide, we've narrowed the field to find 12 powerful HR tools for growing businesses that will solve your most pressing challenges.

🧰 12 HR tools & software for growing businesses

Curious about using HR software to support your business expansion? There are many choices out there, from all-in-one systems that handle every aspect of HR to dedicated products that are the perfect choice for a single function. But how do you know the best solutions for a growing business rather than a startup or a company with decades in the game? We've sifted through the options to suggest these 12 tools. 

1. Zavvy 

Zavvy is a holistic solution enabling employees from day one and reimagining every stage of the employee lifecycle thereafter.

Take a modular approach by only picking the tools you need, or invest in the all-in-one suite for comprehensive support for onboarding, learning and development, feedback, and connections. 

Pricing: A Zavvy plan for Onboarding or Feedback & performance starts from as little as 4€ per user per month. The prices adjust to your needs - without making you pay for modules you don’t want.

The versatile pricing suits any growing business and includes reporting, consultation and support, integrations, and a packed template library.

Best for: companies that want to enjoy tangible business gains like increased retention, productivity, engagement, and satisfaction by enhancing all aspects of the employee experience.

2. PeopleDoc 

PeopleDoc is an HR document management system that allows you to store essential HR resources in the cloud. Instead of being bogged down with paperwork, this centralized approach to filing ensures that HR teams remain compliant while freeing up more time to spend on value-adding activities like employee development or retention initiatives.

Pricing: custom quotes are available when you contact PeopleDoc for a sales demo. 

Best for: HR teams with a mounting body of resources wasting time hunting down the necessary contracts, templates, and employee records. 

3. Asana 

Asana makes it easy to centralize and stay on top of your HR workflows, whether managing your hiring process, housing internal resources, or planning performance meeting agendas. 

Pricing: Asana's free plan is unlikely to meet the needs of a scaling business, but for reference, it comes with three project views (list, board, and calendar), basic reporting, and basic workflows. Stepping up a notch, the Premium version starts at $13.49 per user per month, including everything from the free plan plus a timeline view, scaled security, and automated workflows. Finally, Asana's Business plan is priced at $30.49 per monthly user. It includes advanced workflows and greater reporting capabilities. 

Best for: scaling HR teams that can win back valuable time by creating templates in Asana to streamline recurring processes. 

4. Pento 

Pento is an automated payroll software that allows you to do everything from salary and overtime calculations to HMRC payments to pension contributions. It provides a real-time overview of your payroll management, and you can make adjustments up until payday. Moreover, as you can run automation in just a few clicks, you'll spend 80% less time on payroll processing than the manual number-crunching you've previously done.

Pricing: starts at £5 per employee per month, with a monthly minimum fee of £149 (equivalent to 30 employees). 

Best for: companies struggling to manage their payroll in-house but don't want the lack of control associated with using an outsourced payroll provider.  

5. Workday 

Workday offers a human resources management system that covers everything from your recruiting process and people management to workforce planning. Get at-a-glance insights into employee performance and benchmark the results against peers. Or use the analytics tool to track your people data over time.

Pricing: custom prices are available when you contact Workday but are reported to use a per-user-per-month pricing model to support scaling businesses. 

Best for: companies with a larger budget that need a comprehensive suite of tools to manage human capital management. 

6. Pinpoint 

Pinpoint is a cloud-based platform for talent acquisition that helps you attract, select, and retain the best candidates for your growing business. It simplifies the employment process by creating a candidate pool of active and passive talent, which makes it easy to filter the most appropriate applicants and impress them with your slick hiring systems. 

Pricing: Pinpoint offers a Growth or Enterprise price plan based on headcount. The Growth plan's monthly price starts from £600, providing unlimited recruiters access to unlimited active vacancies. The Enterprise plan's monthly price starts from £1,200 (also based on headcount). It includes bells and whistles like bespoke integrations and custom contract terms. 

If your growing business still has fewer than 50 people, you can apply to join Pinpoint's startup program. As a part of the program, you will receive 50% off either recruiting software plan. This offer is valid if you haven't used applicant tracking systems before. 

Best for: growing companies hiring at scale which no longer have the time to dedicate to interview management, candidate communication, or manual admin like sorting through stacks of paper resumes. 

7. Personio 

Personio is an all-in-one human resources management software that handles pay, recruitment, attendance, approval processes, and your people data.

Pricing: The Essential plan supports your HR's core functions, including attendance tracking, absence management, employee calendars, and salaries. The Professional package provides vital features like document management, extended reports, Google single sign-on, and onboarding & offboarding tools. The Enterprise package supports businesses with more complex needs, including management of sub-companies if that's part of your expansion. All price plans are available on request from the vendor, but the great news is that you're not locked into any of them. You can switch between the packages as your business scales to find the best fit.

Best for: HR teams who want to streamline the repetitive stuff to focus on strategy.

Top tip: Personio integrates with Zavvy to live-sync your employee data. 

8. Paperform 

Paperform is a digital form builder with 86+ Human Resources (HR) templates, including job applications, interview scheduling, employee feedback, and leave request forms. Customize your forms and embed them in emails, web pages, company wiki, or job board ads for easy accessibility.

Pricing: The Essentials plan starts from $24 per month. Although the package is only for one user, it does include unlimited forms, 1,000 form submissions, and up to 10,000 form views each month. The Pro version costs $49 per month for one user, unlimited forms and form views, and up to 10,000 submissions each month. Still not enough? The Agency plan is priced at $159 per month for five users—the extra cost gives you unlimited of everything else!

Note: Paperform branding is not removable with the Essentials plan but is removable with the Pro and Agency plans. 

Best for: companies needing help managing employee or applicant responses through email chains or direct messages that require a more streamlined approach. 

9. Perkbox 

Perkbox is a global rewards and benefits management tool that allows companies to reward their employees for keeping them happy, healthy, and engaged. Employees can access their perks via the web or the mobile app and choose from thousands of deals and discounts. And for HR, the benefits management platform provides a centralized admin dashboard to save bags of time on rewards allocation.

Pricing: Perkbox offers variable pricing suitable for companies from 25 employees upwards. Contact the vendor for a custom price.

Best for: companies with a distributed workforce struggling to find local benefits suppliers in each region. 

10. Okta 

Okta uses pre-built integrations to automate workflows between HR departments and IT. For example, instead of waiting for IT to provision apps or update permissions, Okta uses triggers to automate these processes to improve the employee experience.

Pricing: Single sign-on prices start from $2 per user per month, with life cycle management prices starting from $4 per user per month. 

Best for: companies noticing interdepartmental friction between HR and IT, causing onboarding and offboarding bottlenecks. 

11. Matrix LMS

Matrix is a cloud-based learning management system ideal for training, upskilling, and onboarding your employees. The platform includes gamification options to motivate learners and tap into that competitive spirit by tracking scores.

Pricing: contact the vendor for an accurate price quote.

Best for: companies focused on closing their skills gap without the cost of recruiting externally. 

12. Zapier 

Zapier automates tasks like copying data from one app to another, sending notifications, or creating new records. Automating core HR processes will blitz those mundane tasks that are otherwise error-prone. For example, suppose you use identical employee records on HR and payroll systems. In that case, Zapier can sync the data between them. 

Pricing: Zapier's free plan includes up to 100 tasks per month. The Starter plan starts at $19.99 per month for up to 750 tasks. The Professional plan starts at $49 per month for up to 2,000 tasks per month. At the top level, the Team plan starts at $399 per month for 50,000 tasks, and the Company plan starts at $799 per month for 100,000 tasks. 

Depending on the size of your HR operations, a growing business will get the most use out of the Starter, Professional, or Team package.  

Best for: companies inputting the same employee data on separate tools who want to save time and resources by building an automated workflow between integrated HR systems.

😟 What common issues can HR tools solve for growing businesses?

If you've been managing everyday HR tasks in quiet chaos, you might wonder when to ditch the spreadsheets and paper trails to invest in HR software solutions. 

If any of the below points resonate with you, that's a strong indicator that technology could support your business growth.

Recruiting to manage rapid growth 

If your customer base is swelling, you'll need to recruit quickly to meet demand. But rapid expansion can outstrip your existing people op capabilities, resulting in a disorganized employee experience. HR software can automate recruitment for a seamless process—-from finding the right talent to onboarding and managing new joiners. 

Complex onboarding 

If your current onboarding process relies on a baptism of fire, you can expect high turnover and unnecessary recruitment costs. New joiners want to hit the ground running, not feel like they are in a state of confusion. And if you don't get this right as you scale?

A BambooHR survey finds that 30% of new hires leave their job within the first six months.

Maintaining payroll accuracy 

EY analysis reveals that the average company only boasts an 80% accuracy rate for its payroll processes, with approximately 15 corrections required per pay period. The costs add up quickly for growing companies.

For example, missing or incorrect time punches cost companies $78,700 per 1,000 employees annually. 

Developing retention strategies 

Constant hiring drains company resources, so retention strategies are critical for long-term growth.

Retention analytics software tools open up real-time visibility into employee issues and allow you to identify high-risk groups and tailor strategies accordingly.

Building an engaging culture 

Matthew Ramirez, Founder of Rephrasely, reveals how culture should be a priority component of your hiring strategies:

"One of the biggest challenges growing businesses face is how to keep the culture intact while expanding. When a company is starting to grow, it can be easy to take a more shotgun approach and hire quickly. That is fine for a company looking to scale, but a company that wants to keep its culture at the center must be strategic in its hires."

➡️ Need inspiration? Check out these stellar company culture examples. 

Ensuring a bias-free performance management system 

Rapidly growing companies don't always prioritize time for performance feedback. Any appraisals they do hold can be unwittingly saturated with bias, including recency bias (when reviewers focus on the most recent events and disregard performance earlier in the review cycle) and confirmation bias (when they seek out information that aligns with their existing beliefs.) 

Robust review mechanisms will eradicate bias from your performance management processes while allowing your employees to grow. 

➡️ Want to learn more about the dangers of implicit bias? Check out our guide to stereotypical and cognitive biases in performance feedback management.

Defining a career growth framework 

As your business expands, now's the time to map rich career pathways within your organization. Hence, employees are less tempted to hop across to another employer to support their professional development. 

Tip: Create career progression frameworks and link them to development plans to encourage employees to own their impact.

Providing enticing employee benefits 

Growing businesses must stay competitive in the marketplace, which means more than offering a generous and equitable pay package. Today's workforce requires a holistic approach to benefits, including flexible working options and health-related schemes.

➡️ From well-being and work-life balance to family planning and financial advice, check out the latest trends in employee benefits.

Leveraging data to power decision-making 

Businesses are built on numbers, and people teams can make smarter decisions and act faster with access to data-driven insights. Analytics applications can track employee engagement, turnover, performance KPIs and other metrics to inform a data-driven HR strategy that supports your business objectives.  

Integrating a larger set of tools 

Asana reports that knowledge workers use an average of nine tools daily.

While each tool has its merits, this places an enormous burden on HR to define communication policies, ensure each piece of software meets security protocols, and develop ways to retain productivity while hopping between multiple systems.

Managing asynchronous teams 

HR must find ways to build collaboration, eliminate silos, set team goals, and drive productivity in an asynchronous work environment with multiple different time zones in play. 

➡️ Learn more about the challenges of remote and hybrid work here.  

💸 The ROI of HR software for growing businesses

Some growing businesses have already turned their attention to hiring People Specialists, and others will be exploring the possibility of hiring a CHRO to oversee a dedicated team. In either case, HR software will support these key players in achieving strategic outcomes.

But if you're presenting HR software options to your senior decision-makers, they will need some data. They'll want to explore the cost of your preferred HR tool and the return on investment, including how many hours you'll save. 

Feel free to borrow these nuggets of information from our HR automation and employee onboarding guides: 

• A medical company saved $4,000 by using HR automation. (Gravity Flow)
• HR managers spend 14 hours each week on tasks that could be automated. (CareerBuilder) 
• Companies that have switched to automated onboarding say their processes are 67% faster. (Nucleus Research) 
• Automated onboarding improved new hire retention by 16%. (UserGuiding) 

Zavvy has already partnered with many fantastic growing businesses to unlock their people potential. Here are some key wins they've achieved with the help of our suite of tools: 

• Remote-first company Awesomic now achieves an average of 95.5% completion rates due to our designer onboarding program.
• Storyblok has saved 15 hours weekly during orientation, plus 1.5-2 hours during preboarding. 
• Alasco has slashed time-to-productivity rates by 50% thanks to a fun, structured onboarding plan.
• Taktile's HR team saves 8 hours every week by automating feedback and performance review cycles.

➡️ Are you ready to hire a CHRO but need some onboarding support? Check out our in-depth guide for CHRO onboarding, including a free onboarding plan template.

➡️ Grow your people and your business with Zavvy

Zavvy makes managing your core HR processes as you expand a cinch. Our holistic suite of tools includes solutions for: 

• Onboarding: help new joiners become productive faster through spaced content delivery, smart assignments, journey builders, and more.
• Feedback and performance management: drive feedback conversations and inspire action with employee surveys, feedback templates, performance reviews, and automated reminders.
• Employee growth: boost company performance with a cycle of continuous development using career frameworks and growth plans.
• Leadership development: support business growth by arming future leaders with the tools they need to succeed.
• Training: includes innovative methods like social learning, microlearning, and progress analytics.
• Employee connections: to auto-connect colleagues for casual meetups, coffee chats, meaningful conversations, walking meetings, and more.

We base our solutions on extensive research backed by our highly-skilled learning scientists.

Ready to take Zavvy for a spin? Book today for a free demo. 

❓ FAQs 

Still itching to explore the benefits of HR tech for your business? We've got you covered.

How can HR help a business grow? 

Human resources play a pivotal role in any growing business. An effective HR setup will help companies attract and retain top talent, develop strong employee relationships, manage workflow and resources, and create an inspiring workplace culture. 

By leveraging the right type of HR tech, businesses can streamline processes, improve team performance, and support high growth.

Which HR areas do you need tools for? 

If you had to choose one area where HR can improve your processes, it's automation. 

Instead of spending time manually managing people data, investing in technology can automate everyday tasks like onboarding, performance review tracking, and employee engagement. 

Automation frees up your HR team's time to focus on more strategic tasks. 

What are the best HR tools? 

The best HR tools will depend on the specific needs of your business. Consider solutions that can help you develop effective feedback systems, encourage professional growth, and support employee retention.

Zavvy's suite of essential HR tools is tried and tested by companies like Primer, Typeform, Freeletics, and more. Why not try us out for size?