HR Guide
Our software tool recommendations for your consultancy
Making your HR company the best
Choosing the right technology tools for your business is a key aspect of building your success. They may be industry specific or hold multiple important functions you can utilise to reduce time spent on processes and boost the free time your staff have to hit their goals. We've put together a host of software tools we recommend for your industry whether you're a year into your business and looking to expand, or you've been running for 10 years and now need to make upgrades to certain processes.
When choosing your next tool we recommend considering the following points:
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Does the tool have the specific features you need?
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Is the tool scalable to suit your growth?
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Is the tool compatible with your other software systems?
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Does it handle multiple functions for your teams?
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Is the price suitable for your budget?
We have not built our resources guides as review articles which compare multiple tools against each other. We have taken one or two tools we would recommend and put them forward to make your life easier as we have either carried out the research or used the tools ourselves through our clients. Of course, we recommend you perform your own research to make sure they will fit your company but our aim is to save you the leg work!
You want to keep in mind how many tools you use in your business. You may be reliant on the free plans of certain tools if you're starting out but as you begin to grow the plans may start stacking up, costing you a pretty penny. We have tried to include tools here which offer multiple functions/features for you to keep costs down. Try to keep your tech stack small if you can! It will make building your systems easier.
To visit the website of the tool we recommend, simply click the logo.
Financial
Rippling is an extremely powerful HR system which also offers many capabilities such as managing payroll, benefits, onboarding, attendance tracking and even includes an information database to improve learning and training.
With a very intuitive User Interface and pricing starting from £7/user per month, this is a brilliant tool to handle both HR & payroll for your business.
Combine HR & Accounting
You will no doubt have heard of Xero as it's one of the largest and most well-known cloud-based accounting software designed for small and medium-sized businesses. It offers a range of features including invoicing, bank reconciliation, expense tracking, financial reporting, and payroll management. It's powerful, has an intuitive user interface and hosts many integrations to sink up your current software tools.
Starting from £15/month, this is suitable option if you need your accounts in one set platform.
Straightforward accounting
CRM Tools
We've chosen Zoho CRM as our top pick as it is known for its customisation options, scalability, and comprehensive features. It offers tools for contact management, lead tracking, and workflow automation, making it suitable for HR consultants managing client relationships. One key benefit is its pricing structure which is very linear compared to Hubspot for example as they have multiple tiers within multiple areas - confusing!
We recommend starting off with the Standard plan of £16/user per month and seeing the transformation take place in your sales cycle.
Marketing
In our experience Instantly.AI is one of the best cold outreach email platforms when it comes to reaching your prospects inbox and providing a specific email workflow to introduce them to your brand. This tool will warm up each email account you set up, you can send email sequences at scale to be more effective, and easily personalise your campaigns to your prospects.
Starting at £24/month, this is a brilliant tool to start up your outbound marketing campaigns, or improve your processes on your current efforts.
Outbound marketing
Mailerlite is a fantastic program we have a lot of experience with to send out newsletters and marketing campaigns. Their campaign builder allows you full customisation of your email design make it look exactly how you need. They have their standard drag and drop editor, an AI editor, a rich-text editor and HTML editor to suit your needs. Send newsletter subscribers into a workflow and get them warmed up with automations too!
Pricing starts from £18/month on their Growing Business plan which allows up to 2,500 subscribers before requiring an upgrade in plan.
Inbound marketing
For a small consultancy just looking to get content out into the world, Buffer is a leader in the industry allowing you to easily create, auto-schedule and post your content. Its minimal and clean user interface makes for a shallow learning curve and offers great reports to track your analytics across multiple social media channels. We use this ourselves and have yet to run into an issue!
The free plan offers 10 scheduled posts across 3 channels at a time, with paid plans starting from £5/month.
Social Media
Project Management
ClickUp is a project/task management tool boasting a brilliant user experience with team management capabilities. From this one platform you can create information databases, you can create dashboards for each member to give a clear overview of their work schedule and you can easily monitor progress of your HR client and share updates.
ClickUp offer a free plan but we expect the Unlimited or Business plan would be best suited for your consultancy, starting from £6/user per month which is very competitively priced.
Automations
Your business software stack is never complete without an automation tool, and Zapier is the pick of the bunch! We love Zapier as it allows (most) software tools to communicate with each other, making processes far smoother.
Imagine you have a prospect who signs up for your newsletter, and you want to nurture them. You can use Zapier to send the signup from your webform into your email marketing tool, send them into your CRM, and start a workflow of an email campaign to warm them up. Once they express interest, Zapier can handle your tools to get them onboarded.
It's truly great software which we recommend starting with on the Starter plan of £23.97/month because it offers multi-step automations and 750 "automations" per month.
Additional Tools
We've added some additional tools which aren't necessarily tailored for your industry, but they are widely regarded as the best options for day-to-day business functions such as messaging, security, design and more.
Whether you are working with a virtual or an in-house team, you're going to want a strong password manager which offers a high security rating to protect your passwords. Lastpass offers the ability to store passwords in customisable folders, it will generate highly secure passwords for you, and gives you the ability to share login information with a team member without giving out the password itself.
We recommend this password manager to all of our clients as it's a safe and secure method for keeping your data secure, and many people haven't considered the risks before being introduced to the tool. Starting from £3.40/user per month, it's a small price to pay for peace of mind.
Slack is a supurb messaging app to bring your team together in one application. It's easier to use than MS Teams and certainly operates better than Whatsapp for team use, but the biggest selling point is its ability to integrate with other software tools. One example is connecting it to a project management tool and automating notification messages to team members when changes are made on tickets.
While Slack does have a free plan, for smaller teams we recommend the Pro plan which is £7/user per month. This does make it a more expensive option in the market, but the capabilities more than make up for it.
That concludes our list! We recommend your look into the options we've provided and see how they fit into your company based on size, budget and how experienced your team are with adopting new tools.
Should you require help setting up and running these systems, please send an enquiry in and we will set you up with a member of our team to support your business.
Miro is a fantastic visual collaboration tool tailored for innovation and creation. It provides you with a virtual whiteboard to plan, map, discuss and discover new ways of working and building your product or business processes. Whether mapping out product roadmaps, conducting brainstorming sessions, or facilitating remote team collaboration, Miro is the tool to use. You no longer have to print off a process map and hand it out to team members before a meeting, now you can all work on the same board simultaneously. We use it, and we love it!
Miro offers a free plan to get you started and feel how much better collaboration can feel. If you need more than 3 boards and more features, the Starter plan is £6.28 per user per month when billed annually. This is the plan we recommend.
Your writing is one of the foundational keys of your business, so you want to make sure it's flowing well and without errors. Grammarly is like having a wizen teacher stood behind you with a ruler, constantly peering at your spelling. The tool ensures your writing is free of spelling mistakes and grammar issues, with a surprisingly good AI module now developed with the recent push of AI technology. Grammarly runs in a host of applications meaning you'll always have the ability to check your work.
Grammarly has a great free plan to keep you in check, and for those who would be considered the team novellist, there is a paid plan of £10/month.
Canva will always be at the top of our list for web-based design work for entry and intermediate level design work for social media and documentation requirements. The templates available offer a great basis for bringing your idea to life and the design tools you have at your disposal allow for in-depth customisation.
If you have one person in your business looking after design work, we recommend the Pro subscription at £9/month, and if you have a team each adding their input to the design process you should opt for the Team plan for £100/person per year, which has a minimum of 2 people.