From recruitment to onboarding, from organization to training, we've compiled and analyzed the best HR tools for your startup. Are you just getting started or stuck on which apps to choose? Here you will find which ones to prioritize step by step (recruitment, training, working hours, payroll, communication, etc.) in relation to your corporate culture and how to make them work together to save time.
🤓 To build your team
For effective sourcing, first think about tools that make it easier for you to sort without having to miss out on atypical profiles that would bring a lot to your start-up.
👉 Talent.io
To build your tech team, on-site or remotely, Talent.io brings together the best profiles by Upstream sourcing (selection of 10% of registrations) and adapted to the needs of its clients. The system works on the principle of matching expectations on both sides, which avoids unpleasant surprises. For a start-up, this is all the more reassuring.
👉 Welcome to the Jungle
Start-ups, even those founded several years ago, do not always have the opportunity to dedicate part of their site to their recruitment. But even in this case, the platform Welcome to The Jungle allows you to harmonize a company profile for an employer brand that speaks directly to candidates. For example, in 2022, the online school of creative arts and thread arts Artesane, founded in 2015, created its WTTJ page to cope with its strong acceleration and recruit more easily.
🔧 To strengthen your skills occasionally
Not all startups need a copywriter to constantly pimp their website or a 24/7 communications consultant. But when you need to redo the homepage, find the right signature, or find a solution to a bad buzz, calling on a freelancer often pays off.
👉 Malt
With Malt, you know if freelancers are available, experienced, teleworking or mobile, and if they are active on their account (just check if they have updated their availability). With an account on the site adapted to your needs, you can delegate the search to the teams or take care of it yourself. Then, everything goes through the platform for payment.
This perfectly meets a need for one-off skills that you can repeat with the same person or another.
👉 StaffMe
While Malt highlights profiles with varied skills and experience, StaffMe is aimed at students and young professionals (under 30) only with self-employed status. This doesn't guarantee 100% quality, but you can find a young talent there who is just waiting to show off their creativity for your start-up in a short time.
💪 For onboarding and employee experience
It's not easy to have an employer brand from the start when you're setting up your start-up, apart from copying others a little. To avoid getting tangled up with new recruits, it's better to use a turnkey solution.
👉 Workelo
Workelo is the support tool for all key moments in the company: pre-onboarding, so even before taking your first steps in the company, onboarding, then life in the company and departure. The entire employee cycle is found on the application through an engaging journey based on communication and gamification. Workelo also connects to major workflow applications.
👉 HeyTeam
Same principle with HeyTeam which also relies on key moments from employee arrival to departure. The company can personalize its journeys with templates. This solution fits into a culture of celebrating events and the employee experience. HeyTeam also connects to Teams and Slack.
🗓 For scheduling and payroll
Tracking working hours, especially in specific sectors like retail, catering, and leisure, leads to time-consuming tasks in HR departments. Rather than tearing your hair out, here are some scheduling automation software programs (that don't just do that).
👉 Skello
With the scheduling management software Skello, you can organize the working hours of your startup's employees without fear of making mistakes: everything is automated or pre-filled. If necessary in your company, an integrated time clock makes counting even simpler. This way, you know who is entitled to how many hours of rest, where their leave stands, and pay is calculated effortlessly. Another advantage: Skello has a communication interface for exchanging shifts and requesting validation. And employees, like HR and managers, have their own dashboard.
👉 Payfit
Payfit is a solution that automates payroll, expense reports, as well as the calculation of absences and all HR tasks in this area that are time-consuming and without added value compared to the time spent. Employees also have their own dashboard to track their progress, which is another way to save time for both parties.
🤩 For the quality of life at work in your start-up
We're not going to lie, there are still some preconceived notions about start-ups and the extended hours that some impose. To avoid falling into these pitfalls and offer an employee experience that integrates well-being, think about QVT with these tools.
👉 MoodWork
Developed by researchers and psychologists, MoodWork is a solution that allows them to conduct an assessment of their state of well-being and diagnose a risk of professional burnout.In your employees' search for meaning, this is a very promising tool. For this to work, it is important to involve the entire company: the entrepreneur must also monitor their mental health at work!
👉 Teamii
This young company offers start-ups and large organizations an audit of their QVT and the implementation of a real policy to improve it. The advantage of Teamii's offers lies in the tailor-made approach based on acculturation to QVT: a little, a little, a lot, each situation is taken into account for appropriate solutions.
🩺 For your employees' mandatory mutual insurance
If QVT is One thing, the physical and mental health of your employees is also to be taken into consideration. As a business leader, you have a duty to take care of this aspect. To help you, solutions – or more precisely insurtech – are suitable for you because they are both more flexible and more suitable for start-ups.
👉 Alan
Health insurance for everyone, from the self-employed to large companies, Alan represents a 360° solution to ensure the health of your employees through a company mutual insurance plan. Having become a unicorn – and an inspiration for many project leaders – Alan is growing quickly and offers new solutions regularly. The latest being Alan Mind, dedicated to mental health and launched after the shock of the pandemic. Alan's advantages lie in its comprehensive support with online consultations.
All other health insurance plans for businesses are, of course, valid for startups. And there are well-known players on the market—like Allianz, for example—that have developed contracts dedicated to startups. In this area, as with individuals, there's only one solution: compare guarantees and prices!
🥪 For lunch breaks and employee benefits
Making lunch breaks or mobility easier for your employees is also a good way to enrich the employee experience. For this reason, many solutions exist, mainly with the aim of digitally transforming their employee benefits.
👉 Swile
Meal vouchers in a checkbook? Ancient history with Swile! Employee benefits, including meal vouchers, CSE gift vouchers, and mobility, are integrated into a bank card format that allows you to pay and track your expenses on an app. As soon as the amount allocated by the company is exceeded, the card—linked to the employee's credit card—automatically collects the additional amount from their personal account. Swile is also compatible with Apple Pay and Google Pay. Simple, practical, and intuitive, this type of solution also helps with well-being at work.
👉 Edenred
Same principle for Edenred, but which only offers digital meal vouchers. The company places orders very easily and can give its employees access to pay for their meals with a dedicated card or by mobile payment Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay.
📌 For performance management and organization
There is no shortage of project management tools. But in recent years, solutions have pushed the innovation envelope further by also providing performance tracking features, or even true workflow solutions that take care of everything. So much so that some sometimes require training. But, in any case, it's an essential aid for tracking projects and everyone's progress.
👉 Monday
Ideal for tracking project progress on a dashboard, Monday is also a good productivity indicator. More broadly, this organizational tool facilitates the flow of production to stick to the roadmap. Templates or customization, everything is possible for precise analysis and ease of use. Especially since it's easy to add an external person such as a freelancer, or to connect Slack, Teams, etc.
👉 Notion
Even if the competition is on the move to try to have as many features as it, Notion appears to be a real novelty in the variety of project management software and virtual workspaces. Here, fans of customization are served, everything is possible with the equivalent of an ultra-sophisticated word processor that has eaten a spreadsheet, leading to limitless customization. And all this is merged into a task planning solution. Notion is so vast that training on the tool is not too much if you want to go beyond the basic functionalities.
🤗 To train your teams and share knowledge
Today, it is no longer just useful to send your employees for training. This training must be continuous to advance the start-up and the entire team. Solutions now allow it to emerge continuously on digital.
👉 Elium
This platform centralizes all knowledge, shares it and measures its importance in the company. Like a documentation center designed for the user experience, Elium provides the ability to capture information and share it with the entire team. This way, no one is expected to ignore the news and learn every day about their job and its developments.
👉 Neeva
For an effective skills development plan, Neeva allows you to manage and centralize training needs, catalogs (both face-to-face and e-learning), and all the steps for each employee. You can also define your budget.
🤔 How to choose your HR tools when you're a start-up?
Unlike older companies that need to implement change management to get their employees to embrace new solutions, a start-up has the advantage of starting from scratch and being able to build its digital tools environment. However, you must first define your needs and those of your employees before making “final” choices on HR tools that may not necessarily be relevant:
- Establish all your HR needs and define the key criteria according to the corporate culture you want to build
- Conduct an analysis of the digital solutions on the market, without limiting yourself to those that have recently arrived
- Select those that combine the best approaches for your business in a single tool
- Pay attention to the different layers in the offers to obtain the functionalities that suit you and not those you don’t need
- Always request a quote to know what you will ultimately get
- Ensure data and security compliance
A startup doesn't need to digitally transform its HR organization. However, it must adopt tools so that they become the foundational elements of an excellent employee experience!
