The Benefits of HR Software | How to Choose HR Software

By alisonbarlow|Jan 31, 2025|10:42 pm GMT

Benefits of HR software

A memorable guest experience starts long before your customer walks through the door. Delighting guests requires an impressive location, great hygiene, fresh ingredients, and a well-trained and friendly team. This last one is particularly important—we’re called the hospitality industry for a reason. This is where the benefits of HR software come in, helping to streamline recruitment, training, and workforce management, ensuring your team is always prepared to deliver exceptional service.

Teams that consistently and reliably provide exceptional hospitality enjoy what they do, feel valued in the workplace, and have the support and training they need to perform at their best. It’s the role of human resource (HR) management to tick each of those boxes, and HR software helps them to attract top talent, keep teams motivated, and ensure every shift is fully staffed with employees equipped to succeed.

The benefits of HR software and how to choose the right software for your business

The hospitality workforce is complex, and HR management has to juggle employees with various skills, contracts, employment terms, and shift patterns. Ensuring that everyone, on every shift, in every location, has adequate training to perform at their best and is motivated to succeed is a challenge.

It’s made harder in hospitality by a tendency to centralise operational functions like HR, forcing front-of-house managers to take on many of the daily HR responsibilities. This means managers spend hours tethered to computer screens instead of on the floor with their teams. It’s a set-up that also requires them to understand relevant workforce legislation so they can respond to issues appropriately and ensure that shift schedules comply with labour laws.

HR software simplifies people management by automating common processes and providing a framework to ensure compliance. This relieves the pressure on HR professionals and managers, freeing them to focus on building a positive workplace where staff feel motivated and supported.

What is HR software?

HR software provides a platform to manage employees throughout their entire time with your company, from hiring and onboarding to training and development. These solutions typically swap out manual, time-consuming processes for automated systems, often by:

• Streamlining common HR processes
• Automating manual tasks (e.g., holiday requests)
• Centralising employee data
• Supporting feedback loops
• Facilitating analytics and reporting
• Providing internal communications channels

The benefits of using HR software

Workforce management platforms automate tasks and workflows needed to manage your workforce. They are useful tools for improving efficiency and reducing costs and labour spend. They can also increase data security, boost employee engagement, disseminate information more effectively throughout the business, and streamline hiring and training.

Improve the efficiency of HR practices

HR software saves time. Whether that’s kitchen staff quickly submitting a request for time off, housekeepers using an app to swap shifts, or managers generating next month’s schedule with the click of a button, these platforms can remove manual bottlenecks and deliver impressive efficiency gains.

They also centralise data, ensuring information isn’t duplicated across systems and streamlining back-office processes by giving everyone—from HR to Payroll—access to accurate, up-to-date records. This eliminates the need to hunt through multiple systems to verify employees’ details, improving accuracy and reducing the risk of payroll errors that can lead to costly penalties.

Make better HR decisions

HR software helps track productivity and employee satisfaction metrics, giving HR departments visibility of the challenges teams face throughout their business. This insight is invaluable for understanding patterns and trends–like absences or staff turnover rates–within the workforce and can inform strategies to better support staff.

Create a competitive onboarding experience

The talent market in hospitality is increasingly competitive. It’s not unusual for individuals to accept multiple employment offers and decide which employer they’ll work for later. First impressions matter more than ever, and a strong onboarding experience could make the difference between a fully staffed venue and one that struggles to fill shifts.

Some workforce management platforms do include onboarding functionality designed to streamline this process and ensure new starters are set up for success. Fourth’s onboarding app integrates applicant tracking tools, like Talos. It enables employers to provide a fully branded portal where new joiners can upload all their personal information, access and sign contracts, and view processes, policies and training resources before they start. It also supports direct communication between hiring managers and candidates, avoiding delays that might slow down the hiring process.

Build a high-performance workplace culture

High-performing workplaces have a few things in common, but one of the most telling is that they prioritise internal communications (IC).

A good IC strategy allows staff to build a rapport with colleagues they may not work with regularly and ensures that everyone is aware of updates or issues that could impact the customer experience during their shift, such as a broken oven or facility closures.

HR software that includes specialist features and communications tools can be really helpful in facilitating robust internal communications. Fourth’s Workforce Management platform includes features like a social feed for more informal updates and group messaging to share information quickly with relevant staff members.

Prioritise work-life balance

Many factors contribute to building a positive employee experience. Scheduling might not be the most obvious contributing factor, but it is one of the most important in creating a positive working culture.

If understaffing shifts becomes a habit, it creates a burned-out team that is unable to delight guests. Similarly, regularly overstaffing shifts is expensive and can lead to staff becoming bored or disengaged.

Fourth’s Intelligent Scheduling is just one example of how workforce management software with broad functionality can contribute to an exceptional employee experience. It uses AI-driven forecasting to predict demand in 15-minute intervals, analysing factors like historical sales data, local events, and holidays to automatically generate staff schedules. The result is a schedule with the right team in place for every shift that doesn’t waste time or overstretch staff. Managers also benefit from auto-generated schedules that save them hours of work, while employees benefit from knowing shift times well in advance so they can plan their lives outside of work.

Save money over time

Automating time-consuming processes like scheduling frees your team up to focus on high-value activities that drive the business forward, rather than wasting resources on repetitive, manual tasks. By centralising data and automating routine tasks, HR software also helps businesses to avoid costly compliance breaches and incorrect tax filings.

One of the main benefits of HR software is the simplification of recruitment and ongoing employee engagement. Workforce management platforms help ensure staff have support from day one and provide the tools they need to connect meaningfully with colleagues and teammates. This makes the working environment more enjoyable, reducing turnover and minimising the costs associated with recruiting, onboarding, and training new staff.

Ensure GDPR compliance

Managing employee data through a HR platform mitigates the risks associated with manual data transcription, namely inaccurate data entry and data security. Automated workflows and centralised record-keeping further reduce the likelihood of an accidental data breach and ensure operators can track and control who has access to personal information to ensure compliance with GDPR regulations.

How to choose HR software that suits your business

When it comes to choosing HR software, hospitality operators’ requirements are unique. They need a platform that can accommodate a large, multiskilled workforce, seasonal and flexible workers, and a team split across multiple locations.

Today’s challenges vs. tomorrow’s

Implementing any new software is challenging, and introducing a HR management platform that will be used widely throughout the business can be especially disruptive.

When choosing the best HR software for your business, consider both the challenges you face today and those you may face in the future. You want to select a solution that can grow and evolve with your business, sparing you the disruption and expense of switching platforms further down the line.

Modules and integrations

Modular platforms are a great way of future-proofing, giving you the flexibility to access additional functionality without paying for it before you need it.

Systems that integrate with your existing tech stack or tools you’ll use in the future also ensure that the HR management solution you choose now can scale and flex with future business needs. As a specialist hospitality provider, Fourth supports integrations across point-of-sale and applicant-tracking systems, as well as supply chain and kitchen management tools.

Compliance and data security

Leaked employee data or breaches of employment law can seriously damage trust—both with your current team and future hires. It’s vital that your HR software guarantees data security and includes processes to ensure compliance with UK workforce legislation.

Customer support

Your HR software will be a daily essential for teams across your organisation. If anything goes wrong, you’ll need it fixed quickly to keep your restaurant or hotel running smoothly.

Remember to check the level of support available from your vendor, including when their team is available to troubleshoot––hospitality isn’t a 9-to-5 industry! Fourth offers support during set up and help around the clock via our Customer Success Portal. We also have a support phone line open on weekdays and weekends.

Fourth’s HR software supports hospitality businesses

Fourth’s HR software simplifies workforce management with a fully integrated platform that supports the entire employee lifecycle.

• Intergrations with leading applicant tracking software keeps the whole hiring team informed.
• Onboarding App creates a great first impression and gives new hires all the resources they need to start quickly.
• Employee Engagement App connects your team with a social feed, group and private messaging, and access to company information.
• Intelligent Scheduling forecasts demand to create optimal shifts and automatically generate rosters, saving managers hours and ensuring your teams can hit productivity and compliance goals without burning out.
• Connected Scheduling gives staff and agency workers the flexibility to fulfil empty shifts at any location, maximising shift fulfilment.
• Fully integrated Payroll is designed for hospitality operators and enables you to manage payroll for every employee from one central hub.
• Fourth’s Engagement App provides a single sign-on portal for all your Fourth solutions, so employees can access everything they need in one place.

Want more? Discover these resources:

• A Survival Guide to 2025 HR & Payroll Report
• 2025 HR & Payroll Legislation Checklist
• 3 Steps to Avoid Accidental Non-Compliance with National Minimum Wage
• What do you need to know about April’s new neonatal care leave?
• Employee Email Communication Template: Neonatal Care Leave Policy
• Employee Email Communication Template: National Minimum Wage Updates
• How operators can navigate the 2025 NIC reforms