Does human capital software need to be so expensive?

Picture this scenario: You’re the CEO of a small enterprise and are looking to buy a human capital software. As a well-prepared leader, you and your counsel of senior executives formulate a grocery list about what business goals you hope to accomplish with an Human Capital Management software before moving ahead and purchasing one.  

You’ve got your budget in place and you head on to the market; “$9 per month for 5 employees!” “$95 per month per user based on a 48-month subscription!” “$39 base price plus $6 per person per month!” “$18 per employee per month!” “$12 per employee per month!” Now you’re confused and frustrated.  You’ve done the math and you are way in over your head (don’t worry because there are some sweet deals you just haven’t noticed yet). You have a lot of questions, and one of them may be, “Does a workable human capital software need to be so expensive in this century?”

Let’s try to work that out.  

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Going back to the roots

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The human capital management software that you are familiar with is based on a system that has been developed, remedied and perfected for ages. For as Jason Averbook once said, “HR is one of the oldest professions in the world.” But it never started out as ‘Human Resources’. Pre-World War II era, it was known as ‘personnel management’, where emphasis was largely laid on employee welfare and maintaining records of employee information, such as name, address and employment history, on paper.  

Post the II World War, personnel management intensified its focus on extensive record keeping and made incremental additions, such as a growing emphasis on employee relations, systematic selection processes, and job descriptions for effective selection, appropriate compensation design and individual performance evaluation. The increasing employee records and simultaneous technological advancements during the time consequently lead to computers emerging as a facilitator in managing employee information.

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Between the 1960s and 1980s, organisations began to realise that effective human capital management practices were having a strong effect on the bottom line of the firms. The personnel department slowly evolved into the human resource department, and thus HR was born.  

HR became key to employee success. The integration of technology into human capital management systems became a necessity. This brief history lesson on the evolution of HR was to show you that the evolution of it was borne from the necessity to create efficient and sustainable human capital management systems.  

The evolution of HR was borne from the necessity to create efficient and sustainable human capital management systems.

And to encourage the growth of businesses and job creations, these core systems need to be available to organisations of all scales. Since the emergence of the first client-server based Human Capital Management system in 1987, human capital software has been developing in full steam to find solutions to managing large and decentralised teams. But as popular and beneficial digitized HR management was, the HR functionality was still unavailable for most businesses because these systems were hosted on local devices that required expensive hardware.  

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Why a human capital software comes at a huge expense?

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All that changed in the late 1990s when functionality shifted to cloud-based systems. This ensured better data security and made automation available to a wider roster of clients. One of the major breakthroughs to occur in the early 2000s was the shift from a one-size-fits-all human capital system, which was no longer an attractive buying point for clients, towards specialized systems that dealt with different arms of core businesses processes. The rest, is pretty much history.

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Making work more feasible

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Despite the advances and additions to Human Capital Management system, they still continue to deliver on core processes that every business needs. At least, businesses that can afford it. The prices in the scenario presented earlier in the blog was based on prices collected from top ranking human capital software in the world; and if there is anything to say, it is that the big players don’t exactly have the best interests of businesses in mind.  

Companies rely on HR operations to obtain real-time insights into their human enterprise and to effectively manage operational efficiency, engagement, retention, performance management and the works. To put it quite plainly, human capital management software is the core of business efficiency. So, to answer the question posed at the beginning of this article:

Workable, comprehensive human capital software that serves to fulfil the core requirements for operational efficiency should NOT have to cost you both your kidneys.

With peopleHum’s HCM system, you don’t need to sacrifice your critical organs. At just $2 per employee per month, you can have the power of an entire suite of human capital management resources, which includes hiring, core HR, engagement, performance management, hr analytics, and self-service modules. If you don’t favour that, you can harness the powers of the modules of your choice and customize your business’ HCM system. It is time to make workable human capital software work for you.