Want the Best HR Software for Small Businesses? Build Your Own with this SmartSuite Tutorial

If there's one thing most managers can agree on, it's that people are complicated and by extension so is the people function. In our business there are so many little gears that are involved in making sure that human resources is a well run machine, that using a simple to do list or emails or just your memory, it's not going to cut it. It's not an area of our business that we want to just wing. And so the software industry has answered us by having a ton of space specialty human resource software come onto the market. It feels like every little cog in the business of HR has its own piece of software. There's the applicant tracking software, the management software, the performance software, the offboarding software, the onboarding software, the training software. It's like death by a thousand software. And if you're a small team who's looking to systemize your HR function, adopting 12 different pieces of HR software just to get each little box check checked is a little ridiculous. And so today I want to suggest a cost effective and simpler approach to HR that's a little bit new school by talking you through a tool called SmartSuite. Now, SmartSuite, yes, it's a piece of software, but what it does is it's a no code work management platform. It's somewhere in between a database management tool like airtable and a task management tool like Asana. It's right in the middle. It allows you to organize both your data, your information like your positions, your departments, your disciplinary actions and your actual tasks like sending that disciplinary action, having that check in call, having that interview, the things you need to do rather than having to go into 15 pieces of software or even two pieces of software to gather this information. You can have everything centralized in one place that talks to the tools you already use. And best of all, this smartsuite platform that I'm going to talk you through today is also really affordable. So it's less than the cost of typically one of the specialty HR software that you might be used to associating with. Yet it can replace maybe a dozen of them if you just build out your workflows inside this tool instead. So on that note, today we're going to be building out a full stack HR management system inside of SmartSuite. Because of the time limits we have, we won't be able to go click by click through everything. But I'm going to try my best to highlight all the key features, features you might want to know to get the most out of this session and follow along with yourself. I really Suggest you use the affiliate link below this video to sign up for SmartSuite. It's free, no credit card or any of that. It'll allow you to actually see what the heck it is I'm talking about in this video. So check that out if you want to. But with that, I want to say quick thank you to SmartSuite for sponsoring this video and dive right in. Now, once you create your SmartSuite account using our affiliate link, thank you. Head on down to the Add New Solution area. This is where we're going to create our new work zone, our Solution inside of SmartSuite. So give this a click and click Start with Template. If we click Start from Scratch you are literally going to get a blank solution and we don't have time to work from scratch here. You're busy, I'm busy. Let's use a template to get us started. These templates are going to give us a jumping off point with some Pre made structures, SOPs and checklists that will save you a ton of time on this setup. What we're going to be looking for here is the human resources and recruiting area and we are going to scroll way on down to personnel management now. Disclaimer. There are tons of templates here. Feel free to use any of them that are useful to you. But this particular one, despite having the most boring name in my opinion, is actually one of the coolest. So that's what we're going to highlight today. What we're going to do is click Use Template and let this load into our SmartSuite account. Now once the template loads, you're going to see some uncomfortably happy faces staring at you with these stock images. So just to fix things right off, I'm going to go ahead and change our card size to small just so it's a little less overwhelming. What you are seeing in here at the very top is the solution we just loaded. This is giving you the name of the template you just created, which is now the name of the solution you have in your account. Just to keep things a little bit cuter, we're going to go ahead and call this HRHQ because isn't that nice and succinct. And we're going to go in here and also adjust our color and our icon to suit whatever we find most helpful. Below this we also have options around setting, permissions, documentation and automations. But honestly I think that's a little bit Level two. We'll focus on just the basics today. If you have other people inside your SmartSuite account do take a moment and change your access for this solution permissions to ensure that only you or those who you want to have access to it can see. Because obviously HR can be quite confidential and we don't want this to be necessarily shared with the entire team by default. So we're going to go ahead, make sure our permissions is good and then we are ready to move on down to this row. What is this row? This row is our app row. And despite what you're thinking, it's not like app on your phone. These apps are each individual databases where we can track either records, tasks, something in between. Basically, they're like a collection of information. Each. Each of these right now is organized around a different area of our HR function. We've got onboarding, job profiles, team member, directory, benefits files, even disciplinary actions are organized inside this template, which is just like next level organization. What we can do inside this area is create records using this guy up at the top to create new little dudes like this to organize the information we need to keep track of for our HR function, whether that's tracking people we're onboarding, people who are currently on our team, the jobs that are available on our team, or just the departments that we have inside our company. Each one of these apps allows us to track this kind of information using these things, which are records. Now, if you haven't noticed as I clicked around, records can look different depending on where you're at. If we are in a grid view, which is just an option of how you see things, your records are going to look like rows in a spreadsheet. Now, I'm a bit of a dork and this is what I generally prefer, but if you are someone who's more visual, you can see something like a card view or maybe a Kanban view, or maybe a timeline view. For some reason, you know, whatever it is you want to track, you can view things in those different ways using the view types. None of those view types or really any of these view settings changes or deletes your data. It just shows you things in different ways. It's like the same information but from a different perspective, hence the word view. Now, once we are on the onboarding view, we can start customizing things because ultimately having everything here, that is incredibly valuable. But we really want to not only have things here, but have things here in the way that we want them to be here. So we're going to go ahead and click on Camilla's card here and we're going to edit some of these Fields to make sure this matches how our process is going to work. So inside this we have a bunch of field types visible. Each of these little guys here, these little buttons we can type in or alter or any of that. These are fields. So we could add new fields for things that we want to see, such as maybe we want to have a emergency contact name, or for what languages they speak, or for which location they're applying for. We can add each of these things in by adding additional field types of which there are many, many, many options available to us. Each of these fields, once created, allow us to customize the information. For example, this Onboarding Buddy field, which is actually an assigned to field, meaning it's the person who's assigned making sure all of this runs smoothly. This could be showing up as either an avatar or an avatar and a name, depending on our preferences. We can also choose single or multiple assignees based on this criteria. Inside, we can also filter members so only certain members show up and we can choose, most importantly, to have this show up in my work. Now, this field is very important because this is at the crux of why SmartSuite can easily manage both tasks and data. If I choose to display this in my work, what's going to happen is this person, whoever is selected as the onboarding buddy, whenever they are assigned a new onboarding person, they'll get assigned right here. And this status and any relevant due dates, if they're added will, will show up inside their My Work up at the very top of the screen. So up here, if I go to My work, I will see Camilla show up here on the day that that whole project or task is starting. That's what the show in My work does. This My Work thing summarizes everything from everywhere. So if you want to make sure people don't forget those important steps in the onboarding process, this would be a great way to do it. Speaking of Camilla, let's head back inside here and talk about some of the other fields as well. In addition to things like links to LinkedIn or images that we can attach and show in different ways, such as these here we can also have the ability to add checklists. And this is such an important feature that I want to just highlight it here. And checklists basically are a field type, just like everything else that we can add as we see fit. So if I go in here and type checklist, I can add a new checklist. These checklists I can choose to have any color that I prefer. I can have some options around how they're used and I can even template some default values. So maybe I always want all my checklists for some reason to always say this, that and those as the default values in that checklist anytime it's loaded on any new record. If I wanted to have that happen, I could do so using that checklist default. So if I assigned the offer letter to the CEO, the CEO is going to see that in their my work. If I had to do the executive introductions and I signed this to me and assigned it on a certain date, it would show up in my my work up at the top again. Everything in SmartSuite kind of rolls up and can be reported on in that my work area. If I were you, I would go inside this onboarding checklist field, modify those settings and set some defaults that match what you want to have as your default onboarding process. You can add new values here or even delete existing values to make sure it truly matches how you want HR to flow. Again, these can be customized in any way that you see fit, rearranged in your preferred order, and you can add help decks if you want to remind your future self what the heck you were thinking when you set this up. And that's the onboarding area. Whenever we have a new hire to onboard, we can either manually or through some clever automations, create a new record, write the person's information in, and fill in as many fields as we feel are necessary. If we want to make sure a field is never missed, we have the option to make it a required field or a unique field. So for example, here, if the role needs to be unique, we could have this be CEO, click save and we could add John Doe into our onboarding flow. We can know all of our checklist items are going to show up. So see, we see 17 already here and we have the ability to quickly look and see all the information about John Doe that we've gathered throughout this entire process. So you see, we've got our checklist, we've got my nice super helpful checklist here as well and we're good to go. Now we just need to work through these pieces or assign them out to the relevant people. And as John works through the process, we can change the overall status of his onboarding experience. Now that is just one area inside this personnel management template, and there are obviously many more that we can and will probably should explore. But since we don't have a lot of time in this video, I'm going to just focus on a few More features and FAQs before we wrap this puppy up. All right, the next feature I want to highlight for you here with this onboarding area is to talk about how we can connect information between apps. Well, just because we have these headers up here doesn't mean they have to be silos. Unlike when you have 14 different pieces of software that don't talk to each other. When you have everything inside of SmartSuite, you can connect everything together using LinkedIn records. Let me show you what that looks like inside of Christie here we have this linked record to the employee file, a separate area where we have all those confidential files where we track their progress and so on. And if we click on this little plus, we'll see a pop up that shows us all of the existing client files that exist so we can connect these two things together. These things we're seeing are all based on the People app. That is to the right. So, so let me show you these. If I go back over here, go to the People, this is what I'm seeing. It was giving me a dropdown to pick from all of these and connect them together. So if I go back to onboarding, let's just make Christie over here. Her employee file for some reason is called Bane. We'll just say that and link that record. Now these two things are linked and it is a two way link that we can report on, automate on, calculate on and all that good stuff. I can also change how this particular field, just like all fields, we can change how it looks. We can have it be a compact display, a extended display, or just the name itself. In this case, I'm going to swap this out for a compact record so we can see it with a little bit more detail. And here is the end result. And this networking allows us to do some pretty interesting things. You see it most heavily if you actually go over into the employee files area over in People. If we head out of Christy's task here and we head over to our existing team members, each team member's record has a ton of information on it. So let's go to Lopez here. Lopez, we've got this information here. We've got the name of the person, which is a name field, birth date, ethnicity, allergies and so on. But we also have a ton of collapsible intersections to allow us organize even more information and think of as a new manager coming into a process, coming into a new direct report. To be able to see all of this information about a candidate or about a hire all in one place. This really equips the leader or manager to know. Hey, okay, here's the context of Lopez. Camilla's really been challenging to work with. We've had some disciplinary actions, some files on her, and I can click into each of these files and see additional context about what exactly was happening. Oh, and just so you know, each of these sections are just some organizational folders we can choose to put information into, so it's not quite so overwhelming. You can choose to either delete these, have them always be open, or have them always be closed, or wherever you want them to be based on your preferences. So that's the people area and the records and all the information that's stored into it. If by some chance these records do not include enough information for you to be able to confidently organize your people function, do know that you are more than welcome to add more or just more or delete these fields as you see fit to suit the kind of information that you want to see. But it's not at all a requirement. I think many HR functions or HR departments could completely overhaul their entire organization just by using this pre made template with no modifications. And for those of you who are in that camp who are watching this video and like, whoa, this is cool, this is enough for me to work off of. This is going to make me ditch my spreadsheets and my sticky notes and move on to something digital that's a little bit more lean. I want to spend the last few minutes of this video just going over some action steps of how you can take this into your own account. Like in a few clicks. Just use the affiliate link below. Okay, here are the steps. Step number one. Go to the first app, this very first one, onboarding, and locate any particular record. Just click on one of them inside that record. Delete any fields you know for sure you're not going to use or edit the fields that you know for sure are not correct for your team. So for example, if you do not have a sales team for some reason, you can modify these fields and delete the sales team. Or maybe you want to change the color or maybe change to add emojis to some of these. Whatever you prefer to have happen, do that first. That is your very first action step. Go into each app, click on one record per app. Because all records have the same fields in an app and adjust these fields. I want you to focus on deleting and editing fields rather than adding anything at this point. Okay, that's your first action step. Your second action step is to remove unnecessary views. So similar to the fields I Don't want you to focus on adding anything quite yet. Yes, you can add a whole bunch of views. If you really want to see all your team members on a map view, you can do that, be my guest. But for this step, what I want you to focus on is deleting any views you know for sure you are not going to need. You can always recreate them later. But things like onboarding by team, maybe you only have one department that doesn't matter. Maybe you don't like to see a calendar view, go ahead and delete that. That's not going to hurt any of the data or any of the structures. It's just going to delete that layout. That way of seeing things, for example, for me, I know I always like to see things in a small narrow rows like a little spreadsheet geek that I am. And I do not like any other kind of views. So I'm going to go ahead and go back into onboarding Q and change that to a grid view. And with that I'm going to be a happy camper. What you want to do now is repeat that for each of the other apps, delete the unnecessary views or edit them to suit your style. So that's step two. Step three of making this your own would be to go up to the very top, the solution area and click on that delete it button that I warned you about. At the top of this video, we are going to delete all of the demo data. This is not going to delete your structure, the rows and columns and fields, but it will delete, you know, Camilla and Christy and Paul and John Doe, who don't really exist. So go ahead and click delete to wipe out the demo data from your structure. This is a pretty unique feature of SmartSuite. You'll notice it only deletes the stuff that came with the template and not things you created, which is, I think particularly nice. That is your step three. Now finally step four is to add your data into this. So if you are onboarding certain people right now, go ahead and add them in. If you have current people on your team right now, go ahead and add them in. If you have disciplinary actions that you're currently keeping in Google Drive or Dropbox, go ahead and add them in. And that's our final step. Once you have your data in here and you've deleted anything that's not helpful to you, start using this. What we've shown you here is just one little baby example of a sub process of hr. But once you learn these skills of building fields and organizing pages. You can really expand this to any other function of HR or any other function of the business in general. The same concepts of tasks and data and organization. This all applies. And if you do decide to try out a SmartSuite paid plan, which you don't have to do by any means, just know that you can add as many solutions as you'd like for the same price. So unless you're adding more features or more users, you could continue to repeat the same process. Use another template for your sales process. Use another template for your performance management so you can continue to push this software as far as your creativity allows as long as you start thinking about it as I'm going to build my HR software versus I'm just going to pay a lot of high subscription costs and have it built for me. Because remember, this is just the beginning in the kind of stuff that you can organize in SmartSuite. But with that, I'm so excited to hear what you build inside of SmartSuite or what questions this might raise for you about how you can start to systemize other areas of your business inside and around human resources. If you have any questions about specifics like how do you get your checklist template to do the right thing? Or how do you use automations to push this further, go ahead and drop me a comment below this video so I can make a follow up video to answer your question. Otherwise, thanks so much for watching and be sure to use that affiliate link in the description below to get your SmartSuite account if you haven't already. Till next time, enjoy the process.