Your HRIS is a foundational pillar for everything HR. It’s part database, part reporting tool, and part mission control for HR initiatives. There’s nothing wrong with your HRIS, but you’ve started to feel some gaps in what it can do. Maybe you’re not getting as much visibility on employee performance or you’re struggling to get a complete view of the employee experience.
The problem isn’t your HRIS. It’s just that your needs are changing. That comes with growth in any field. Manufacturers upgrade their machinery, plumbers add new tools to the back of their van, and HR teams start looking for ways to upgrade their HRIS.
Many HR teams feel stuck between their role’s administrative burden and their growing role as a strategic partner for the broader organization. The last thing they need is to feel like their tools can’t keep up with their needs.
In this guide, you’ll find practical signals that you need more than just your HRIS (not a replacement).
Key takeaways
- Your HRIS serves best as a system of record and automation, but it’s not always the best tool for the job.
- HR’s role changes as organizations grow, and the tools they use need to reflect this.
- Common signs you’ve outgrown your HRIS include data without insights, a lack of visibility into performance trends, and a struggle to prove HR’s impact to leadership.
- Dedicated tools HR teams should add to their stack include performance management, employee engagement, and learning management.
- Performance management tools allow HR teams to use the data in their HRIS to take the right actions to empower managers and employees alike.
What an HRIS is designed to do (well)
Your HRIS (human resources information software) is the hub for most of your HR activities. It stores essential information about employees and employers alike. It automates processes that would otherwise require paper forms and spreadsheets. It makes HR teams more efficient. It powers data-driven decisions. Specifically, your HRIS plays an essential role in:
- Managing employee information
- Administering payroll and benefits
- Recruiting and hiring
- Employee onboarding
- Handling timesheets, attendance, and time off requests
- Powering self-serve employee experiences (e.g., requesting sick days)
Without an HRIS, these tasks would be time-consuming and error-prone. You’d struggle to stay compliant with both your own policies and external regulations. You can’t just get rid of your HRIS tomorrow.
But that doesn’t mean it can’t be frustrating.
Why growing teams start to feel HRIS limitations
As your organization grows, HR responsibilities change. In small companies, where HR is either handled by a founder or an office manager, HR duties are more about compliance, basic hiring efforts, and making sure everyone gets paid.
Once these companies start to grow, HR helps establish hiring practices that scale with the company, performance management systems like annual reviews, and policies around conflict-resolution and harassment. A one-person HR department becomes a small team, temporarily lightening the administrative load until the work ramps up again.
After a company reaches a few hundred employees, the role of HR changes fundamentally. You’re not just putting out fires and drafting policies anymore. You’re rolling out processes company-wide and getting involved in broader company strategy. Forms and one-on-one meetings are still part of your day-to-day, but so are questions around optimizing your workforce, supporting managers as they lead their teams, and guiding the future of the organization through hiring practices and succession planning.
Your HRIS still serves as a baseline for these initiatives, but it starts to show its limitations as your role becomes more strategic. Here’s how you can tell.
7 signs you’ve outgrown your HRIS
Sign 1: You have data but no clear insights
Your HRIS is great for generating data and storing it. But it will rarely give you the ability to dig into that data, identify trends, and cross-reference patterns. When you have a more strategic role to play in a growing organization, turning that data into action can be difficult when you’re only relying on your HRIS.
Sign 2: Managers lack visibility into performance trends
In many growing organizations, managers are largely left to their own devices. They may have best practices and policies to refer to, but everything from performance reviews and one-on-ones lack the context of broader performance data. Since they rarely have access to your HRIS, managers have to keep track of trends within their teams manually and rarely get the chance to compare them against other teams.
Sign 3: Feedback happens sporadically or informally
Your HRIS may hold data about employee performance across the organization, but it’s rarely a jumping-off point for building a strong feedback process.
Feedback is given when managers feel it’s needed, with some teams getting better growth conversations than others. If there’s no consistent, organization-wide process for giving feedback to employees and managers alike, you may need a dedicated performance management system.
Sign 4: HR spends more time chasing updates than driving outcomes
Are your HR teams manually following up to get specific forms filled? Maybe they’re regularly reminding managers to hold performance reviews or have growth conversations? The more time HR spends on these follow-ups, the less they have for strategic conversations or executing on other initiatives.
Sign 5: Performance and development live outside your core systems
Performance management is an essential process in growing organizations, as efforts to grow your talent pool are redirected towards finding and empowering your top performers. But often, these efforts rely on data and notes scattered across multiple tools. Similarly, employees aren’t clear on what’s expected of them or the progress they’re making, since that information is either locked away in your HRIS or in other tools they don’t have access to.
Sign 6: You can’t easily see manager effectiveness at scale
Your HR team gets a lot out of every one-on-one conversation with managers. They know which questions to ask and how to get alignment on priorities. You come away from each conversation with useful insights into that specific manager and their team.
But that’s the problem. It’s too specific. You don’t have any visibility on how this manager’s experience compares to other managers or how their team’s performance compares to other teams. Your HRIS might be a great place to store that data, but it doesn’t give you easy ways to work with that data.
Sign 7: Leadership wants proof of impact you can’t confidently show
As your organization transitions from no-holds-barred hiring to optimizing its existing workforce, leadership starts to ask for more insights, more visibility, and more proof.
Your initiatives get bigger, bolder, and more expensive, and leaders want to make sure they’re getting the best bang for their HR buck. That means you need to start proving your work’s impact. While your HRIS provides some reporting capabilities, you don’t quite have the metrics or the data to really show the benefit of what you’re doing.
Recognizing any of these signs in your day-to-day? Here’s what you can do.
What high-impact HR teams add after an HRIS
You won’t be replacing your HRIS. You’ll be adding complementary systems that help you shore up its weaknesses and get more out of the data in it. The goal is to get more clarity on what’s happening within your organization, make your initiatives and policies more consistent, and add accountability when executing them. Here are the most common tools HR teams add after their HRIS:
- Performance management: These platforms give you tools to proactively track, manage, and improve employee performance across your organization. This includes handling performance reviews and giving you performance data across teams and managers.
- Employee engagement: Measuring employee engagement without dedicated tools can be challenging, and since engagement can have a massive impact on your organization, these tools quickly become essential. They allow you to measure engagement throughout the organization, draft surveys, and more.
- Learning management: As HR gets more involved in manager enablement and career growth, they need resources to provide to managers and employees alike. Learning management platforms provide these resources, as well as a framework for charting learning and development goals.
- Recruitment: Your HRIS is a great recruitment tool up to a point. As your organization’s hiring needs change, you need a dedicated tool that can handle everything from applicant tracking to offer management.
These systems don’t compete with your HRIS. They enhance it by allowing you to do more.
How performance systems support growth without replacing your HRIS
Performance management platforms centralize every aspect of performance management, from tracking goals to soliciting feedback and supporting employee development. These platforms often integrate natively with your HRIS, meaning all the employee data in your HRIS is automatically available for your performance management initiatives without any expensive third-party software.
You don’t need to replace your HRIS or any of your existing processes; a performance management platform enhances what you’re already doing while enabling new initiatives.
For example, performance management platforms are especially suited to enabling continuous performance feedback, allowing both managers and employees to get feedback outside of traditional performance review cycles. Without this dedicated tool, this initiative would require much more administrative work, including manually updating spreadsheets.
Other HR functions that become more important as you grow, from manager enablement to employee turnover reduction, are best handled through dedicated performance management platforms. Your HRIS becomes the database, while these tools are the mission control center where you actually take action.
How to assess whether you’re ready for the next layer
Not sure you’re ready to move beyond your HRIS? Here’s a quick self-assessment you can take to make this call.
HR department
- Are executives expecting HR to drive measurable impact on engagement, retention, and performance?
- Yes: You likely need more than administrative tooling.
- No: Clarify expectations before expanding your stack.
- Are managers equipped to have consistent, high-quality performance conversations?
- Yes: You’re ready to scale what’s working.
- No: You may need a platform that supports manager effectiveness, not just review cycles.
- Do you have defined processes for performance reviews, feedback, goal alignment, and compensation calibration?
- Yes: You’re ready for tools that strengthen and connect these motions.
- No: Establish your philosophy and guardrails first.
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Can you easily answer questions about turnover, retention, and performance?
- Yes: You’re likely ready to leverage more advanced, integrated performance tools.
- No: If answering these requires manual exports, spreadsheets, or side analyses, you may be ready for a dedicated performance platform
Find the best match for your HRIS
Outgrowing your HRIS doesn’t mean your tools are lacking; it’s a sign of progress. As organizations grow, their HR needs evolve, and HR teams need dedicated tools to become the strategic partner leadership needs. An HRIS is a fantastic system for keeping records and feeding initiatives, but it’s rarely suited to enabling HR teams to take action—or even know where action is needed.
HR teams in growing organizations find their role shifting from putting out fires and closing administrative tasks to supporting managers at large and providing insights that drive the organization’s people strategy. A complete, dedicated tool stack is the best way to empower HR teams to do this at scale.
Want to see what a performance management platform like 15Five can do for your growing organization? Learn more here.
