HR tech stack: how to build a connected system your teams actually use

According to our research, 66% of employees report rising workloads, and 50% feel more overwhelmed year over year.*

Your HR tools should reduce this burden; yet, many teams struggle with bloated technology, including multiple performance tools, overlapping survey platforms, and feedback that lives in siloed systems.

As a result, managers waste time switching between platforms, employees become confused about where to find information or complete tasks, and HR teams spend hours on manual data entry instead of focusing on strategic work.

To help you build a connected system that actually reduces workload rather than adding to it, we've created this guide to auditing and streamlining your HR tech stack. You'll learn which core categories belong in your stack, how to spot duplication and low adoption, and how to connect the tools that matter most.

💡Simplify your HR tech stack with an all-in-one HRIS
‍
See how Leapsome combines HRIS, performance management, engagement surveys, learning, and compensation in one platform built for adoption.
‍
👉 Watch our HRIS walkthrough

*Leapsome's 2026 Workforce Trends Report
‍

What is an HR tech stack (and what belongs in yours)

An HR tech stack is the collection of software and platforms your organization uses to manage HR processes across the employee lifecycle. From the moment a candidate joins to their last day at the company, your tech stack should support onboarding, performance, development, engagement, and compensation.

If you’re responsible for modernizing and streamlining your HR technology, you’ll need to ensure your stack covers eight essential categories. These are the building blocks that help HR teams operate efficiently while giving managers and employees the tools they need to grow and collaborate.

Below, we examine the core functions of each category, identify key priorities when evaluating solutions, and outline common pitfalls to avoid.
‍

1. HRIS (Human Resource Information System)

Your HRIS platform is the backbone of your entire tech stack. This is where employee records, organizational charts, documents, absence tracking, and basic workflows, such as onboarding and job changes, reside. 

Think of your HRIS as the single source of truth for all employee data that every other tool should connect to.

Without a solid HRIS foundation, you end up with scattered data, inconsistent org structures across systems, and no reliable way to answer simple questions like "how many people report to this manager?" 

A people-first HRIS avoids this by connecting core HR tasks with performance and development, allowing employee data to flow naturally to where managers and teams carry out their day-to-day work.

For example, Leapsome's HRIS approach prioritizes making the system accessible to employees and managers, not just HR administrators. Core HR processes are directly connected to performance context alongside employee data when conducting reviews or planning development. 

At the same time, AI helps surface issues like absence patterns and automates routine workflows, such as onboarding approvals or document requests, which reduces manual work and provides managers with the necessary context without constantly requiring HR involvement.

"Employees can now find everything in one place — their data, absences, goals, and reviews. I don't have to explain which tool to use for what. It's all in Leapsome."
— Marilyn, People Operations, Bob W

💡 See how an all-in-one HRIS reduces tech stack complexity
‍
Leapsome connects core HR, performance, engagement, and learning in one platform so your data flows where managers actually work.
‍
👉 Explore Leapsome HRIS

2. Performance management

Your performance management system handles reviews, goal-setting, continuous feedback, calibration (where managers align on fair ratings across teams), and development plans. 

This is how managers run fair and consistent review processes, and how employees gain clear visibility into expectations and growth paths.

The challenge many HR teams face is that performance data lives in isolation. Reviews happen in one tool, goals in another, and feedback in email threads or Slack. The best systems connect performance reviews with goals, feedback, and learning in one place, allowing managers to see the full picture when evaluating team members and planning their development.

For example, with Leapsome, a manager conducting a performance review can view an employee's goal progress, recent feedback they've received, and completed learning paths all in the same view. This makes reviews more informed and development planning more targeted.
‍

3. Employee engagement

Employee engagement tools include surveys, pulse checks, and action planning. These help you understand how employees feel and what's driving retention or turnover, so you can spot issues early and measure the impact of your people initiatives.

For example, if your engagement survey reveals that employees feel unclear about career progression, you might launch a development planning initiative and run a follow-up pulse survey three months later to measure progress. 

Likewise, after identifying low scores related to workload or burnout, you can create an action plan to adjust team capacity or improve prioritization, and then track whether engagement scores improve in the next survey cycle. 

With Leapsome, AI analyzes open-text comments to identify themes and sentiment, then suggests specific action plans based on the survey findings, which helps you quickly turn feedback into concrete next steps.

🤖 Turn survey feedback into action with AI
‍
Leapsome AI analyzes thousands of comments in seconds, identifies themes, and suggests concrete action plans, so you spend less time reviewing and more time improving.
‍
👉 See Leapsome AI in action

4. Learning and development

A learning and development platform covers onboarding journeys, training programs, skill tracking, and development resources. Effective L&D systems enable new hires to get up to speed faster, close skill gaps across teams, and help employees prepare for internal promotions.

In our experience working with HR teams, when L&D tools operate independently of performance and development planning, employees complete courses that don't align with their actual goals or career paths. Training becomes a checkbox exercise, and managers struggle to identify which courses will actually close their team's skill gaps.

Therefore, you should prioritize a system that connects learning paths to performance data and career frameworks. This is because, when training links to performance reviews, managers can easily assign courses that target specific competency gaps. Similarly, when learning aligns with development plans, employees see how their training advances them toward new roles.

For example, with Leapsome, new hires are automatically enrolled in onboarding paths, and managers can assign training based on gaps identified in performance reviews.

"Leapsome was an easier process in terms of assigning. We could automate the modules to deploy to new hires, which meant we no longer needed to go in and assign them manually."
— Susan Fort, Senior Director of Training and Development, GoCanvas

5. Compensation management

Compensation management handles salary bands, equity allocation, merit increase cycles, and compensation planning. When done well, it supports fair, transparent pay decisions and helps HR run structured review cycles that link compensation to performance.

The trickiest part of compensation is connecting performance ratings, market data, budget constraints, and equity considerations, especially when this information lives in different systems. 

Integrated platforms bring compensation cycles together with performance ratings and organizational data in a single view, providing HR and leadership with the full context they need to make informed, equitable decisions, rather than working from incomplete information. 

Additionally, AI can help by recommending fair salary adjustments based on performance data, flagging potential pay gaps across teams or demographics, and even guiding managers on how to communicate compensation decisions clearly.

For example, Leapsome’s AI features can generate a full competency framework in minutes that integrates directly with performance reviews, giving you clear skill benchmarks to inform fair compensation decisions across roles.
‍

6. People analytics

People analytics encompasses dashboards, reporting, and workforce insights that enable HR to make data-driven decisions. 

Ideally, you should be able to track engagement scores, turnover risk, performance trends, and compensation equity across the organization without having to stitch together exports from multiple systems.

The challenge with standalone analytics tools is that data often lags behind reality. By the time you've exported, combined, and analyzed information from different platforms, you're working with outdated snapshots. 

Integrated platforms like Leapsome offer a different approach by pulling analytics from across your people data in real-time, which means you're seeing current trends rather than last month's numbers when you need to make decisions.
‍

7. Payroll

Payroll covers salary processing, tax compliance, and benefits administration. For multi-country organizations with complex tax and benefits requirements, this often warrants specialist payroll tools that can handle the nuances of different jurisdictions.

That said, much of the manual work involves gathering employee data, tracking absences, and consolidating compensation changes. For this reason, platforms like Leapsome include payroll preparation features to automate this consolidation and sync clean data directly to your payroll provider, including integrations like our DATEV add-on.

Regardless of your approach, the key is to ensure that your payroll tool connects with your HRIS. Employee changes should flow automatically, and compensation data should sync back to your HRIS without manual data entry.
‍

8. Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

An ATS manages recruiting pipelines, candidate management, interview scheduling, and offer management. Like payroll, you may need a specialized tool for complex hiring needs, such as running high-volume recruiting or hiring across multiple countries.

The critical integration point is at the time of hire. When a candidate accepts an offer, their information, including contact details, job title, start date, and compensation, should transfer directly from your ATS into your HRIS. 

This handoff eliminates duplicate data entry, reduces onboarding errors, and ensures that new hires are set up correctly in your system from the start. Without this integration, HR teams are forced to manually re-enter the same information, which wastes time and increases the risk of inconsistencies between recruiting and employee records.
‍

How to audit your HR tech stack before adding more tools

Before sitting through another vendor demo, run through the three steps below to understand what you actually need. 

As you do this, always ask the following questions: 

“Does this integrate well enough that no one has to do manual data entry or reconciliation?”
If not, either fix the integration or consolidate the function into your core platform. 

“Is there another tool that does this?” If the answer is yes, one of them needs to go. This is because duplicate and overlapping tools create confusion, inconsistent data, and wasted spend.
‍

1. Map your tools and spot duplicates

List your current tools by category – HRIS, performance management, employee engagement, learning management, compensation, and analytics – and look for obvious overlaps. If you have two survey tools or multiple performance review systems, that’s a clear opportunity for consolidation.
‍

2. Identify what people actually use

Ask managers which systems they engage with versus which ones are essentially ignored. Look for workarounds – are people maintaining parallel spreadsheets or giving feedback over Slack because your paid tools are too clunky? In our experience, HR teams are often surprised by the gap between "tools we pay for" and "tools people use," and find it informative when deciding which systems are worth keeping.
‍

3. Decide what stays separate and how it connects

Specialist tools like ATS and payroll make sense for complex recruiting or multi-country tax compliance, but they need to integrate cleanly with your core platform. Candidate data should be transferred automatically to your HRIS upon hire, while payroll changes should be automatically reflected in your HRIS. Likewise, performance data should inform compensation planning without exports.

🔗 Connect your tech stack without the integration headache
‍
Leapsome integrates with leading ATS, payroll, and productivity tools so your data syncs automatically with no manual exports or reconciliation.
‍
👉 View our integrations

Best practices for building a connected HR tech stack

Once you've audited your existing tools, the next step is actually connecting them in ways that make work easier. This will help you create workflows that support quick, simple data-based decisions across your organization.
‍

Prioritize integrations that actually change how work gets done

Begin with the critical data flows that eliminate manual work and provide managers with a better context. When your HRIS feeds org structure and employee data to your performance system, managers see updated team rosters without manual updates. 

Similarly, when demographics sync to your engagement platform, you can analyze survey results by team, tenure, or location without needing to export data. The best setups enable managers to open a performance review and view the employee's goals, recent feedback, engagement scores, and learning progress in a single view, rather than scattered across multiple systems. 

These connections are the difference between HR teams spending time on spreadsheet reconciliation versus strategic work.
‍

Use AI to eliminate repetitive work, not make decisions

AI works best when it handles repetitive tasks, like sending review reminders, routing approval requests, summarizing survey feedback, flagging engagement patterns, and automating workflow steps. 

That said, it shouldn't make final calls on performance ratings, determine compensation changes, or create development plans without human review. 

According to our 2026 Workforce Trends Report, 56% of employees spend a significant amount of time reviewing AI output, and 43% of HR leaders report taking on higher responsibilities since introducing AI. However, your goal is to reduce workload, so look for AI implementations that genuinely eliminate tasks rather than just create new work reviewing and correcting output.
‍

Calculate whether consolidation actually saves time and money

Finally, measure your current setup to see if a change is worth it. Look at hours per week spent on manual reporting and duplicate data entry, total HR software spend (often hidden across department budgets), IT hours maintaining integrations, and improvements in decision quality. 

If an HR team discovers that it’s spending 10-15 hours per week on tasks that could be better integrated and automated, that's 500-750 hours per year. Likewise, consolidating five separate tools with one integrated platform could significantly reduce your total software spend.
‍

Bringing your HR tech stack back under control

A bloated HR tech stack accumulates tool by tool as teams try to solve isolated problems. Therefore, the fix requires a holistic approach as you evaluate which tools truly add value and which create more work than they solve.

The best place to begin is by understanding the eight core categories your stack should cover, then auditing what you have versus what people actually use in practice. At this stage, you should be looking for obvious duplicates, low adoption rates, and integration gaps that necessitate manual work.

From there, you can focus on connecting the data flows that genuinely change how HR and managers work. As you do this, prioritize integrations that eliminate reconciliation, use AI to handle repetitive work, and measure whether consolidation actually saves time and money.

Throughout this process, it's worth remembering that progress matters more than perfection. Even consolidating two overlapping tools or fixing one critical integration can free up hours each week, providing your team with better insights. 

An all-in-one platform that integrates HRIS, performance, engagement, learning, and compensation into a single system will simplify this journey, providing managers and employees with a unified workspace while reducing the administrative burden on HR.

✨ Simplify your HR tech stack with Leapsome
‍
See how Leapsome unifies HRIS, performance, engagement, and learning in one platform that’s built for adoption.
‍
👉 Book a demo

Frequently asked questions about HR tech stack

How do you decide between an all-in-one HR tech stack and specialist tools?

The best way to decide between consolidated and specialist HR tools is by looking at your priorities. Specialist tools offer deep functionality but require integration work, while an all-in-one HR software stack consolidates core functions in one platform, reducing manual work. For this reason, many teams prefer an integrated core platform plus specialist tools for payroll and recruiting.
‍

How can an HR tech stack support performance management and employee engagement?

Your HR tech stack can link engagement scores to performance data and help spot patterns. When your performance management tool and employee engagement platform connect, managers see goals, feedback, and survey responses in one view during reviews, which makes conversations more informed and helps you use engagement insights to shape development plans.
‍

How does an HR tech stack improve HR process automation and reduce manual work?

HR process automation eliminates repetitive tasks like sending reminders, routing approvals, and syncing employee data. When your stack connects properly, changes in your HRIS automatically update performance reviews, compensation planning, and engagement surveys. Data-driven HR becomes realistic when you're not spending hours reconciling spreadsheets, freeing your team for more valuable, strategic work.