In preparation for a recent speaking engagement, I was curious about what sorts of mobile apps are available to help with human resources management. What are innovative HR departments doing to help leaders manage their people? I found several iPhone apps, and two in particular seem like they could improve convenience and effectiveness.

1. Interview Assistant iPhone App for HR

Interview Assistant allows you to select questions from several categories, ranging from IT questions to leadership and administrative assistant questions. You can also add your own questions. Create a template for a position that you are hiring, and save the questions to that template. Schedule your interviews in the app, and it will send reminders to you. When it’s time to interview, you can recored the answer on your iPhone or type in the text. It also syncs to dropbox for easy sharing among devices and teams.

What I like about it: It’s a simple interface, the opportunity to record interviews gives you a great alternative to writing down verbatim answers (which i usually recommend). The dropbox connection is also great, so that you can share the interview results with the rest of your team quickly.

Downfalls: The interview questions it contains leave a lot to be desired in my opinion. But with that said, it it extremely simple to add categories of questions and put your own questions into a template, so this is an easy fix.

2. Direct Report iPhone App

Direct Report provides a mobile employee performance feedback log. Add your direct reports to the app, with positions and start dates, with a photo if you’d like. Then you’re ready to add feedback. Click on an employee to see their photo along with three icons – a smiley face for positive feedback, straight face for neutral, and a frowning face for constructive feedback. You can categorize the feedback into areas including “business savvy, communication, leadership, etc, or you can create your own categories. Sort all feedback by date, category or type of feedback, and you can also email the report.

What I like about it: I can see great uses for this app especially in the industries that my clients are in – retail, hospitality, and restaurants. In these industries, managers are not at a desk or computer, and don’t have time to pull out a file on an employee to make notes as feedback situations occur. this app provides a great way to log feedback on a daily basis, and would be a huge help when it’s time for one on ones, performance reviews, etc.

Downfalls:  No real downfalls – just even more potential. It would be great to be able to enter performance objectives, development goals, and be able to link feedback to them. I can also see potential for adding feedback form the employee or at least a check box to indicate that the manager has had a coaching conversation with the employee. Overall, the app doesn’t have any issues that I can see, but it would simply be better and more useful if these things were added in.

Do you use any mobile apps to help manage your human resources? Have you tried these? I would love to hear from you! Please comment below or contact me.

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