5 Small Employer HR Hacks: Free and Low-Cost Tools to Make Your Job Easier

HR in a small employer setting is not the same as it is in it’s larger counterpart. With limited resources and no dedicated HR team, you’re expected to juggle compliance, payroll, hiring, employee relations, and more—often without the budget or resources to really manage them well.

But luckily we live in the age of technology and even free technology can prevent someone managing HR in a small environment from doing everything manually. 

Here’s a breakdown of some of our favorite budget-friendly HR tools for small employers.

1. Compliance & Legal Resources

Keeping up with labor laws and compliance requirements is overwhelming, but missing key updates can lead to costly mistakes. 

• State Chamber of Commerce - most states have a Chamber of Commerce and they often share updates on state laws that may affect employers. Email updates are usually free.

• Department of Labor - essential federal legal updates and templates can be downloaded for free.

• Local Attorneys - I find that local attorneys who blog and have email lists you can sign up for do a great job and sharing when new laws are even proposed that affect their state. You can also find attorneys who blog about specific things like FMLA.

🔹 Pro Tip: Set Google Alerts for HR compliance changes in your state to stay ahead of regulatory updates.

2. Recruiting & Hiring Tools

Recruiting can take up a significant amount of time, especially when you’re managing multiple roles. We always suggest having an HRIS system that has a recruiting module attached for the highest level of automation and ease of use, but if that isn’t in the budget, here are a few other options.

• There are many free applicant tracking systems today that likely have enough functionality to get by especially if you are not doing high volume recruiting. Smart Recruiters, SmartStart is a free version of their award winning applicant tracking platform built for those in employers with less than 250 employees and hiring less than 10 roles at any given time. 

• Leverage subscription based resources only when you need them. Our clients recruiting needs ebbs and flows. While something like LinkedIn Recruiter is great for when we are sourcing/hiring quite a bit, we don’t need it year round.

  Therefore we add the subscriptions only in the months we need it and then cancel when we don’t. It may mean our monthly subscription rate is a bit higher than others, but since we aren’t paying for it even when we don’t need it, we come out ahead while still getting the tech we need when we need it. 

  
  

🔹 Pro Tip: Create evergreen templates for job postings, auto-reponders, email communication and calendar invites to save time when hiring for recurring roles. Use ChatGPT to update these templates with the info for the current role you are hiring for. 

3. Payroll & Benefits Management

I call payroll the easiest-hardest discipline of HR. It is easier to be black and white with payroll. It is more structured and regularly occurring which means you can plan for it. The laws are pretty easy to understand. All of that makes it easy. 

Where it can get hard is if you are trying to figure out pay manually or if you have no checks and balances in place. Payroll errors not only signal negatively to employees, but they can be costly in the long run. It’s an area that is important to get right every single time. 

I never suggest processing payroll manually. There are many affordable options for payroll especially if you do not need a lot of bells & whistles. 

• Gusto, iSolved, ADP and even Quickbooks (although not our recommendation) all offer very low cost payroll processing that takes the guesswork out of figuring taxes and overtime. Most even help with the payment of taxes and keeping you compliant.

• Many payroll providers, like Paylocity (our preferred vendor) provide bundle pricing for payroll when you add on other modules like applicant tracking, onboarding and more. You may be able to get payroll processing and more for a very reasonable monthly cost. Bonus when you work with a team like ours for your implementation because our partnership offers discounts with some providers. 

🔹 Pro Tip: Create payroll checks and balances and involve managers in getting timesheets completed/approved and always have a second set of eyes review/approve payroll before processing. This helps to eliminate what can feel like an overwhelming administrative burden while also mitigating payroll errors.

4. Employee Engagement & Culture

Engaged employees are more productive and stay longer. But culture-building doesn’t require a big budget. I just heard you say, “yes but it does require time”. Fair enough. Let me see if I can suggest ideas for those with limited budgets and time.

• Online Chat: Google Chat, Teams or Slack (which has a free plan). We are 100% remote so I tell my team to think of our chat like our office. If you were to walk in an office you would say good morning. You might meet in the breakroom and ask what others are having for lunch. Doing those things in chat are all easy engaging techniques to build culture. 

• Engagement Surveys: I believe you can not work on engagement and culture if you don’t know how your employees feel about it. Zoho Survey is one of several software platforms that offer a free plan. Number of surveys, questions and other analytics may be limited but they offer enough to get going.  

🔹 Pro Tip: Use your online chat channel to do a quick pulse survey asking employees to share an emoji representing how they are feeling in this moment. It’s a quick way to gauge overall sentiment. 

🔹 Pro Tip Bonus: Have online chat channels dedicated to engaging activities to break up the monotony of always talking about work. We have a Would You Rather chat channel where I pose a new question every Friday. Employees look forward to this and will remind me when I haven’t sent the question of the week yet. 

5. Free HR Communities & Support

Sometimes, the best resource isn’t software—it’s other HR pros who understand your challenges. This can be hard to find in the small employer space because most content is built for large HR teams, but we are working to change that.

Coming very soon is a community built just for those managing HR in small employers. Where every piece of content, every piece of advice, every event caters to those in small environments. 

Add your email to our mailing list below to stay informed. 

We See You!

HR in a small employer setting can feel overwhelming. By leveraging free and low-cost tools, you can reduce administrative burdens, improve compliance, and create a better experience for employees and you!

👉 What’s your favorite free or low-cost HR tool? Let us know in the comments!

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