Which of the three HR problems are you actually solving?
All-in-one HR administration is the record-keeping layer: personnel files, contracts, absence, time tracking, onboarding and payroll preparation. Personio, Factorial and Kenjo compete here, and it is what most companies mean when they say they need HR software.
Performance and engagement is a different product entirely: reviews, 360 feedback, goals and OKRs, engagement surveys and one-to-one meetings. Dialog and Leapsome compete here. Buying an administration platform and expecting good performance management, or the reverse, is the standard disappointment in this category.
Recruitment is a third: applicant tracking, job distribution, careers pages, collaborative hiring and interview scheduling. Recruitee is the specialist, though Personio, Factorial and Kenjo all include lighter recruitment modules.
Most companies eventually need all three and get there by adding rather than replacing — starting with administration, adding recruitment when hiring volume justifies it, and adding performance last because it is the one that fails without leadership commitment rather than without software.
Why is personnel data the strongest privacy case of any category?
Because of what a personnel file contains and who it belongs to. Sickness absence records, which are health data and therefore special category under the GDPR. Salary and bank details. Performance judgements written by managers. Disciplinary records. Home addresses, dependants, sometimes union membership.
And unlike a customer, an employee did not choose the vendor. Consent is not a valid basis for most employment processing precisely because the power imbalance makes it not freely given — which puts the whole weight on the employer as controller getting the arrangement right.
Personio processes in the EU on AWS Frankfurt; Factorial is Spanish; Dialog runs in EU data centres under Visma; Leapsome, Kenjo and Recruitee are all EU-established. That means intra-EEA processing with no transfer mechanism to verify and re-verify.
With a US-established HR platform, the transfer runs on the Data Privacy Framework and needs checking that the specific entity is certified and keeping it current — an ongoing obligation on data that includes your employees' health records. That is the argument, and it is stronger here than anywhere else on this site.
What does "payroll" actually mean in these products?
Usually preparation rather than execution, and confusing the two produces a rollout that fails in month one. Personio and Kenjo both do payroll preparation: they assemble the data — hours, absences, contract changes, variable pay — and hand it to a payroll provider or accountant who runs the actual calculation and filing.
That division exists because payroll is national law rather than software. German, Dutch, Spanish and French payroll each have their own rules, filings, deadlines and social security handling, and a platform that genuinely ran payroll in all of them would be several products.
Factorial goes further into payroll and compensation, and Personio integrates with national payroll providers. The question to ask a vendor is precise: does this calculate and file, or does it produce a file my accountant imports? Both are useful; only one removes the accountant.
For a company operating in more than one country, this is the point where an all-in-one stops being all-in-one, and it is better discovered during evaluation than during the first month-end.
What does European working-time law require from the software?
More than most companies realise. European Court of Justice case law requires employers to maintain an objective, reliable and accessible system for recording daily working time, and several member states have implemented that with specific national rules — Spain and Germany most stringently.
That turns time tracking from a nice-to-have into a compliance obligation with an audit trail attached. Factorial and Kenjo both build time tracking and working-time compliance in as core features rather than add-ons, which is not a coincidence given their Spanish and German origins. Personio covers time tracking and absence management in the same layer.
The practical requirement is that records are objective and tamper-evident: a spreadsheet a manager can edit afterwards does not satisfy it. Neither does an honour-system app with no audit log.
This is the single most common reason a European company outgrows a US HR product that treats time tracking as an optional module for hourly workers — because in Europe it applies to salaried staff too.
Why do performance management rollouts fail more often than HR admin ones?
Because HR administration succeeds when the software works and performance management succeeds only when leadership changes behaviour. The platform can schedule the review, collect the 360 feedback and track the OKR; it cannot make a manager have an honest conversation.
Dialog and Leapsome are both built around continuous conversation rather than an annual event — Dialog with continuous performance management, engagement surveys, 360 feedback and OKRs; Leapsome adding learning and development, one-to-one meeting management, compensation and AI-assisted features. Both are good products, and both fail in organisations that deploy them to avoid having the conversation rather than to structure it.
The sequencing that works: agree what good performance means before choosing software to measure it, run one cycle manually to find out where the disagreements are, then automate what survived.
The signal that a rollout is failing is completion rate holding while comment quality collapses — everybody submits the form on time and nobody writes anything. No platform reports that, which is why someone has to read them.
