Fairsail review by Inspector Jones

Fairsail is a comprehensive and fast-growing Human Capital Management service for mid-sized businesses. We recommend putting them on your shortlist.

For a smaller provider, Fairsail packs a big punch. They’ve got a feature list designed to compete with the big boys of the industry, while still remaining a small and nimble company.

Before you choose Fairsail, here are the things you need to know.

First, features. We’ve been surprised at the breadth of functionality that Fairsail encompasses. Fairsail stacks up well in a head-to-head feature comparison, and includes:

• A full HR management system, including all employee records, organisation charts, employee portal, and reporting
• Support for multi-national organisations - multi-currency, multi-language, with different employment rules and calendars
• Talent Management - including performance planning / goal setting, performance reviews, skills tracking, 360 feedback and succession planning
• Recruitment - with an applicant tracking system, criteria-based interviews and scorecards, careers page, screening, portals (for agents and applicants), email templates, and onboarding features
• Payflow - a two-way sync with payroll and benefits providers. Payflow manages the data you need to send (salaries, time/attendance, etc.) and receive (loading paycycle information back into Fairsail). It supports multiple different payroll providers, over different countries.
• Basic time and attendance management
• Benefits and open enrollment
• Vacation management
• Analytics - with dashboards, and a good set of pre-built and configurable reports that allow you to monitor your KPIs

Second, Fairsail isn’t a large organisation. They are relatively small, with around 25 staff based in the UK. We’ve found that this does make Fairsail rather agile, able to quickly develop new functionality and respond to customer needs. Implementation times for Fairsail are likely to be much shorter compared to some of their larger competitors. However, there is an increased risk of failure with smaller companies. Fairsail provide support during both UK and US business hours, however standard support isn’t 24x7. Also, with a smaller team, if a significant problem were to strike (or if there was a sudden influx of work), there’s less ability to absorb the extra load.

Third, the platform is a strength. Fairsail is hosted on Force.com - the high-quality cloud platform provided by Salesforce. Force.com meets some of the best standards in the industry. It’s secure, highly-scalable and a service I’m happy to recommend. This means that Fairsail’s reliability, ability to grow to hold extra data, and ability to cope with failure are all solid. Salesforce also perform routine security / vulnerability scanning, providing an extra level of comfort.

Fourth, security. We have reviewed Fairsail’s security practices. They are reasonable, pragmatic, and align with industry good-practice. For most organisations this means the security is as good as, or likely much better than, you can provide with an internal system. However, be aware that Fairsail don’t have independent security certification against industry standards like ISO27001.

Finally, our advice. Fairsail is a solid choice if you’re looking for a comprehensive Human Capital Management solution that covers the full gamut of your HR needs. It’s ideal for businesses of a few hundred to a few thousand employees looking for a new HR suite that “does everything”, and can be implemented quickly.