Paychex Flex—Noteworthy Platform or Just Flexing?

Paychex Flex is more than just a regular applicant tracking system (ATS). It’s an all-in-one HR solution to hire new employees and manage existing ones. With Paychex Flex, you get payroll services, health benefits management, and retirement services, as well as solutions for HR, attendance management, and business insurance.

Source: Paychex Flex

The platform focuses on small and mid-sized businesses with one to 1,000+ employees. Having been founded in 1971, it’s one of the pioneers in HR services.

This article will review the Paychex Flex software, focusing on its features and the standalone ATS package. We’ll also introduce an alternative ATS for SMBs that you can use to hire top candidates quickly.

Paychex Flex Key Features

Paychex Flex is the way to go if you need a solution to take care of various aspects of your business’s HR department. It has dozens of functionalities and 100+ integrations that will automate your daily functions.

One of the main attractions of Paychex Flex is its payroll services. The company has over 200 compliance experts that constantly check new laws and regulations to keep the software up-to-date. You can use the platform to automate payroll management, customize bonuses and deductions, create reports, and calculate and pay taxes.

Regarding attendance management, Paychex Flex offers various punching methods, such as facial verification, biometric iris and fingerprint scanners, mobile apps, and web punch. The software automatically logs overtime and missed hours, automatically calculating the changes in the payroll.

Hiring With Paychex Flex—ATS Solution

If you’re interested only in Paychex Flex’s ATS solution, you can get the standalone package called myStaffingPro.

You can use Paychex Flex to post a job ad on Indeed directly, and they will offer you a $200 credit for a sponsored job post the first time you do it. The platform has also integrated with JobTarget, allowing you to quickly distribute your listing on over 25,000 international and niche job boards.

You can add prescreening questions in the form of a questionnaire to your ads and set up a ranking system so that candidates are automatically graded as they apply. Paychex Flex will validate an applicant’s employment history, education, and other elements of their resume. 

You can choose one of the dozens of application statuses to move candidates through your hiring funnel. This way, you can track the progress of each candidate through the funnel without having to log changes manually. Status options include:

• Incomplete application
• Filled position
• Unqualified
• Eligible for interview
• Interview scheduled
• Candidate rejected
• Offer extended
• Offer signed

Paychex Flex allows candidates to check their application status on their own instead of messaging your recruiting officers. 

Once you hire a new employee, you can use the software’s onboarding features (online forms, onboarding videos, automatically shared documents, etc.) to ease settling in.

Paychex Flex Downsides

There’s a fine line between vintage and outdated, and Paychex Flex has a tough time hiding its age. The platform’s design will give you a throwback to Windows 95 (if you remember it), with little addition to UI to make it more user-friendly.

The navigation is not intuitive enough, and you’ll have to rely on your own patience to figure out how the platform works. Expect a significant learning curve the first time you start using the software. While the whole idea of HR software is to automate processes and save time, you’ll find it time-consuming until you get used to it.

Another issue is the complexity. You’ll hardly use some of the features (complex payroll functionalities, retirement services, and Umbrella insurance come to mind), and you’ll have difficulty finding your way to a functionality you’ve used before and would benefit from it again.

Paychex Flex Integrations

Paychex Flex supports an incredible number of integrations (in the hundreds). They have separate categories of integrations for tools and platforms, such as point-of-sale systems, finance, accounting, health benefits, hiring, HR, retirement, attendance management, and compensation.

We’ve decided to focus on HR and hiring integrations, of which there are 39. Some of them are:

• Beekeeper
• BambooHR
• Ashby
• Bullhorn
• CareerPlug
• Chally
• EasyLlama
• Glassdoor
• HCM TradeSeal
• HireRight
• TazWorks
• HIREtech
• Indeed
• JazzHR
• Jobvite
• OurPeople
• Oracle NetSuite
• TalentReef
• SimplyHired
• Workstream

Paychex Flex Pricing

Paychex Flex has three pricing plans for its software:

1. Essentials
2. Select
3. Pro

The Essentials plan costs $39 per month plus an additional $5 per employee. The company has not disclosed the pricing of the other two plans, and you will need to contact their sales team to get a quote.

Source: Paychex Flex

Depending on your chosen plan, you’ll get different features unlocked. For example, the Essentials plan lacks the ATS, onboarding, and employee screening essentials.

If you opt for myStaffingPro, the standalone ATS, you’ll have to contact the sales team for a quote as the company doesn’t disclose its price.

Paychex Flex Customers

Considering the number of clients, Paychex Flex is the largest HR company catering to SMBs, with over 730,000 customers in the United States and Northern Europe. The software is available in English and Spanish.

Some of the companies that use the Paychex Flex platform are:

• West Park Animal Hospital
• H.Y.P.E. Counseling Services
• Little Caesars
• TYR Tactical
• StratasCorp
• Vienna Beef
• TLF Graphics
• Mason Marketing/Mason Digital
• Lyrid
• Plumbing M.D.
• WXXI Public Media
• Crown Jewell Entertainment
• Ace Handyman Services
• Plumbing Doctor
• Bolden Insurance Agency
• The American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene
• Rescue Village

Alternatives to Paychex Flex

Paychex Flex is not really what you’re looking for? We’ve reviewed many other ATS solutions for you:

Workello vs. Paychex Flex

Workello is a dedicated ATS that offers an automated hiring process combined with candidate assessment software that will help you make the right choice and hire the best candidate. It doesn’t have non-hiring capabilities and is easy to use. You won’t have to spend weeks getting used to it and will be able to launch your funnel in under 3 minutes, making it perfect for high-volume recruiting.

You can use Workello to create a database of applicants, test candidates, interview, reject, and hire them with a couple of clicks. Everything is set up so that you can find your way around the whole platform effortlessly and know where each candidate in the funnel is at all times.

Compared to Paychex Flex, Workello has a transparent pricing model. It has only two plans, and all features are available in both. The difference between the subscriptions is in the number of assessments and how you get billed:

1. Growth—$299, billed quarterly (up to 30 assessments)
2. Scale—$579, billed annually (up to 300 assessments)

Paychex Flex vs. Workello—Features Overview

Check out how the two platforms compare:

Summary

The fact that over 730,000 companies use Paychex Flex is not a fluke. While it could do with some visual brushing up, it’s well-built software that covers all your HR needs. If you’re looking solely for an ATS, you can get the standalone package without paying for the company’s payroll and insurance services.

The problem with Paychex Flex is the complexity of the platform and the fact that you need weeks and months to learn all its ins and outs. Many companies have shied away from using it due to the long learning curve.

If you don’t want to waste time learning about features you’ll rarely use, you can switch your attention to an ATS built to be used hassle-free. You can sign up for Workello for free and set up your hiring process in under 90 seconds. With our pre-hire assessments, you can spot the top 1% of candidates quickly.