Zoho People is an HR platform in which the employee file is the starting point and the processes around it do the work.
Most organisations buy HR software to store files. Contracts, ID documents, performance review notes and leave forms move from a folder on the server to a folder in the cloud, and that is the end of the project. Six months later someone rightly asks what it has actually delivered.
The answer: nothing, because moving an archive is not automation. The value of HR software is not in where the documents are stored but in what happens around them: who is allowed to approve something, which tasks are created automatically when someone joins, which deadline is counting down, and which figures you get out of it at the end of the quarter.
Zoho People is built for exactly that.
Recruitment belongs at the start of the same chain, not in a separate tool with its own database. Zoho Recruit manages vacancies, the candidate pipeline, interviews, communication with candidates and publication to job boards and your own careers page.
The gain is in the handover. A candidate you hire is turned into an employee in Zoho People with a single action, including everything you already collected during the process: address details, education, availability, start date. Nobody retypes it, and that gets rid of the typos that would otherwise only surface in your first payroll tax return.
On top of that, you can finally measure the full funnel: from vacancy to applicant to hire to turnover in the first year. That last figure (how many of your hires leave again within twelve months, per role and per recruitment channel) says more about your recruitment process than any other KPI, and hardly anyone can produce it because the two systems are not connected.
With Zia Agents you deploy AI agents that carry out HR tasks independently within the permissions and boundaries you set. In practice it comes down to four kinds of work.
Important to keep in mind: HR agents work with the most sensitive data your organisation has. Because Zia Agents run within the platform, they inherit the role and permission model you have already set up: an agent sees no more than the user on whose behalf it works, and every action can be traced. That is a fundamentally different story from a standalone chatbot that someone pastes personnel data into.
From your own schemes, handbook and collective labour agreement. How much leave do I have left, how do I apply for parental leave, what is the study cost scheme. That is the bulk of the incoming questions in every HR department.
Assigning onboarding tasks, following up on open actions, flagging that a probation period or a temporary contract is ending before the notice deadline passes.
On hard criteria set in advance, so the recruiter starts with the candidates who meet the basic requirements.
Rising absence in a specific team, a department with above-average turnover, or a job group where inflow structurally lags behind outflow.
Leave, absence and onboarding are now in Zoho People instead of in folders and emails. Employees handle a lot themselves and we finally have an overview.
Zoho People is an international product. That is not an objection, but it does mean a number of things have to be configured deliberately rather than being right out of the box.
Leave types and expiry periods. As described above: you can configure the distinction between statutory and extra-statutory leave, with the corresponding periods, yourself. The platform offers that flexibility.
You can record sickness and recovery notifications and the steps in the reintegration process in Zoho People. In practice this works in one of two ways: you build the deadline monitoring yourself with workflows and alerts, or you leave the absence process with your occupational health service or absence management system and only connect the notifications. Discuss this explicitly during setup: it is the most common reason an HR implementation in the Netherlands has to be adjusted afterwards.
When it comes to sickness absence, as an employer you may not record medical data, only functional limitations and the progress of reintegration. Set up your permission model accordingly and limit who can view absence files.
You keep your payroll processing in a Dutch package such as Loket.nl, Nmbrs or a comparable system and connect it to Zoho People, so changes flow through and payslips come back into the employee portal. That is not a limitation but almost always the most sensible setup in the Netherlands, if only because of segregation of duties around salary data.
Shift allowances, age-related leave days, senior schemes and roster-free days differ per sector. Map them out in advance; it determines how much configuration work the setup takes.
For an organisation of up to around fifty employees this is a project of a few weeks, most of which goes into steps 1 and 2.
Duplicate records, outdated addresses and missing contract data make up most of the work and are structurally underestimated.
In line with your collective agreement and terms of employment, including expiry periods.
Not the way they are described in the handbook.
Not as one big bulk upload.
This is the moment the time saving becomes visible.
So the monthly round of changes runs automatically.
To recruitment, reviews, training and AI agents.
The question with HR software is not where your documents are stored, but whether your organisation can run on it: whether a manager can approve leave without HR, whether a new employee has a working laptop on day one, whether you can show who holds which certification, and whether you have figures at the end of the quarter that nobody argues about.
Zoho People provides that foundation, with Zoho Recruit at the front end and Zia Agents to take over the operational work, and your Dutch payroll package at the back end, where it belongs.
A cloud-based HR platform in which you manage employee files, leave, absence, attendance, timesheets, onboarding, reviews, document management and HR questions. You set up processes and forms yourself without a developer, and employees handle their own matters through self-service and the mobile app.
No. Zoho Payroll exists, but it is not available for the Netherlands. You keep your payroll processing in a Dutch package such as Loket.nl or Nmbrs and connect it to Zoho People: changes flow from HR to payroll, and payslips come back into the employee portal. An added advantage is that salary data sits in a separate system with its own authorisations.
You set up leave types yourself, including accrual, request rules, approval and expiry period. The distinction between statutory and extra-statutory leave, with the corresponding periods, is easy to configure. It is very doable, but it has to happen during setup: correcting it afterwards means recalculating your balances and your leave provision.
You can record sickness and recovery notifications and reintegration steps. In practice you build the deadline monitoring with workflows and alerts, or you leave the absence process with your occupational health service or absence management system and only connect the notifications. Discuss this explicitly during selection.
Natively. You manage vacancies, candidates and interviews in Recruit; a hired candidate is turned into an employee in Zoho People with a single action, including the data you already collected during the process. You can also measure the full funnel, right through to first-year turnover per role and recruitment channel.
It is not the number of employees that decides it, but the number of people keeping the records and the number of processes with an approval step. In practice things start to pinch at around twenty to twenty-five employees, especially as soon as several managers approve leave or retention and certification obligations come into play.
For an organisation of up to around fifty employees coming from Excel or a simple tool: a few weeks, most of which goes into cleaning up data and setting up leave types and approval flows. With multiple entities, countries or a migration from an existing HR system with a hundred-plus employees, that grows to a few months.
Yes, and that is one of the strongest arguments. Zoho People shares user management, permissions and reporting with the rest of the platform. That means you can combine personnel data and business data in one dashboard (for example revenue per FTE, the occupancy of a project team, or the ratio between billable and non-billable hours) without exports and intermediate integrations.
Mobile XL is a Zoho partner and sets up HR environments including Dutch leave rules and the integration with your payroll package.
