Spreadsheets still run HR—and that’s part of the problem. Whether you’re tracking headcount, screening applicants, or prepping compensation reviews, you're knee-deep in Excel tabs, VLOOKUPs, and error-prone filters. The truth is: HR has the most human work, and yet spends the most time fighting cells and formats.
That’s why 2025 is becoming the breakout year for practical, AI-powered HR tools. These aren't full-scale HCM suites. They're lean, focused assistants that handle data cleaning, candidate scoring, policy workflows, and reporting—without needing a team of analysts or an implementation partner.
Let’s start with the most Excel-friendly of the bunch.
Excelmatic
If your HR team still works inside spreadsheets (and let’s be honest, most do), Excelmatic is the smart bridge between raw data and actual answers.
Upload your Excel file, and instead of battling formulas or nested filters, just ask:
Summarize average tenure by department.
Highlight employees with missing performance ratings.
Which roles had the highest turnover last quarter?
Excelmatic instantly analyzes your file, cleans messy data, standardizes formats like start dates or salary fields, generates clear summary tables, and creates basic visualizations like bar or line charts. All of this—without you writing a single formula.
It’s built for HR professionals who know what insight they want, but don’t want to spend their morning tangled in pivot tables.
Pricing: Free trial available; basic plan starts at $5.99/month
Best For: HR teams that rely on Excel for tracking, reporting, and workforce analysis
2. Hiretual
This one’s for recruiters drowning in resumes. hireEZ isn’t just another job board—it’s a talent intelligence engine. You feed it a JD or ideal profile, and it pulls from 700M+ public profiles, auto-ranks candidates, and even predicts salary expectations.
It’s like having a recruiter that doesn’t sleep—scanning, ranking, shortlisting, and even emailing candidates at scale.
You can download shortlists, drop them into Excelmatic, and ask:
“Which candidates match 80%+ of required skills and live in California?”
Pricing: Starts at ~$169/month per seat
Best For: Recruiting teams who want proactive sourcing without LinkedIn dependence
3. PeopleGPT by Juicebox
Imagine if ChatGPT knew your org chart. PeopleGPT lets you search your team as if it were a dataset.
“Show me all employees who joined before 2022, are female, and haven’t completed manager training.”
It integrates with your HRIS (or takes CSVs), and instantly builds filters, charts, or audit-friendly tables. It’s not just about people lookup—it’s about making HR data queryable in natural language.
Pair with Excelmatic for broader workbook-level analysis, especially across payroll, training, and exit records.
Pricing: Free plan available; Pro starts ~$10/user/month
Best For: HRBPs, People Ops, or DEI analysts
4. Pymetrics
Hiring isn’t just skills. It’s fit. harver uses neuroscience-based games to assess soft traits like attention, risk tolerance, and learning speed. Candidates take a 25-minute assessment, and hiring managers get a traits match score based on team benchmarks.
It’s not perfect—but it adds real structure to high-variance roles like sales, consulting, or client support.
What Excelmatic is to past data, harver is to future potential.
Pricing: Enterprise tiered pricing (best for mid-sized orgs and up)
Best For: Talent teams hiring for culture fit or EQ-driven roles
5. Leapsome
Performance reviews and OKRs are always painful to coordinate. Leapsome turns reviews, feedback, and goal tracking into an integrated loop. Managers get nudges to complete reviews. Employees see goal progress linked to their KPIs.
You can analyze 360 feedback, engagement scores, or development conversations over time. Export the data, run it through Excelmatic, and uncover patterns in satisfaction, leadership alignment, or retention risk.
Pricing: Starts ~$8/user/month
Best For: HR teams looking to make reviews continuous—not just annual
Final Thoughts: HR Needs Tools That Work With Their Work
HR doesn’t need more tools. It needs the right ones—small helpers that fit into the chaos, clean it up, and let you focus on the people part of people operations.
Excelmatic lets you do instant reporting and analysis on the files you already use. hireEZ finds better candidates, faster. PeopleGPT lets you query your team like a database. Pymetrics helps reduce guesswork in hiring. Leapsome makes feedback loops easier to close.
None of these tools try to be everything. And that’s exactly why they work.
