With the rise of cloud-computing, social media, Big Data and mobile, few corporate departments will start the New Year unchanged.

The biggest trends in Human Resources software over the past year will continue to have an impact throughout 2013.

When you consider that the 2012 HR Technology Conference had the highest attendance in the 15-year history of the event, it is more than obvious that HR departments will be become prominent in shaping business strategy, using innovation and technology on the way.

With the focus on technology, here are the top five HR trends to expect for the coming year:

Increased investment in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

The flexibility, ease of implementation and lower costs of SaaS will ensure an increased market share for both subscription-based and pay-as-you-go service providers. Another benefit of improved SaaS, configurations will appear to be indistinguishable from customization, a feature that will attract the largest market for SaaS—Small and Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs).

The rise of HR Big Data.

As the need for proactive planning strategies grows, systems to handle Big Data into actionable insights will rise to meet the challenge. The means to provide a repository to sync large data between different systems will be a dominant theme in HR departments 2013.

Corporations will have to manage the master data of employees, and there will be more sources (both established providers and startups) to support this goal.

HR will have a seat at the head table of many corporations.

2013 will see HR become part of the big picture, not just a thin sliver of the pie. The New Year will usher in emergence of Human Resources as a part of long-term corporate goals, instead of a section providing one-off results. HR information software will become integrated in business planning, and will begin to focus on results-driven campaigns, impacting the bottom line of the entire organization.

Social media will provide real-time performance management, lessening the impact of performance reviews.

Next year may not mark the end of the annual performance review, but it could weaken them to the point of being unrecognizable. As more companies are embracing the immediacy that social media platforms allow, more companies will use this as means to gauge employee functioning. Feedback has always had a role in determining the effectiveness of workers. In 2013, feedback will be even more significant. In the social world, substandard performance is difficult to hide will not be tolerated.

Three words: engagement, engagement and engagement.

In 2013, HR will focus more on keeping employees happy and engaged on the job. With more online hiring tools, the recruitment process will become increasingly interactive, and this trend will extend into more HR functions, like compliance and training.

Companies like Taleo, Kenexa and Ovation Technologies have already proven their worth in their roles for recruitment, hiring and onboarding. This involvement will encourage HR to expand technology into other areas, pushing them to perform at comparably higher levels, especially in areas like employee self-service, among others.

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