Human Capital Management

Human Capital Management and Human Capital Management Solutions are the same market under two names, and this article is about the scorecard under the first one. Forrester's final edition titled simply Human Capital Management is The Forrester Wave: Human Capital Management, Q2 2023, and the edition that replaced it added a word to the title.

The scorecard under the shorter name: The Forrester Wave: Human Capital Management, Q2 2023

The Q2 2023 evaluation was published May 15, 2023, authored by senior analyst Greg Pridgeon with contributors James McQuivey, Sarah Morane, and Kara Hartig. It scored eleven providers against twenty eight criteria across current offering, strategy, and market presence.

Only one placement from that edition is publicly confirmed, and it belongs to Workday, a Leader with the highest score in the Strategy category. The public record of this edition is thin, and this article works from what is confirmed and nothing beyond it.

That thinness is itself part of the story. The HCM giants do not announce these placements loudly because the category was a settled system-of-record market, and a settled market's scorecard gets quoted in procurement documents, not press releases.

What Workday was scored for

Workday's citation reads like the 2023 market's definition of winning. Forrester wrote that Workday "delivers on its superior vision of creating the future of work by adapting its HCM offering rapidly and staying ahead of customer needs."

The scored evidence is specific. The VNDLY acquisition, bringing contingent workforce management into the suite, and Peakon, bringing employee listening, both deepened and integrated rather than bolted on. The Value Inclusion Belonging and Equity Index and the Pay Equity Discovery Board turned equity from a policy into a product feature. Workday Extend gave customers platform tools of their own.

The pattern is the point. The 2023 scorecard rewarded a vendor for absorbing adjacent capabilities, contingent labor and employee voice, into core HR, which is exactly the expansion direction the next edition would make its thesis. The scorecard was not rewarding a feature list. It was rewarding the operating pattern, absorb, integrate, extend, that the next generation of HCM platforms would have to copy.

The system-of-record scorecard

The 2023 edition measured the market at its most settled. The criteria framework was classic Wave structure, current offering, strategy, market presence, and the product under evaluation was the core suite: core HR, payroll, talent, the personnel file made software. Core HR as the record, payroll as the engine, talent as the attached module. None of it is wrong. All of it is the old center of gravity, and the vendors who optimized for exactly that definition are the ones the next edition had to re-measure.

What that scorecard could not see is what came next. Two years later the successor edition would announce a "seismic shift" from system of record to system of engagement and intelligence, and the 2023 scorecard reads in retrospect like the last photograph of the old definition.

The vendors in the 2023 field beyond Workday have not surfaced their placements publicly. A buyer needing the full tier table from that era will find one confirmed Leader and silence, which is the honest state of the record.

Where the market went

The successor evaluation is The Forrester Wave: Human Capital Management Solutions, Q4 2025, announced by senior analyst Akshara Naik Lopez on October 21, 2025. Its framing is the redefinition: "What was once a back-office system of record is now evolving into a strategic, intelligent platform that powers workforce productivity and organizational health."

The 2025 edition scored twelve vendors, and the confirmed placements describe the shift. ADP a Leader with the highest possible scores in seventeen criteria. UKG a Leader with the highest Current Offering score, positioned as the frontline-heavy choice. Oracle a Leader, called "the most innovative vendor in the HCM market" on the strength of embedded agentic AI. Darwinbox and isolved Strong Performers.

The deep coverage of the successor scorecard belongs to its own article, under its own name. What matters here is the arc: the short name's final edition scored the system of record, and the long name's first edition scored the platform that replaced it.

What a two-name category costs a buyer

The honest limitation is practical. This market now has two names, two scorecards, and a thin public record for the older one. Anyone benchmarking vendors across the transition is comparing a 2023 system-of-record evaluation against a 2025 engagement-and-intelligence one, and the two are not the same test.

The vendors themselves reinforce the confusion by quoting whichever edition flattered them most. A buyer should treat citations from the short-name era as historical documents and citations from the long-name era as current, and should verify which edition any vendor's marketing actually quotes. The safest reading of the 2023 edition today is as a field roster: who was in the market at the end of the system-of-record era, and who had the vision scores to survive the rename.

Three questions for the renamed market

Which scorecard is your procurement actually benchmarked against? If your RFP references the 2023 edition, you are evaluating vendors against a definition the analyst has since replaced. Update the benchmark before you score the vendors.

What did the vendor absorb, and what did it bolt on? The 2023 Leader won on deepened acquisitions, and the 2025 edition rewarded platform expansion. Ask how each acquisition in the vendor's suite is integrated, and get demos across the seams, not the modules.

Who is actually using the system, desk workers or everyone? The 2025 thesis is frontline-first, nearly eighty percent of the global workforce. If your workforce is frontline-heavy, a 2023-era system-of-record benchmark will systematically undervalue the vendors built for that reality.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.

The natural next comparison is Human Capital Management Solutions: forrester's newest HCM evaluation is organized around one statistic: nearly eighty percent of the global workforce is frontline, and the scorecard now grades platforms on how well they serve people who have never touched a desktop.

This market sits next to Talent Acquisition (Recruiting) Suites, covered separately on this site. Workday's recruiting suite now averages a 3.5-day time-to-hire on high-volume roles, per Gartner's newest quadrant, the market's clearest proof yet that the AI layer became the recruiter's copilot rather than its replacement.