Search layer for enterprise HR portals

The moment that triggers this: an employee needs to update their direct deposit, or an HR admin needs to find a specific tax field, and after clicking through three menus they're still not sure they're in the right place. They type something into the native search bar and get documentation articles back instead of a direct link to the screen they need. This isn't an accident — large HR vendors have every incentive to build deep, comprehensive software, and almost no incentive to rebuild navigation from scratch for the 5% of users who are truly lost. The people who complain are individual contributors and small HR teams; they don't have procurement power, and their complaints get routed to 'training and onboarding' instead of product.

The specific failure the complaints describe isn't that content doesn't exist — it's that users can't find it through the system's own structure. 'It is sometimes hard to find the link you are looking for' and 'figuring out the location of different features is tricky because there's so much to go through' are navigation problems, not content problems. Native search in these products returns knowledge base articles, not direct links to screens or fields. There's no 'take me there' button.

This is a business and not a feature because the underlying HR software won't fix it — rebuilding navigation is architecturally expensive and politically risky inside a large vendor. The need recurs every time a new hire joins HR, every time the vendor updates its menu structure (which happens), and every time an employee tries to self-serve a task they do twice a year. HR admins spend real time fielding 'where do I find X' questions that should have been answered by the system itself. That's a quantifiable cost in support tickets and Slack messages.

What to build

Build a browser extension that overlays a universal search bar on ADP Workforce Now and ADP TotalSource, indexes every reachable screen and field by task-oriented labels, and navigates the user directly to the correct screen when they search a plain-language query like 'change my bank account' or 'run a termination report'.

Where to start

Start with ADP Workforce Now specifically, targeting companies that run HR with a team of one to three people, where the admin is fielding constant 'where do I find X' questions from employees — that pain is acute, measurable, and the admin has enough autonomy to expense a $30/month tool without a procurement process.

The hard part

ADP can break the extension at any time by changing its DOM structure or URL routing, so you need a lightweight re-indexing mechanism that doesn't require a full rebuild every product update — getting that to run reliably without manual maintenance is the core technical risk.

How it makes money

Per-seat subscription charged to the HR team (not per employee), roughly $25–$40/month per HR admin seat, with a free trial that requires no IT involvement to install.