Face recognition has become a key technology in improving the efficiency and security of modern employee attendance systems. This study compares the performance of three pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models - VGG16, ResNet50, and InceptionV3 - in the context of face recognition for employee attendance systems. The study evaluated the accuracy, consistency, and generalization of the models on a dataset of employee faces, using prediction accuracy, confusion matrix, and classification report measurement methods. Results showed InceptionV3 performed best overall, with high consistency and confidence, achieving up to 99% accuracy on the test data. ResNet50 showed consistent performance in some cases but required further fine-tuning, while VGG16 showed the worst performance. These findings have significant practical implications for the industry, recommending the use of InceptionV3 for the implementation of reliable face recognition-based attendance systems, with consideration of the use of confidence thresholds to optimize accuracy. This research also highlights the importance of further optimization, including hyperparameter fine-tuning and more sophisticated data augmentation strategies, to improve system performance under various work environment conditions.