As an HR solution, BambooHR is built to be more than just a set of tools you use to ensure your payroll and recruiting processes are fine-tuned and streamlined. With it, small and medium businesses can cultivate better company culture, manage compensation, and find and hire the best talent. In this article, we’ll go into the best and worst of everything BambooHR has to offer.
Compare BambooHR to The Best Recruiting Software
Now, BambooHR, though useful and built with a robust set of employee management tools, didn’t make it onto our top list. As you probably already know, there are quite a few recruiting software solutions out there—some more feature-rich than others. In BambooHR’s case, after hours of research, there were simply other tools whose features we liked a bit better.
That’s not to say BambooHR isn’t worth considering as an option for you. To find out which recruiting software made it on our list, see all of our top picks here.
BambooHR: The Good and The Bad
The Good
Mobile hiring app: Not all employee management solutions offer a mobile app feature, but BambooHR does. With it, you can access your calendar, track employee progress, approve time-off requests, and have access to the employee directory. It offers both an employee and manager app so that everyone can communicate and have access to crucial information from anywhere.
Performance management tools: BambooHR enables you to plan employee assessments all year long with its review cycle questionnaires. You can run 30, 60, or 90-day check-ins. Any scheduled assessments can always be skipped or rescheduled according to your priorities.
Offboarding features: BambooHR doesn’t only come with onboarding features. Its offboarding tools ensure you tick every box when an employee leaves your company. Employees can volunteer feedback, and you ensure the offboarding process stays compliant with a predetermined checklist that BambooHR can automate.
Robust ATS: BambooHR is pretty multifaceted and also comes with a robust applicant tracking system. Its ATS lets you create a collaborative hiring process with custom permissions. Its automated alert feature keeps you on schedule as far as the hiring process goes and keeps candidates in the loop throughout the process. Once you find the right new hire, BambooHR lets you use its offer letter templates with auto-fill features to send via email, and new candidates can easily sign and accept everything digitally right through the ATS.
Data and analytics: An all-in-one tool like BambooHR wouldn’t be complete without a data and analytics feature. You can generate instant detailed reports on everything from workforce planning to approval tracking or PTO usage—saving you hours of generating reports in the process. Having detailed reports lets you make better, more informed business decisions.
Customizable permissions: If you’re working with an HR team, chances are that not all of them should have access to every single piece of information in your company, especially when it comes to sensitive or confidential information. BambooHR makes it easy to dole out permissions to stakeholders when necessary for both collaborative and information-sensitive processes.
Time-off management: You’re bound to deal with a lot more of this as your team grows. BambooHR’s intuitive employee vacation tracking system notifies managers once employees submit a PTO request online. From there, it’s easy to check for scheduling conflicts and approve or deny the request on your end. BambooHR automatically takes note of and revises PTO balances as changes are made.
Time and attendance tracking: Time and attendance tracking can be yet another time-sucking task that, when automated, will you a lot of time. BambooHR helps you more accurately track employee hours. Employees are also able to edit their hours and log hours spent on projects.
eSignature capabilities: Gone are the days when you have to chase an employee down to make sure they’ve signed all their paperwork or have endless back-and-forth email chains. BambooHR makes sure you can send paperwork to employees to sign online, making forms easier to store as you ditch all the printing. Save time and trees!
Centralized employee database: BambooHR eases the process of tracking all your employee records—including the sensitive stuff. Its centralized database lets you track both basic information and more granular data in one place so you can ditch the disconnected files and spreadsheets.
Employee self-service tools: BambooHR’s employee self-service tools save your HR team time by ensuring your employees have online access to things like pay stubs, tax forms, and the ability to update their personal information. They no longer have to stop by the HR office or ask for permission to look at their benefits plan—it can all be easily accessed through the self-service portal. They can also use the self-service portal to submit time-off requests or view an employee directory.
Avoid payroll mistakes: Anything that has to do with HR, payroll, or applicant tracking is prone to double-entry and other manual entry issues. BambooHR’s centralized dashboard eliminates that issue and ensures all your data is kept organized, accessible, and error-free.
Automates the tax filing process: Filing federal, state, and local taxes can be overwhelming if you’re trying to take care of everything manually. BambooHR automates the tax filing process for you for more accuracy and fewer tax penalties come tax time.
The Bad
Difficulty sending emails: If you’re trying to send emails through BambooHR or work with an integration, it isn’t as easy and intuitive as other tools. This is especially true when mass emails to more than one recipient.
Not contractor-friendly: While other employee management solutions have tools for dealing with and paying contractors, BambooHR doesn’t come with tools that ease the process of working with temporary employees. If you have a lot of contract or freelance workers, this will be a considerable drawback.
Doesn’t support multi-department roles: Sometimes, you need to give permissions and access to employees that fulfill more than one role in different departments. BambooHR doesn’t seem to come with a comprehensive solution for this.
Not a global employee management tool: While BambooHR works great with companies that manage employees throughout the US, it isn’t built to cover global employee management needs, making it a less viable option for remote or distributed global teams.
BambooHR Pricing and Options
Unlike other recruiting software, BambooHR does not publicly list its pricing plans. To learn more about what it costs to get access to any of its product offerings, you’ll have to get in contact with its sales team to snag a price quote.
They offer two main packages–Essentials and Advantage, where Advantage comes with more hiring and support features, advanced reporting, tailored workflows, customizable access levels, and more. Users can also purchase add-ons for additional payroll, time tracking, and performance management features.
As noted, there are no prices listed on the website. BambooHR designs packages to fit your needs—meaning it personalizes its plans for each company. Depending on the cost, this could work to your advantage as you’ll get access to all the tools you need and none of the ones you don’t. To get a price quote, you can submit a form here.
BambooHR People and Data Analytics
BambooHR has different product offerings, each with its own suite of tools designed to automate and ease employee management. Employee records, workflows, and approvals, reporting and analytics, as well as a useful mobile app are all BambooHR features that come together to ensure you’re managing your employees responsibly and accurately.
BambooHR doesn’t cut corners when it comes to managing both basic and sensitive employee data with its data and analytics capabilities. You can kiss disconnected paperwork and half-filled spreadsheets goodbye.
As for reporting and analytics, BambooHR offers many different types of reports, from hiring planning, PTO usage, employee turnover, EEO reports, and more. With the Advantage package, users can create custom reports and templates for even more detailed analysis.
BambooHR’s reports are easy to read and organize, so anyone can review them and get valuable data for informed decision-making.
BambooHR Hiring
BambooHR’s hiring tools are pretty multifaceted. Its applicant tracking system is built to keep everyone in the loop and made for internal collaboration, ensuring that you’re always making the best hiring decisions collectively.
BambooHR also centralizes the employee tracking and hiring system, so you have access to data along every step of the pipeline in one place. As a hiring tool, the ability to connect and streamline your applicant tracking and hiring that BambooHR can absolutely help you save time through an otherwise costly and time-consuming process.
BambooHR Onboarding
When you’re onboarding, you’re inevitably dealing with IT checklists, compliance, and paperwork. All of this and more gets taken care of by BambooHR in a way where you simply have to set up the repeatable processes to use them with each new hire.
The onboarding experience is different for teams across industries. But BambooHR is flexible enough to customize checklists, permissions, and processes to the needs of your business. It also offers welcome templates you can customize for different job types or departments that ultimately help save you the administrative load that onboarding can be. Anything that can save you time wins points in our book.
BambooHR Compensation
This BambooHR review wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t talk about one of BambooHR’s main product offerings. The time tracking, PTO, and payroll tools come together to create its compensation branch of product offerings that help you automate the process of paying your employees accurately and on time.
Everything from billable vs. non-billable hours, employee attendance, and time management for specifically assigned projects can not only be tracked but approved with one click. You no longer have to spend hours sending a ton of emails or tracking down employee time cards.
BambooHR does a stellar job of streamlining and automating the process of keeping track of how productive your employees are and how much it costs your business. But all in all, BambooHR’s compensation product offering alone wouldn’t be enough to entice us to buy.
When you need to connect and centralize additional needs like culture management and onboarding tools, the deal starts to get sweeter as a package option. However, as we mentioned earlier, BambooHR doesn’t have pricing tiers, so you can probably negotiate specific tools you want access to for a cost-effective plan that increases its buy-in value.
BambooHR Culture Management
Culture management is a big tie-in for BambooHR that really brings all its tools together. Instead of only offering you an interconnected network of tools that do the job but are pretty technical, BambooHR has culture-building tools to help you gather, process, and assess feedback for more immediate course correction.
Its performance management tools help you create and deploy employee reviews as often as four times during the year. Not only that, but it also enables you to make the most out of the offboarding process by ensuring employees are heard with candid feedback through an online process.
Beyond that, it helps you avoid biased, one-sided assessments by allowing both managers and employees to conduct evaluations on how they think they’re performing. If you struggle with or don’t have tools for managing your company culture, features like these can help your culture-building efforts.
How BambooHR Ranks
BambooHR is a solid recruiting tool for small to medium-sized teams keen on creating and maintaining company culture. As far as its recruiting tools go, they are enough to get the job done most of the time. However, if you’re looking for a more robust or full-service recruiting solution with additional tools and integration options, you might want to look at other options. For more, be sure to check out our list of top picks.
Here’s a quick list of the best recruiting software picks that made it on our roster:
- Zoho Recruit – Best software for recruiters
- JazzHR – Best for syncing recruiting with your software
- Workable – Best recruiting software for occasional hiring
- Freshteam – Best for most
- Ascendify – Best recruiting software for enterprises
- Recruiterflow – Best for staffing and recruitment agencies
- Recooty – Best applicant tracking system (ATS)
Summary
BambooHR’s motto is “software with heart,” and that’s true as far as how its tools are built and its focus on maintaining and creating a great company culture through feedback and performance assessments. When you truly look at BambooHR and everything it offers, it’s an excellent tool for managing multiple pieces of your company puzzle in a centralized location. There’s a lot of value in keeping all your employee management solutions under one ecosystem, which is how BambooHR is built—and it’s why we recommend it. Try BambooHR out here.
