By Bill Mann | 11/20/2016 | Product Analysis

BambooHR Review – Quality HR Software for Small & Medium Businesses

BambooHR Review – Quality HR Software for Small & Medium Businesses

Is your small or medium-sized business in the market for a better way to track and manage Human Resources? If so, you should definitely consider BambooHR™, the #1 online HR solution for small and medium businesses. It serves as a flexible core for an efficient, modern HR system. It replaces old-fashioned spreadsheet-based approaches with something that is easy-to-use and cost-effective for companies like yours.

One huge advantage of BambooHR is its Software as a Service (SaaS) approach. As a SaaS solution, BambooHR offers real benefits over older spreadsheet-based HR solutions or totally manual systems. Because the software runs on BambooHR’s servers in your web browser instead of on desktops or servers in your offices, you don’t need to worry about building a data center and staffing it. BambooHR is responsible for deploying, maintaining, and upgrading the software on their end. All you and your staff need to do is log in.

The BambooHR HRIS (Human Resource Information System) HRMS (Human Resource Management System) is an easy-to-use, real-time system for access to all your HR information. Because BambooHR stores all your company’s HR information in one place, the system can track and manage everything. We’re talking about:

  • Personal data including contact info
  • PTO
  • Employee training records
  • Job responsibilities
  • Benefits
  • Hiring checklists
  • And more

To help you keep track of all your HR information, BambooHR includes document storage. Any document that is related to an employee can be stored and accessed through this system.

This system helps reduce your workload by giving employees self-service access to their information, as well as to published company information like employee handbooks. And to be sure that people only have access to the information that they should, the HRIS gives you simple access control options. You can create custom user groups that have different levels of access, then easily add staff to the groups that are appropriate for them.

Working with BambooHR is facilitated by their Dashboard. You can display company information here as well as customize the look and feel to match that of your company.

BambooHR Dashboard

BambooHR Reporting

Then of course there is reporting. A partial list of the reports BambooHR can automatically generate for you includes:

  • EEO-1
  • Turnover Rate
  • Salary History
  • Missing Data (Swiss Cheese)

Creating custom reports is almost as easy. Choose the fields you want to pull from, the data you want to filter and sort, and optionally how you want to group it all. Once generated, BambooHR can print or email the report, or generate a PDF, even an Excel Spreadsheet. The reports you create are automatically stored in the BambooHR report library so you can always find them when you need them.

BambooHR Reports

To ensure that important dates (everything from software license renewals to birthdays) do not get forgotten, the service provides automatic email alerts. Users can also set custom alerts for any dates that matter to them.

Is your business international? BambooHR still has you covered. Their user interface supports six languages, (English, Dutch, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish) and understands international currencies too.

Even though BambooHR is designed to be easy to use, they offer a complete set of training resources to make sure that things go smoothly. The training resources for this software include:

  • Videos
  • Webinars
  • Whitepapers
  • Custom training sessions

The BambooHR Applicant Tracking System Module

Filling open positions quickly and efficiently (with the right people) is vital to keeping your business running smoothly. Managing this process the old way, using spreadsheets and piles of paper doesn’t get the job done. That’s why BambooHR added an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) module to their service.

With the ATS module, you can quickly list openings on your company’s career page. But to find the best candidates, you’ll want to spread the word better than that. The module also lets you post your openings to social media accounts and free job boards such as Simple Hired and Indeed.

Once resumes arrive, the ATS module lets you view the applicants based on which position they applied for. From within that position listing, you can review resumes and contact candidates directly. If you want even more information on an applicant, you can click their name to view their profile, including their LinkedIn page. You have the option here to give each applicant a rating. Leave your comments about an applicant in their profile where anyone else on the hiring team will see them.

Finally, once you hire a candidate, changing their status to “hired” in the Applicant Tracking System causes all their information to flow into BambooHR, eliminating the need to reenter data.

Employee Onboarding

Onboarding new employees can be time-consuming and tedious both for HR and for the new employees as well. BambooHR is self-onboarding software. That is, it allows your new employees to enter their personal data and completed forms into your HRIS themselves.

An online and streamlined system makes onboarding a more pleasant and efficient process for new employees and saves HR vast amounts of time. The time savings of this approach free your HR staff to do more important things, such as getting to know the new employees and helping them understand their role in your company. The system can also send out an introductory email to the team for each new employee. This email will contain answers to custom questions and conversation starters to help everyone get to know each other.

Performance Management

According to BambooHR, “only 4% of employees feel that performance reviews are the best way to motivate and engage them.” To address this issue, the company has reinvented the performance experience.

Instead of high-stress, high-pressure annual performance reviews, the BambooHR Performance Management system automatically triggers frequent check-ins with employees. These check-ins ask employees to report how challenged and engaged they are feeling. The system encourages frequent recognition of good performance, as well as timely feedback and guidance. This ensures that employees stay motivated, and feedback is timely and feels relevant.

Pricing

BambooHR doesn’t offer set pricing tiers like many other products or year-long contracts. Instead, they have a flexible pricing scheme where you pay month-to-month. To find out how much it will cost to put BambooHR to work in your company, you submit a simple six-field form. Curious? Click here for pricing.

Mobile Apps

BambooHR offers mobile apps for iOS and Android devices. With these apps, employees can continue to interact with BambooHR from anywhere they have an Internet connection. The apps give everyone access to the company directory.

BambooHR Android App

Employees can also use the apps to submit leave requests, while managers can approve or deny those requests from the app as well. Any changes to HR data are automatically synced between the app and the main BambooHR database, so you always have the latest information.

Additional Resources

As we talked about earlier, BambooHR provides a collection of training and other resources that help you get the most out of their service. These resources include:

  • Webinars, both live scheduled ones and pre-recorded ones that you can view at your leisure
  • A small set of Whitepapers
  • Videos that highlight specific features, specific customers, or random fun stuff
  • Slides from their presentation at Elevate 2015

Another important resource is the BambooHR Blog. It contains hundreds of posts broken into more than two dozen categories. These range from items specifically about BambooHR, to general HR topics. The blog is also keyword searchable.

Partners and the BambooHR API

BambooHR does a great job on its own. At the same time, they have a large group of partners that they can connect to. This gives you the power to use BambooHR with your existing systems or connect additional best-in-class solutions. At the time of this review (early May, 2016) they had more than 20 technology partners in areas such as benefits management, payroll, productivity, and single sign-on. To see if BambooHR works with your current solutions, visit their Partners page.

One of these partnerships is with eSignatures. Thanks to this, you can get documents signed electronically using the eSignatures system, with a copy of the resulting signed document appearing in the employee’s Documents tab and another stored in eSignatures. Free yourself and your staff from the old, “Print, Sign, Scan” routine!

If you don’t see the integration you need, don’t worry. BambooHR provides a simple, well-documented API. Your developers can use this open API to build the interface you need.

Conclusion

BambooHR is a well-respected service that has been serving small and medium businesses since 2008. Thousands of companies use their service to track and manage their human resources. It also handles Applicant Tracking, Onboarding, and Performance Management.

BambooHR also gets a Very Good rating in user reviews here at DiscoverCloud. Reviewers particularly like the service’s ease of use and customer support. BambooHR is definitely worth investigating for any small or medium business looking to improve its HR system.

You have a few options for investigating further. First would be to check out the BambooHR Resources. The videos, webinars, and other information you find there will give you better insights into how the service can improve your company’s HR systems. Here’s a good starting point.

The final step in your investigations must be to actually see BambooHR in action. You have two options for that. One option is to schedule a demo. You will get a quick walkthrough of the service, followed by a question and answer session with product specialists from the company. To schedule a free demo, click here.

The other option is to sign up for a free 7-Day Trial. Once you put BambooHR to work with your people, in your actual work environment, you are unlikely to want to go back to your old way of doing things. Click the following link to sign up today for a 7-Day Free Trial.

By Bill Mann | 11/20/2016 | Product Analysis

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