BambooHR is designed to make the hiring process easier, from posting a job to onboarding new employees.
With the ability to easily share job posts to job boards and a centralized hub to keep your staff updated on the hiring process, this platform saves time while also helping to ensure that the process moves smoothly.
BambooHR also helps you present a professional onboarding process, making that essential positive first impression on new staff.
While it does lack some of the features that come standard with other recruiting platforms, it’s a solid option that will suit the needs of many larger businesses with active recruitment strategies.
BambooHR Pros and Cons
Pros
- Easily share job posts on job boards and social media
- Customizable onboarding tools
- Offer letter templates to save time
- Electronic signature capabilities
- Customizable with your branding colors and logo
- Add-ons help to keep plan base prices down
- iOS and Android app
Cons
- Pricing isn’t listed
- Maximum number of job posts aren’t identified
- Important features like time tracking are add-ons
- Phone support is only available with the Advantage plan
How BambooHR Compares to Top Recruiting Software
BambooHR can help to make your recruiting process more effective while also saving you time. Features like offer templates and a centralized applicant tracking system make BambooHR one of the top recruiting software options. While it did not make our top picks for recruiting software, users love its easy-to-use interface and how many features it offers.
If BambooHR isn’t the best fit for your needs, consider Breezy HR, which offers automated scheduling and candidate screening. Workable is also a top recruitment platform that pairs with more than 200 job boards. You can learn more about them and our other top options in our guide to the best recruiting software.
BambooHR Hiring Volume
BambooHR doesn’t advertise a hiring volume limit or capacity. Seeing as the platform is marketed toward larger businesses and enterprises, the hiring volume is probably significant, and BambooHR provides this information personally when you reach out for a customized price quote.
BambooHR Onboarding Tools
The BambooHR onboarding tools help save you time and lets your business put forth a professional first impression.
You can personalize the onboarding experience using New Hire Packet Templates. These templates let you customize the onboarding experience, ensuring it accommodates different departments, job types, and even locations. This personalized experience will be accurate for each employee you onboard, and you won’t have to worry about leaving out documents or including sections that don’t apply to them.
Customizable offer letters further save you time while allowing you to provide personalization to each new employee. These templates are valuable to any business hiring staff at volume. With the ability to customize essential fields and populate them with candidate information, you can reduce the chance of user error during data entry while increasing the document’s accuracy and saving staff time.
This platform also makes the onboarding experience streamlined and easy for your HR staff and new employees. You can automatically send onboarding tasks to your new staff, letting them complete the documents at their convenience. This can help keep your new hires engaged and make for an easier onboarding process. Built-in electronic signatures further speed the onboarding process along.
This software even helps new employees forge connections, a valuable aspect of helping them feel like they’re already a part of the team. A “Get to Know You” feature helps new hires discover common interests with your staff, creating inter-staff connections.
BambooHR Employer Branding
The ability to customize your HR platform is a significant benefit, and BambooHR gives some customization options with its Advantage plan. You can customize your account using your branding colors and your logo. This allows you to white-label the platform to employees as company-branded software.
BambooHR Support
BambooHR offers multiple support outlets. Its support library is full of articles, video tutorials, webinars, and blog posts that provide detailed information on the program’s nuances.
The customer support team is available by live chat from Mondays through Fridays, 6:00 am to 6:00 pm Mountain time. Support is also available via phone for Advantage plan subscribers. The fact that phone support isn’t available at the Essentials plan level is a downside, especially if you need an issue resolved ASAP.
BambooHR Essentials
BambooHR offers two plans, with the Essentials being the base plan. The Essentials plan effectively functions as an HR management platform. It lacks hiring and onboarding features, but it is ideal for a company looking to manage its HR responsibilities and existing employees better.
With the Essentials plan, you’ll enjoy many features to help you organize your HR department and workflows. All employee records are maintained in a central database, and benefits tracking simplifies and organizes the process of maintaining benefits for your entire business. You can also use the available standard email alerts to update announcements, time-off requests, and more. These standard alerts save you from writing individual emails for each occurrence and make it easier to keep all of your employees updated.
This plan also offers valuable time-saving capabilities. The standard workflows and approvals option helps you to organize and define the time-off approval request process, ensuring all staff understands their roles in the process, keeping it moving smoothly. The platform also empowers employees to access the information they’re seeking, like the company calendar, the employee directory, and the employee org chart. This can save your HR staff from having to field requests and manually search for the documents.
This information is also available on the BambooHR mobile app, which is available for iOS and Android.
While the Essentials plan lacks valuable hiring and onboarding tools, it can help maximize efficiency and better organize your HR department. This plan would be ideal for a business doing minimal hiring or for a company that already has efficient and organized hiring and onboarding processes in place.
The Essentials plan includes email support but lacks phone support. This can potentially delay the support response time and is an important consideration when choosing this plan.
BambooHR Advantage
The BambooHR Advantage plan offers all of the same capabilities as the Essentials plan, but it also has hiring and onboarding functionality. This is a much more comprehensive plan, and advanced components give you customization options to better tailor the platform to your specific needs.
With BambooHR, you can post jobs through the platform and share them with all essential job boards, like Glassdoor and Indeed. You can also easily share the job posts on social media, increasing your reach and helping to connect you with the right candidates.
The most significant value of this plan is in its hiring and onboarding capabilities. The process begins with the applicant tracking system, which helps to organize the hiring process. It’s also available on the BambooHR Hiring app, allowing you to stay on top of the process even when you’re on the go. Push notifications keep your entire HR team updated, and they allow multiple team members to seamlessly collaborate within the hiring process.
The onboarding and offboarding capabilities help organize employee transitions, ensuring that no essential documents are overlooked. BambooHR features offer letter templates that you can customize and auto-populate with candidate data, saving you time every step of the hiring process.
Electronic signature capabilities mean employees can complete their documents digitally as needed, particularly helpful for businesses with remote workforces. Those electronic signatures further save time in processing, scanning, and then storing hard copies of documents. This makes for greater efficiency and less likely to miss a necessary signature during the onboarding process.
The platform also offers training tracking to help monitor staff progress and completion of mandatory trainings. It’s helpful for large-scale businesses or for industries where staff need to frequently complete training.
This plan’s advanced components let you tailor its performance so it works better for your business. You can create customized reports and then use that information to assess your business’ performance and identify areas for improvement.
While the Essentials plan features standard workflows, the Advantage plan offers tailored workflows and approvals. With more control over the workflow customization, you can identify bottlenecks and then adjust workflows to avoid them. You can better design your approval process for consistent performance and streamlined operation, helping to keep your business progressing.
This plan offers widespread customization options, too. You can create custom tabs and fields for better organization and navigation throughout the platform. Custom email alerts update employees about upcoming or missed milestones, while custom access levels let you choose which employees can access which information and tools. This is highly valuable to businesses with larger HR departments where you need a tiered access option to ensure staff has access to only the information that their roles require.
This plan also features an audit trail to help you monitor changes made to the system. The audit trail tracks which employees make which changes, helping you to catch any mistakes early on in the process before they become widespread problems.
The Advanced plan includes both email and phone support. It’s much more comprehensive than the Essentials plan and is a better choice for larger businesses with bigger HR teams looking for advanced features. This plan’s hiring and onboarding features make it ideal for businesses that frequently hire or hire staff in large volumes.
BambooHR Add-Ons
While the Advantage plan is a well-rounded plan designed to meet most of your HR department’s needs, it doesn’t include everything. BambooHR offers payroll, time tracking, and performance management add-ons.
Available payroll add-ons include full-service tax filing, employee access to items like pay stubs and withholdings, and comprehensive payroll reporting to ensure you always have the details you need. Increased data security, including advanced data encryption and continuous monitoring, is also available.
Time tracking add-ons include daily time entries so you can track timecards right through BambooHR, as well as automatic overtime calculations and payroll reporting. You can review and process employee timesheets right through the platform, keeping your payroll processing centralized.
BambooHR also offers several performance management features as an add-on. In addition to peer reviews and self-assessments, you can add on employee and company performance reports. These reports can be valuable aids in assessing progress, identifying areas for improvement, and implementing effective solutions.
The availability of these add-ons means you can enhance and customize BambooHR to work just as you need it to. However, many of these add-ons, particularly the time tracking and payroll features, are somewhat standard features. It would be reasonable to expect that some or all of those features would be included in a comprehensive HR platform, especially when it focuses on recruiting and hiring.
At the same time, leaving those features as add-ons does help to keep the program’s cost down. If you want to use BambooHR strictly for recruitment, you can, and you won’t have to pay for its use as a payroll processor. Whether or not these add-ons are necessary will really depend on how you want to use the software. Choosing only the add-ons that add value to your business will help you get the most value out of BambooHR.
BambooHR is designed to support your HR department from the time you post a job to the time you onboard new employees and more. Its centralized design allows your team to collaborate on the hiring process, ensuring that everyone is always up-to-date on the latest progress. Valuable onboarding tools like customizable offer templates and documents with e-signature capabilities also mean you can present an efficient and professional onboarding experience to new employees.
While BambooHR lacks a bit in its time tracking and payroll functionalities, it functions well as a recruiting platform. It’s an ideal choice for smaller and medium-sized businesses, and adding on additional features makes it a well-rounded HR platform.