BambooHR Reviews

The look an feel of BambooHR (BHR) is amazing! Its almost like Facebook for recruiting. It is very intuitive for what it does and offers to the administrator and end user. The applicant tracking system is very easy to use and goes the extra mile with automation and thoughtfulness concerning on-boarding and then " flowing" into the core HRIS. The BHR system was chosen by a previous HR professional that clearly had a recruiting bias. Although important, more vetting should have been done to make a sound choice for long term success regarding the needs of a small to mid-size business.

Beyond what I described above there is limited functionality without also purchasing and integrating other systems through a "bolt-on" approach. By "Bolt-on" I mean that BHR will not automate between the core HR system of BHR and a timekeeping system, a payroll system, benefits administration system, leave administration system. The ability to have a robust system is possible but is not practical or cost effective with BambooHR. In order to get a full platform, covering the full life cycle of and employee, through BHR, a business would have to pay upwards of 30-40 dollars per employee per month. Simply put other options are available and far more robust with better long term results for less money- See my review of APS Payroll for an example.

Love the simplicity of the HRIS system to allow for tracking personnel

The payroll system and time management are not as robust as it needs to be. Unlike optional features such as performance or applicant tracking that are not critical to risk management, the payroll and time management must be up to par to ensure customers are compliant with state regulations, able to identify and correct discrepancies quickly, and able to customize reporting to identify labor cost trends. Unfortunately, the payroll and time tracking doesn't relate.1 Example: We cannot track if meals are being taken or the system does not alert us when someone does not take their required lunch breaks. Depending on state, there are penalties associated with this2 Example: If an employee is scheduled to be terminated on a specific day, they are automatically taken out of the system before ensuring they were paid their last check. States have many different regulations around when a former employee must be paid their final check. We would have to alter the person's last day and final pay date in order to process their last check, which can cause incorrect records if we forget to switch the dates back to correct separation date. If we schedule termination ahead of time, we have no way of tracking who is up for termination soon or no notice that the person was removed from payroll ensuring timely payment. 3 Example: Timetracking is more than just about having the ability to clock in and out with approval. There is very limited reporting that can be pulled to track labor cost

It is wonderful for company announcements, payroll, reporting, employee management, and onboarding. It make life much easier in many ways and gives us a more professional approach and look to the team.

Employee coaching and project tasking are not great. It really is not good at either of these. Too hard to track, follow, and update. For hiring and onboarding it doesn't sync well with Indeed and we always have issues. Like when rejecting a candidate, we have to manually send an email to every candidate that applies. Time tracking needs some minor tweaking. It would be great if it would auto notify of odd punches and help control OT better. The eNPS program is dumb and not realistic. We changed the questions to the Gallup 13 instead.

The API to google calendar and the user friendly interface

I'd really enhance the process to see review people time logging. It is hard to track on an overall basis who is missing, who has reported 'x' or 'y' hours so I can quickly check if that's is ok, etc.

I'm constantly listening to what my customers want and need and I love how it always scales to amazing features. The software can find help documents for almost everything you want to know. Electronic signatures that can be set up in HR documents are very convenient. The recruitment module is very good, and the onboard is much smoother without having to print and handwrite each form.

There was a limit to integrating custom fields and tables into on-board filters such as on-board, training, presentations, and benefits. This software seems to need to be integrated with other accounting services.

I have gone through implementation of payroll services with four different providers over the years and BambooHR was by far the easiest process with the fewest issues. While there was work involved, their expectations were very clear and they worked with us to determine the best way to manage unique situations specific to our company. The system is very intuitive and easy to use.

There are some small things here and there that we have encountered and have to work around, but customer services is always very responsive and help us find a solution. We have made suggestions to BambooHR's feedback team and they have already implemented some changes to help with some of these issues. They are always making improvements and additions to their products.

Our business truly benefits from being able to track due dates for trainings and documents. Because we are education, there are a ton of clearances, health forms, and professional development that must be completed. Keeping this all up to date has been done in the past on spreadsheets and not available to everyone to see. Now we can access this as admins and be able to verify things are being done when they are needed.

We have also really enjoyed the integration of time tracking, to timesheets, to payroll. It has made our managers lives easier and saved a ton of time for them. it has also made everything seemless for me to run payroll and process benefits without thinking about it too much or taking multiple days to get it done.

I feel like we would really benefit from a follow up training or someone to talk to. Kind of like implementation where someone would just check in to see if you could be using things better or differently to be more effective. We do reach out to support a ton and they are great!!

We love the customer service Bamboo provides. 90% of the time I have someone helping me within 2 minutes. And they always know the answer. If what I am wanting to do is not an option, they push it up the line and a group reviews these requests constantly. Bamboo is always looking to improve their product, which I appreciate and I want to be a part of a company that is always looking forward to the future's possibilities.

Our main issue is with payroll. We would love to utilize it, but you can only have one tax ID. We have multiple tax IDs for multiple locations and employees cross over between them constantly. The work around was for us to have multiple Bamboo accounts to accommodate for the multiple tax IDs. But this is not cost efficient for us.

Being able to bring so many various aspects of my job together in one platform has made me much more efficient in areas such as applicant tracking, time tracking, and payroll processing!

One of my Bamboo HR wish list items is a scheduling feature! I would like to see this feature combined with the time clock function to help us enforce policies about clocking in early, as well as sending a reminder to clock in or out for scheduled shifts. I would also like to see improved calendar functionality. Currently, the only way to add items to the calendar are through the time off policies. I would like to be able to manually add events and other items to the calendar.

BambooHR is an easy to use and very comprehensive HR software that offers a lot of valuable and high-use out-of-box features. Our initial primary uses of the software were aggregation and consolidation of personnel information, PTO tracking, and general communication of company announcements to the team. As we got further into the product offerings, we also began to heavily utilize the onboarding, offboarding, and recruiting features, all of which were previously done using very manual processes. BambooHR allowed us to discontinue using spreadsheets and other manual forms for very common and basic HR functions, while housing them under one roof. It also provided our employees with a easier way to contribute to their own personnel profiles, and while as request and track PTO.

To properly utilize BambooHR according to your companies specific HR processes, there is a lot of individual and time-intensive setup involved. The platform is fairly customizable, but only if you are willing to invest significant time into configuring the features. While we expected a significant time investment into setting up the application, we were disappointed to learn that we would not have a dedicated account manager to help us with the setup process. We had to learn everything about the platform on our own through the BambooHR help portal, or by calling the customer service number and waiting for a representative to be available. We also experience a price increase only a few month after signing up for the service. We were also disappointed to learn that the integrations with Google and Slack are very limited, and while some information can be passed between the systems, we needed to customize some of the API calls in order to share more useful information with the team. There are definitely some limitations to their integrations.

I really enjoy many aspects of BambooHR. It is a cost effective solution for small to medium businesses. Great with onboarding/hiring, employee documentation & profiles, UI and navigation, etc. Also, the payroll part of the system has come a long way and is now a well designed feature that is easy to use.

Their customer support team, when you can get ahold of them, is fantastic. One of the best things about BambooHR.

It lacks either features entirely, or lacks complexity of competitors. The ATS and Performance parts are extremely lacking with limited options to customize or enhance. Missing many common features that other platforms have had for many years now.

A general theme with BambooHR is that you can only go so deep when it comes to how you can customize things. The two built in surveys they offer, for example, have no option to customize, nor can you run custom surveys at all, which is a shame.

Additionally, BambooHR recently decided to completely redo their package and pricing structure and it is not a good change. We are on a grandfathered package that they are going to be dropping support for in some cases. There is no incentive to switch to one of the other packages because one offers less at almost the same cost, and the other adds on 3 features that are either redundant, not really a full feature, or that we already have. Performance was an add-on and is now included with the Pro package, which is way more costly.

Customer support team, as mentioned in Pros, is great, but the chat feature is never available anymore and sometimes it feels like they have so many inquiries that they would rather point the finger at other things versus solving problems and working with customers.

If you are an international company, BambooHR is extremely lacking in support there. You can tell that BambooHR was built with US employees in mind first and many things just don't work in other countries, or you have to find workarounds.

In my opinion, BambooHR has become what I think they have tried to not be, which is a corporate entity selling a product versus selling a mission/vision of setting people free to do great work. They claim to listen to their customer base, but it is clear when talking to other customers that they don't.

Very structured and helpful implementation, and very responsive support.
Love the ability to request custom fields to be created, including calculations.
Great standard, out-of-the-box reports, like Additions & terminations over a period of time, Headcount as of a certain date, Employee Turnover (that one was a lifesaver when it was realeased, much better than what we were doing internally so far!), Change History over a period of time for job-related changes.
I also love the fact that they are intentional in their product development: even though they request and collect product feedback, they want their product to remain coherent, i.e. they know what makes sense for them to propose as features vs. not (and recommend one of their specialized integrated partners if not), so that their tool always remains simple, legible, etc.
And I like their Panda mascot and in-navigation messages, down to humanizing error messages.

It will be pretty minor details, part of which will simply have to do with their client size positioning. As we were growing, I encountered director-level newcomers in our HR department who were used to the more prominent HRIS players, and to the ability to set up more complex workflows than BambooHR allows (example: self-service on employment letters, sending change notifications to other people than change approvers, allowing back-up assignees for tasks, etc).

One feature that I feel might need adjusting (but again, that's detail) is their "Who's Out" calendar, which is synced with their time-off feature: regardless of whether the person has booked 1 hour off or the full day off, it will look like the person is away for the whole day, which looks confusing.
Then two things come to mind on the analytics side, but again, they are minor and for more advanced users: I would love the ability to report on changes for personal details (beyond the audit trail report) and on custom fields. Then, custom calculation fields (which are already a great thing to have!!) are limited to the employment profile itself, i.e. you cannot return data fields from other employees' profiles, for example, who the manager of their manager is, etc.

The product is easy to implement , out of the box. The product is best for small to mid size companies, but especially if you have minimal processes to manage. The add on features of Performance and eNPS are simple to use and very effective. You can find workarounds for unique processes.

As a company continues to scale and grow, the incremental processes added become more difficult to manage with the system. A simple example is onboarding. Onboarding is only geared to true new hires. If you have an employee who is transferred to a new division within the organization and needs to be assigned new tasks that are well documented, the software does not have the ability to manage transfers.

The ability to format a document for e-signature would be incredibly helpful.

A little more flexibility in problem solving rather than simply suggesting to put suggestions on a future product launch list.

BambooHR is very user-friendly. It has a clean layout and can be customized based on the needs of the organization. The overall site is easy to navigate and has the tabs that I need to manage employee data. I like that the HRIS acts as an internal intranet site for employees.

Training tab - employees are not able to upload their own certificates. For example, if there are 6 mandatory training modules and I have 6 new hires, I would need to upload 36 files into their training tab. It's tedious and time consuming for the admin.Templates - while this is a smart feature, I think it should be broken down into two. One is for an actual template that applies to all staff (primarily forms). For contracts that require signature, it is not necessary to upload the contract as a template (since it's only used once) and request for the signature. With this, we usually use an external party to get the signatures from both parties and upload it into documents. It would be nice if this can be integrated in BambooHR so everything is in one place. Also, if the "contract" specified to an individual becomes a template, there is a risk of uploading/ sharing it by error to another employee.Cost - I wish there was an option for non-profit to save money on the software especially we're a smaller company. The cost increased a lot from July and it is also in USD which impacts the overall fee since we're a Canadian organization.

It's completely utilitarian, you'll clock in and out (and it's geotagged, so no cheating), you'll be able request days off, see pay stubs, etc. BambooHR has made one of the leading HR stages on the advertise. Favorite highlights incorporate the capacity to onboard or unlink representatives utilizing numerous distinctive workflows and choices, we too cherish the capacity to keep track of representative data, counting reports that require marks. BambooHR permits you to turn any archive into a signature layout with custom areas, signature order, and other alternatives. BambooHR Finance offers a simple way to oversee finance and match up it with data put away within the entry, there are numerous more highlights we utilize counting execution administration, time following, candidate following, etc., our group adores you. adore it since they can log in and see their pay stubs and other pertinent data.

The speed of the execution caused us to miss a few points of interest that we had to burrow up afterward, but the bolster group was exceptionally supportive and a few of the extra information areas we needed were not a issue at all to execute. So distant, the as it were drawback I've seen when exchanging to BambooHR is that our pay stubs aren't accessible until payday. The execution module can be progressed by pleasing non-calendar year survey cycles, they did post advertisement hoc surveys a whereas back, but it would be accommodating to be able to set our plan based on the commemoration of the contract date.

The idea of on-boarding a new employee electronically is a huge plus. It engages employees before they start and makes it so that they come in with paperwork already filled out and spend their first day doing more than just paperwork.
Most of the framework is in place, but EACH area needs improvement, both in the functionality for administration and the ease of use for employees. The sections offered are vital, but aren't complete.

The benefits area is lacking a lot of common sense tools - like the ability to attach plan documents to an insurance plan (only a link can be used), display plan cost information to an employee BEFORE they sign up (the pricing is only available AFTER they sign up and become eligible). Many things like this create double the amount of work for the administrator.
The actual on-boarding process was a struggle because even though the forms were done properly by the employees (I sat with a few and watched them), it didn't save all information in completed fields. Employees were frustrated when they had to fill out forms multiple times because you cannot edit once saved.
I love that employees can e-sign documents, but preparing the forms is cumbersome and they can't be customized easily. For instance, if you need to update a form because something has changed or didn't save properly, you have to delete the task and resend to any employees who need an updated form.
When I discussed a few very basic items with support, they just offered a work around that many clients use. These are obvious flaws in the system that need to be addressed, but aren't necessarily a priority. Bamboo HR seems to focus more on flashy design than actual content. It makes them seem like a leader in the industry, but as soon as you dig in, the flaws are obvious.
For the price, there needs to be more development in the software.