BambooHR’s core features include an employee database, time-off management, automated approval workflows, an applicant tracking system and more.
Employee Data Management
BambooHR securely stores all employee data in one place. Plus, HR staff members don’t have to enter data more than once because the central database communicates with all other parts of the system, including third-party integrations. BambooHR also enables employee self-service, so there’s no need to reach out to someone in HR to enter or make changes to an employee’s data.
In the testing environment, we found it very easy to add an employee and update their information. When an employee or their manager makes a change to an employee’s profile, the administrator receives an email notification. When entering BambooHR through that notification, it displays what was changed, and you simply approve, deny or add a comment.
Benefits Tracking
BambooHR includes benefits tracking but offers benefits administration as an add-on.
Benefits tracking comes standard with BambooHR, so you can create, manage and assign employees to your benefits groups and packages, including Affordable Care Act (ACA) reporting, for your entire organization.
We tried this out ourselves, and the process was pretty straightforward. You create a new plan under the Benefits settings by giving it a name, assigning start and end dates and choosing a rate.
From there, you select coverage options, for example, employee and/or employee and children and define eligibility criteria. BambooHR will then automatically follow those criteria rules.
Then, you have to enter your payroll deduction rules as well as the monthly premiums that employees and the company pay.
Finally, you assign employees to the plan, set the effective date and select each employee’s chosen coverage type.
Benefits tracking is a suitable option for very small businesses that have basic benefits. However, this option involves a lot of manual entry, as it doesn’t enable employee self-enrollment. Plus, you may also have to manually calculate premium deductions from employee paychecks.
To save yourself the trouble, you might instead want to check out BambooHR’s benefits administration add-on.
Time-off Management
Employees can make a PTO request from their desktop or mobile device, and their manager gets notified automatically via email, the app and in their BambooHR inbox. BambooHR automatically calculates the number of vacation or sick time hours an employee has based on your company’s time-off policy. In fact, you can create multiple PTO policies for specific teams, departments or locations.
Upon receiving a PTO request, managers can view the schedule within BambooHR to check for time conflicts before approving or denying the request. Once a manager approves or denies, the employee receives a notification, and their time-off balance is updated.
On both the employee and manager side, and on a desktop as well as mobile device, it was easy for us to submit and respond to a time-off request. We especially thought it was helpful to see who else will be out at the same time. When we approved a time-off request from the admin side, we received an email and a push notification on mobile—from the employee perspective—that the request was approved.
Managers can view and act on time-off requests on a desktop or mobile device.
Approval Workflows
BambooHR enables automated workflows to expedite processes and help teams make decisions more quickly. The Essentials plan features built-in automated approval workflow templates for managing:
- Employee information
- Time-off requests
- Compensation changes
- An employee’s employment status
- An employee’s job information
- Promotions
- Asset requests
With the Advantage plan, you can create customized workflows. When building your own workflow sequence, you can add up to five steps and assign each one to a specific person in your organization. When it’s their turn to complete a task in the workflow, they’ll receive an email notification.
In the test environment, it was easy to find the “Approvals” section under “Settings.” It was simple to add certain roles to a workflow and add or remove fields from an approval request form.
BambooHR’s includes some built-in approval workflows.
Applicant Tracking System
BambooHR’s applicant tracking system (available in the Advantage plan) features three main tabs for job openings, candidates and candidate pools. BambooHR has a separate mobile app, BambooHR Hiring, for managing the candidate pipeline.
Creating a New Job in BambooHR
To create a new job, BambooHR takes you through an easy, three-step process. First, you enter job information. To save time, we recommend copying an existing job opening and making adjustments where needed rather than typing or copying it in manually.
You then adjust application details by selecting the information and documents you want applicants to submit. You can even select and customize questions for an application.
Finally, you select the job boards you want to push your post to. The options we saw included Indeed, Glassdoor and ZipRecruiter. Once you save your post, you can also post to LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter via a shareable link.
BambooHR takes you through a step-by-step process to create a job opening.
It’s worth noting that you cannot create a new job opening on BambooHR Hiring mobile app.
When applications start rolling in, you can view and annotate candidate profiles with notes and move a candidate along by changing their hiring status in their profile. You also can communicate with candidates at every step by email with the help of templates.
You can review candidates and view notes on a desktop or mobile device.
We also found it convenient that the system automatically adds the candidate as a new employee and archives the job opening when the candidate is marked as “Hired.”
Unfortunately, BambooHR currently doesn’t offer automatic candidate matching, and we couldn’t visualize where applicants stood at any given stage in the hiring process.
BambooHR provides a smooth transition from hiring to onboarding.
Candidate Database in BambooHR
Under job openings, the search capabilities were rather limited in both the browser version and mobile app, as we were able to apply filters to existing job openings by status only. However, we found a workaround in the browser interface by navigating to the candidate list where you get several more filtering options. Both job opening and candidate search capabilities are limited in the mobile app. The candidate pools section is only available in the browser version and enables you to add candidates who haven’t applied but who you think fit a particular job type at your company.
When testing BambooHR’s ATS, we found it easy to use overall. Though you have a lot of options, BambooHR leads you through the process, so you don’t get overwhelmed. The mobile app is a parsed-down version of the browser interface that’s perfect for quick status checks or changes as well as candidate rating and communication.
BambooHR’s candidate database search functions.
Onboarding and Offboarding
If you’re looking to follow best onboarding practices, you’re in luck with BambooHR. It’s ranked among our top onboarding software providers, particularly for its customizable preboarding and onboarding checklists. That way, new hires know what to expect on day one and have everything they need.
BambooHR facilitates easy onboarding, though it’s worth mentioning that onboarding features aren’t available on the mobile app. Once you mark a candidate as hired and add them as an employee, you’re directed to their profile to double-check and save their information in the database.
BambooHR allows you to customize new hire packets based on job type, department, locations and other factors. New hires can sign documents electronically before BambooHR securely stores them in one spot for easy access. Also, you can create internal task lists for teams or individuals to do before or after a new employee starts their job.
BambooHR enables customized onboarding checklists.
We tested the e-signature feature, in particular, on both the desktop and mobile devices, and it was somewhat difficult to use. Upon clicking the yellow arrow, it took us directly to the empty signature fields, but then kept taking us to the next field to fill in various information. The progress bar at the top did not change.
When it’s time to part ways with an employee, BambooHR ensures that the offboarding process is secure, compliant and thoughtful. The offboarding interface in your browser looks just like the one for onboarding. You can set up task lists to automate information security restrictions, delegate property collection tasks and ensure compliance. Offboarding is not available on BambooHR’s mobile app.
Employee Wellness
BambooHR helps you keep a finger on the pulse of employee sentiment towards their jobs and the company as a whole. It does this through a combination of Net Promoter Score surveys, pulse surveys and anonymous, open-ended feedback.
For the eNPS and open-ended feedback, you can determine keywords that BambooHR matches with employee feedback in order to detect recurring themes. After collecting feedback, BambooHR displays the most mentioned topics.
Additionally, on a more granular level, BambooHR’s Employee Wellbeing tool prompts each employee to answer preset questions by choosing from a six-point Likert scale and filling in an optional notes section. Questions can be sent automatically on a monthly, bimonthly or quarterly basis and cannot be customized.
Both employee satisfaction and well-being tools provide high-level insights to company leadership and HR who can then work together to identify initiatives that will help employees feel happier at work.
BambooHR’s Employee Wellbeing Analytics
With our trial account, we were only able to set up an Employee Satisfaction Introduction Email to distribute to employees. However, we had full access to the Employee Wellbeing feature.
Setting up an Employee Wellbeing survey involved setting a survey date, cadence and selecting four questions total. Each question targets four different dimensions of employee well-being: happiness, personal motivators, company motivators and relationships.
The employee satisfaction and well-being tools aren’t available on BambooHR’s mobile app.
Reporting and Analytics
Reporting tools are embedded into every part of the browser version of BambooHR, so you can run a report on basically any data it houses. BambooHR has dozens of standard reports available related to employee data, turnover, hiring, time off used and more.
BambooHR’s Employee Turnover Report
Under the Advantage plan, you can easily create your own report. We tried making our own “Turnover” report by navigating to the “Reports” tab, clicking the “New Report” button, giving it a title and selecting the relevant fields. Just hit “Save,” and it appears under “My Reports.”
BambooHR also displays visually appealing dashboards to notice patterns and get insights right away. Each user can customize their dashboard to their liking by arranging the widgets. We noticed that you cannot access reporting and analytics features through the mobile app.
