BambooHR is an on-line human resources solution that provides onboarding, payroll, and benefits management. It also offers automated time-off management and employee self-service.
$250
per month
Brassring
Score 6.9 out of 10
N/A
Brassring, formerly from IBM and part of the Kenexa Talent Acquisition Suite, and now sold by Infinite Computer Solutions, is an enterprise grade ATS and onboarding solution. It allows companies to find the right talent, track and manage candidates, and use candidate data to spot trends within the applicant pool.
N/A
Pricing
BambooHR
Brassring
Editions & Modules
Core
$250
per month
Pro
$250
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BambooHR
Brassring
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
No matter what HR looks like at your company, we have the perfect plan for you!
For small business, like myself, BambooHR is enough. When working for more giant corporations, Workday was amazing. However, I cannot compare their customer service. In terms of user experience, BambooHR is definitely better than the others listed.
I think BambooHR is meant for companies that have more than 200 employees, because it is not cheap, but for what they are offering, it is a nice software with some easy UI to understand for everyone at a company. I think for a small company, it is way too big of a software and it is not that worth the price.
Kenexa is is well suited for any organization that has more than 3000 employees globally. I would not recommend this to startups or a growing organization with less than 3000 employees. But once you cross this number, Kenexa becomes useful and is a brilliant tool for global operations - recruiting. I would recommend this tool to any organization that has offices in many countries/geographies as well.
Customer Service - The customer service is consistent and the team is always eager to help. They are polite, patient, and there are never terrible interactions.
Communication - BambooHR communication channels are simple. There are many different ways to communicate with the team. I prefer e-mail because it helps me keep track of the conversations and they respond within the appropriate time. Also, the e-mail reminders or notifications help tremendously and it's not overbearing.
Kenexa allows Boolean key word search within a particular requisition so it makes sifting through a high number of applicants manageable and effective
Kenexa can be tailored to meet individual business needs. During the time we’ve had Kenexa here I’ve used it in support of a few different business segments and for each the way the system was used to “position” candidate statuses have varied based on the individual need of the business. One example is when interviewing a high volume of applicants internationally, we were able to send qualified applicants through to the “event manager” and it would enable the candidate to select his/her interview date/time based on previously submitted options inputted by our Kenexa users.
Kenexa allows one to customize and score questions for each open requisition that applicants complete as they apply. The system then sorts applicants according to the score of candidate answers allowing for easy sorting of top qualified candidates.
Reporting - I wish that you could choose a timeframe for all reports. There are times when I need to run a report for information at a point in time, but there is no functionality to complete this (maybe this is an add-on, but seems like it should be a basic function.)
ATS - Customizable notifications and making it easier to figure out how to change notification/email settings. I figured it out, but it was difficult to find. I wish you could choose to notify managers of candidates 1/week instead of every time someone applies.
Custom Holidays - being able to set up 2 different Holiday policies for different working groups. Some of our team gets a floating holiday, but we can't set that up without doing it for the entire company.
Being able to intercept a form that was signed by an employee but not the 2nd signer. We can't access onboarding forms that new hires signed after the 2nd signer left the company. Now we have to have our team resign all their onboarding forms because we cannot access the one with their signature.
Delegation for approvals - being able to delegate this when someone is on leave or time away so that Admins don't have to manage.
BrassRing's application system for candidates is prone to freezing and crashing in the middle of the application causing potential candidates to lose all progress. I filled out the application myself and witnessed these issues first hand, on top of several complaints I received via phone and email from candidates attempting to apply via the BrassRing service. Also, the Parsing system within the application is not capable of pulling any meaningful information out of text documents.
Each user must be added to each job in order for that job, and the candidates in it, to show up in relevant searches. This becomes a problem when a new team member joins the account and needs access to all of the previous openings just so that they can find candidates already in the system. The account I was working on involved literally hundreds of new openings a month, meaning that any movement of personnel on or off the account would mean having to update potentially thousands of old positions just to allow them to be able to mine the ATS for candidates. I don't see any particular reason why someone with access to the system should have to be given access to each individual job. If a particular position needs to be kept confidential for whatever reason then that individual position should be able to be set to only show to authorized recruiters. The rest of the positions should automatically be searchable by anyone with appropriate access to the ATS to allow for basic level candidate mining and movement.
Overall we have not had any reason to discontinue our use of BambooHR. We have not found a better solution, and there is no pressing reason that we would want to move away from the product. If they should fail to continue to improve their features over time, I could see this changing down the road, but for now I would say we are very satisfied with them. We would definitely like to see continued growth of their product however.
I am confident that the Kenexa product will continue to evolve to meet the needs of our business in an ever changing work environment. The affiliation with IBM also plays a factor as we have a long standing successful relationship with IBM products. We will be looking to integrate other Kenexa products in the near future to streamline our HR processes.
Is very easy to navigate. All processes once explained, you can actually create an implement process associated to your HR goals. It is like a digital file of your employees, with functionalities that let you be on track on onboarding, performance, information, among others process. Time off approvals are easy to navigate.
I feel like I am pretty decent with computers and systems. It was fairly easy to use it after about a week or two . But I have seen people struggle with it as well as some people not use it at all. It can be slow at times and not work at times. But Its a fine system.
Yes, there is a huge team in the back of the online platform or it looks like it because I have never been left without an answer when I have a question or waiting from a response on my chat .... There must be a huge team, this is so great and I always seem to have someone that is very knowledgeable too. So many times in the past I had to leave with customer service that would connect you with someone else because of the expertise, here everyone seems to be some kind of an expert in the HR function.
I love BambooHR. Reports are easy to run and download and it usually covers any types of requests I get from the management team. You get excel or .csv downloads/reports and it is fast and simple, not too crowded so it is easy to read through. We don't integrate the tool yet but again, soon we will. we just did not had the time to utilize it yet but that's the plan.
I have used the help chat function several times and that is easy and great to use. There are also many articles, FAQs sections and an entire learning platform to learn on your own. I believe that is great. I also have used ChatGPT to ask how to do certain functions as well, which were accurately reported.
It is a very basic system. It may be OK for entry level positions only. The practice of removing CVs while the recruitment process is ON is disturbing and there is no one to explain or to inform why it is being done. Even a routine mail is not sent to the client/consultant. I am surprised how this system is continuing without too many complaints.
As far as I can recall, everything went well with doing it online and got questions answered. Was thankful to work with a dummy file to get used to some practices prior to getting our own domain within bamboo to then place our personnel information in the system, this helped a lot!
It was some work involved in moving all of our documents from a drive over to the correct folders and creating the system of what folders were needed and what got placed where
Although there are many products in the marketplace, there is no perfect system. BambooHR is the most economical HRIS for a small business, start-up, or business that has never had HR software. BambooHR was selected for its affordable functionality. However, if they continue to ingore the lack of functionality the pretty package will no longer have any value.
SF ATS was not available at the time and Taleo was thought to be too expensive. In retrospect, given the amount of customization and leveraging of other vendor technology for things like analytics I suspect any cost advantage we realized evaporated
Since my organization has dropped with employees, I always find ways to reduce costs. I thought there would be a cheaper option, but I was glad that my package included a lot for the price, and downgrading would cost more. The rep could have let me downgraded and taken me to a higher package. I am thankful that didn't happen.
There is so much you can do with this platform, it is incredible and so welcoming. We don't utilize it 100% yet just because we are growing and the HR team has not been able to concentrate on other areas offered to us but but we will soon. Which is also why we got the product, specifically because what BambooHR can do to help us meet our growing business needs.
