BambooHR is an cloud-based human resources solution that provides onboarding, payroll, and benefits management. It also offers automated time-off management and employee self-service.
$10
per month per user
Hire by Google (discontinued)
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Hire, by Google, was a recruiting app for G suite customers. The product includes functionality for applicant tracking, candidate relationship management, and candidate sourcing. Google sunsetted the product in late 2020.
The best use of it is for employee tracking and vacation requests. It can also be used for payroll; however, my company uses a separate program for that. The best use for it, in my opinion, is staff performance management. All the notes and documents can be added/attached to the employee. You can click on an employee's profile and see what days they have been off, how close they are to achieving goals, etc.
Google Hire is very good at doing the basics well. I believe for most internal HR departments at small companies, this is all you need. It also works well for small to medium-sized staffing companies that just want something reliable and easy to use. What Google Hire doesn't do very well is be flexible. They don't have custom options, they don't have a ton of settings, and their development cycle is slow. As a result, it's pretty much what you see is what you get.
Google does search well so when I search through our database for candidates, I'm confident that I'm pulling up all the right people from what we have.
They have a modern and nice user interface - this is one of the biggest reasons to use it over other systems, as most ATS' are pretty ancient looking and not very pleasant to use.
Their support is very good at answering and addressing questions.
Their pricing is incredible. I'm sure at some point it will change, but for small companies paying 100+ per user for other ATS' - it's incredible to pay 100/month for the whole company.
Despite many many months of requests, Google still hasn't implemented ANY custom fields. This makes it tough for an external recruiting firm to track what they want (most importantly: desired salary).
The job board integration is not great for external recruiters, mostly at the fault of Indeed. Indeed flagged us as a recruiting firm and so none of our jobs actually go live. While I know this is an Indeed problem (we had the same problem when using Bullhorn), Breezy ATS never has that problem for us so I don't know what they're doing differently.
Their development cycles are quite frankly very slow. I've requested some features, and while support is great about telling me it's coming or in the pipeline, I honestly don't really see a difference in the product since we started using it. It's still great to use, and we still love the software, but there haven't been too many visible improvements that make any difference to our work.
Being Google, it can sometimes be frustrating that one arm doesn't talk to the other. For example, they announced a Gmail for Works App/Extension integration, but for some reason when they launched it, admins of a domain couldn't install it. Google Hire pointed to the Google for Works team, and it took literally months to fix. Not the end of the world, but just very silly considering they're the same company.
There's nothing wrong with this platform. I would recommend it to any business starting with more than 10 employees. I will continue to use the program for as long as I need to, hoping they continue being tremendous and finding other ways to incorporate more technology.
I had never used BambooHR® before and when I was hired the company already had the software but no one truly owned it (no HR previous to me) so I had to simply log in and figure things out for myself. Extremely intuitive! If there was anything I wanted to figure out or learn more about, the resources, step-by-step instructions and videos were there for support.
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.
Support has always been excellent. I was skeptical about not having a dedicated account manager at first, but my concerns were quickly eased. I love the different options for communication. Being able to chat, send emails or call a representative are great so that my workflow isn't disrupted by having to complete a call. I have never had an issue reaching anyone and the email follow up is great!
Overall this training was great and our implementation specialist was wonderful and very helpful. We felt really prepared once our training was completed, But we could get additional help immediately even when we were live. The continuation Support heros after implementation are wonderful and you can always get a LIVE person each time you call into their office.
We implemented bambooHR in Fall, 2023 then implemented Payroll 1/1/24. A vital piece of information was not known or missed in that we are exempt from State Unemployment Tax and have a Reimbursement Set-up, so bambooHR did not send Payroll Reports to the State. Those reports need to be sent regardless if we are exempt or not.
BambooHR® was a great fit for our organization of 75-100 people. We became too big for our small custom MS Access system but not big enough for Workday. Lattice was more of an employee engagement and performance management system and didn't have some of the HR management and API integration we wanted. BambooHR® was robust enough to scale with us and provided the features and functionality we needed.
I picked Google Hire after spending about 3 months on Bullhorn. I found Bullhorn to be terrible. It's WAY more customizable and theoretically powerful, but it's also a pain to set up and maintain. Even just getting your job page set up on your own site required tech support. Getting it eventually to what you want could be a great benefit, but Google Hire does great right out of the box and is a lot cheaper. Breezy HR is a great system. It's a bit more expensive than Google Hire for multiple job postings, but their system is equally easy to use and straight forward. However, we are all in on Google Products, so it was just a no brainer to go with Hire for a better price and most likely a better search function.
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.
HR team members have been saved thousands of hours over the 3.5 years we've had BambooHR®. It saved me personally several hours a day once BambooHR® was set up. Specifically, onboarding, offboarding, and a formal Hiring system are the major time savers.
Employee Information is much easier to access and is all centralized. Employees are empowered to update their information when applicable, and we have designed custom access levels for different positions and managers to ensure every individual is seeing the appropriate types of information about employees.
We saved significant money by switching from Lattice to BambooHR®'s Performance Management solution. This solution is less advanced, but the simplicity meets our needs perfectly fine, and it even saves time for managers and employees by BambooHR®'s standard questions, carefully designed to get to the heart of performance and improvement.
Google Hire makes, unfortunately, a very little impact on our ROI, but I think in the ATS world that's a good thing. It simply acts as a record that we can put everything in and easily reference, and the fact that it works overall makes it a positive software product in the long run.
While the search works great, I don't know that I've ever specifically found a candidate and placed them due to it. That could be a result of our job reqs though.
The biggest most obvious impact is really just the price. We needed a tool that does what Google Hire does, reliably. Most other companies charge at least 150 or so for 2 people, whereas Google Hire is 100/month for many users. It gives us flexibility for the future and helps minimize what could be a big expense. That definitely helps our bottom line.
