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.
$250
per month (minimum price for 25 employees or fewer)
iApplicants
Score 5.0 out of 10
N/A
iApplicants is a cloud-based ATS that offers batch or mass communication with potential candidates via multiple channels, resume parsing, and data management. This particular platform is sought and used by small to midsize companies and is offered on a flexible payment schedule.
I think if you're a small organization and you're trying to get out of paper, this is a really good first step to doing that. I've heard from other people that are in larger organizations where they have thousands of employees that there may be better platforms, but for smaller organization it's awesome.
In my opinion, they are well suited to any hiring scenario in which there are many applicants and you need to do an initial screening. The tests we use are effective in filtering out people who we have learned later or from experience would not work in our organization, those who have scored well have went on to be successful. It is an excellent tool.
Recruiting- communications are easy for both the internal team and candidates
Onboarding- the onboarding tasks are great. I love being able to attach documents as well as delay sending out tasks
Communication- the employee community is a great tool to keep our communications clean and organized. I love that we now have insight as to who has viewed the comms
Innovation - iApplicants partners with other related businesses and develops tools to streamline processes. Their integration makes sense - e.g. integrated background checks or HR software integration.
Responsiveness - I don't think I've ever had a response that was beyond 24 hours of my request.
Training and Updates - The dashboard offers tutorials at your fingertips. Updates/announcements are displayed upon logging in. I appreciate having it there as a constant reminder, but without getting a lot of email notices that clutter my inbox.
Customization - I love that we can brand the application for a professional recruiting "portal" and add additional details about our company. Additional customizations are accessible to me as an end user via the GUI, so I don't have to make a request for everything.
The application is long enough to deter job hunters who are "click-happy" and apply to every job they come across - applications that allow job hunters to store their resume in the system and click to apply generated hundreds of unqualified people who were desperate for anything and didn't even read the job description. On the reverse side of the spectrum (particularly government systems), I've seen (experienced) online submissions that were so long and tedious and could take hours to complete online. While some fields are mandatory in the application, iApplicants doesn't require a candidiate to essentially re-key every piece of their resume into sections of an online form.
BambooHR® has moved their offerings to a tiered package approach that groups features together at different tier and price levels. To gain access to a specific feature, you may need to upgrade to a whole new tier that includes additional features you may not be interested in. I would prefer being able to add-on one specific feature when needed.
The version we used didn't have the look and feel of more sophisticated ATS systems, which often feel more user friendly. It would be nice if it had less of a database format.
The posting feature utilized a third party which was great but didn't post to real time and required some follow up administratively. The feature of posting from the system is fantastic and the number of options is great but for sites that require manual entry and approval just knowing you are waiting on a third party company to manually enter those postings, have them approved and then verify they have actually been posted live requires a bit more follow up than I prefer.
We had a posting delete and no technical explanation as to why or how. It took someone several days to realize it was gone which lost traction and was alarming when we realized that the technical support team had no idea how it happened or what could prevent it from happening again. Needless to say that led to having to verify all postings were active daily for several weeks after which was time consuming when you have 30 open requisitions at a time.
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.
This is simply because as we expanded our business to include a staffing division, our technical needs of a tracking system greatly increased because now we needed to also track job orders, time sheets and billing. Had we simply stayed a software development company, we would have stayed with iApplicants as it fulfilled our needs at that time.
It's clear and well appointed with prompts on where to go for each category of information it holds. The user has limited access based on a need to know/job related basis. It has a clear help option with the ability to chat, email or read documentation on how to do something.
iApplicants is rare -- they offer both a great company (service, innovation, and ongoing development) with a product that really focuses on the needs of its users. It provides the basis for HR/legal reporting. It's easy to use, just logging in for the first time, so even my not-so-tech-savvy managers love it.
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've used this product consistently for 8 years now. In that time, I've seen ONE time that they had a technical glitch -- and THEY were all over it. The only reason I even knew about it was an email alert they sent out to all clients, explaining the issue. They also had it fixed the same day.
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.
It works. It's easy for everyone I've shared it with -- even my not-so-tech-savvy staff. When I hired a coordinator to handle routine HR duties, this was a simple transition to hand off to someone else without a lot of training. Sometimes it's a little slow downloading documents (resumes) from the site, but that could be a combination of issues that may not be related to their product. At one time, it wasn't able to accommodate newer Word documents (.doc vs. .docx), but they fixed that, as well.
10/10. The absolute best. I never dread contacting support. I know the team will be quick and helpful. It is so easy, that sometimes I skip straight to contacting support instead of trying to find help articles. They are faster than me trying to figure it out on my own!
Responses are always within 24 hours. They don't nickel and dime for everything we request. I like that they understand the request and we're not caught in a flurry of emails or failed attempts. Customizations, when needed by the vendor, have been at no charge. Most modifications can be made from my administrative panel. Everyone I've dealt with at iApplicants has been positive -- there seems to be a great sense of ownership across all staff there.
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!
I thought the training was well structured and the demos well-paced. Topics are set up sequentially so one can watch each one and build on previous tutorials. However, they are broken down into segments so a user can hone in on just a specific area where help is needed and not waste time on other topics s/he may already know. I also like the fact that the tutorials are available on the home page of the admin login, so we don't have to hunt for topics in a huge "knowledgebase." It's easy to get a quick refresher when needed (or when ready to try out something a little more advanced) and apply it immediately.
BambooHR's initial implementation team was amazing. We loved having a dedicated person we could call, email or speak to during the entire process. I feel that's so important when you are new to a software. Our process was time consuming, but well worth the final product.
BambooHR® was able to provide excellent value for money when compared to the other options we looked at when we carried out a review of them. A previous member of the team had also used BambooHR® at another company and rated them highly which influenced our decision greatly. The demo also showed BambooHR® was able to carry out all of the tasks we were looking for
I would say the overall capability with the iApplicant system is fairly similar to what other products can offer. Our recruitment goes in streaks where we can have several positions at once and then there are times when we have no recruitment at all. So we didn't want to spend a lot of money on an applicant tracking system. I would say the biggest selling point for us was that the iApplicants allowed for our applicants to apply online and would improve our processes. But also that it was reasonably priced compared to the other products.
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.
At the very basic level, it provides a place to post jobs and cross-post to free job boards. It could just be used by HR staff. However, it's more than just another place to post if one opts to utilize the full functionality-- it's an applicant management system that allows a user to pre-screen, organize, and collaborate on candidates with other users. They've added built-in background checks, reporting tools, community boards, integrated with larger/broader paid marketing opportunities, and affirmative action programs.
Time Savings: Automating onboarding, payroll, and employee record management has cut HR admin time by up to 30%, allowing teams to focus on strategic initiatives instead of paperwork.
Improved Onboarding: Streamlined workflows have cut onboarding time by nearly 50%, ensuring new hires are productive faster, reducing turnover risk in the critical first months.
- Enhanced Informational Clarity: Centralized employee data means fewer errors and faster access to essential information, reducing compliance risks and increasing accuracy in reporting.
