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
SilkRoad Recruiting
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
SilkRoad offers OpenHire, a recruiting and ATS system. It offers recruiting access through social media channels, data security, and EEO compliance for mid-sized to large businesses. It is a component of SilkRoad’s Lifesuite product line.
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.
I think OpenHire is best for a small company (max about 2500 employees). The more employees you have the more HR people you should have and this can get expensive. I know most larger companies are using more advanced systems as well (Workday). During the selection process be sure to determine how many OpenHire users you would need. Ask whether your managers will be willing to work in the system as well or whether HR would have to own the entire process. If you are EEOC compliant, make sure you ask about diversity posting, APP tracking of applicants, and reporting needs. If you require an onboarding tool, SilkRoad offers RedCarpet. I found it to be very complex and hiring managers refused to use it. If you require an onboarding tool, definitely look into it. The demo may look great but there were a lot of implementation steps done to make it work and it just didn't fit our company culture. So make sure it fits yours.
The ease of use when it comes to create requisitions from a hiring managers side of things is definitely a positive. It's very much user intuitive and the specifications can be completely customized as to what a company would like to appear within said requisition.
Candidate correspondence is an absolute breeze as you can custom load templates into the system that can be edited at any time through an administrator in your company instead of having to go through a technical support team on the other side of things.
Overall, it's a pretty no muss no fuss system to use as there's not a great layer of complication about it and like most things, spaced practice and consistent exposure to it tend to iron out those rough edges. From an administration standpoint, adding in locations and hiring managers is incredibly simplistic along with reporting functionality.
Candidate folders have come a long way in the system and are much more user friendly at this point than when I began using the system some four years ago. It's very easy to shift candidate profiles between folders and edit on the fly.
OpenHire's user roles can create issues depending on how your company's hiring process flows. For example, at one company, the hiring managers were extremely involved in screening candidates yet the system seems very geared towards use of centralized recruiters who distribute candidates. The lack of ability to customize roles and security to match our managers' needs created additional burden on HR as well as frustration from hiring managers.
I experienced several problems uploading documents to accompany a candidate's offer. There was a limit on the number, size and type of attachments that could be included, and there was no alternative (as vetted with OpenHire) besides sending a separate correspondence to the candidate. I found this to appear unprofessional to the candidate as well as creating an extra step in the process for HR/recruiting.
The requisition process had a few issues which created inefficiencies in the process. Firstly, for times when you need to post a role confidentially outside of your standard process, there was no way to designate the req as 'confidential'. Instead, you had to use the 'executive' status which created issues (ie: inaccurate data in reporting). Secondly, OpenHire was unable to upload the company directory of emails in the requisition approver fields so rather than being able to select from a drop-down or using a 'smart' field, you had to type each approver's email out manually thus increasing the potential for error and delay in the process.
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.
It was a great solution for the company in all aspects, especially the cost. The company was not in a position to afford a solution such as Oracle PeopleSoft. The only reason we did not renew OpenHire was we got acquired by a much larger organization and started utilizing the tools that the parent company had available
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.
It's not a bad system to use, there just seems to be so much click through to get one task achieved. Once you know all the little routes and pieces it gets easier.
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!
The support for Silkroad is awful. I know they are working on it and it seems to be slightly better but it's still not great. I have had multiple cases I have never heard from them on, others I have had to follow-up multiple times and one that took a year
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.
NeoGov is a more simple system but just being able to require specific documents has been a huge time saver for us. Other elements in NeoGov aren't as robust but still it saves me a lot of time compared to OpenHire.
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.
