Item: HiBob
Rating: 7
Author: Valentino Ferro

Overall Satisfaction with Hibob

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Hibob is our HRIS. Whether that’s our people themselves (being able to see all of their employment information in one place, being able to book a holiday and see when others have time off), our managers (getting a full view of their team’s details - salaries, job titles, locations in one place and seeing time off in full view in order to capacity plan accurately) or our People, Culture and Inclusion team (reporting, right to work checks, onboarding new folks, onboarding ourselves onto new systems and employment changes) - all of these things get simpler with Bob.

We make a great use of the automation of tasks that Bob allows to build, from new joiners to leavers, from probation and onboarding to parental leave, we have created flows that automatically assign tasks to the relevant people, to make sure nothing is missed on important lifecycle phases of employees.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Managing time off
Automating tasks
Build reports

Cons

Hard-coded lifecycle statuses of employees that prevent them from performing certain actions
Flexibility to adapt to company policies
Can't assign tasks to other people if those who are usually in charge of that task are on holiday

Most Important Features

Flows and task lists
Time off
Reports

Return on Investment

50% time saved from the People Team (it could have been a lot higher, but it takes a lot of time to understand how HiBob works and the workarounds that one needs to build where the functionality needed is not present)
100% increase in automation of tasks

Alternatives Considered

Personio and Humaans

HiBoB

Pros:

great user and admin experience
DEIB focus with pronouns and demographic fields
letter and signature capabilities
mass loading
super quick implementation

Cons:

Dashboards are accessible to admins and managers only (managers only if you make it so)
Signature feature isn’t legally binding (same for all e-sign HRIS capabilities)
open API to get Hello Sign integrated is time consuming
time off delegation a little complicated

Humaans

Pro:

Super quick implementation
Simple for both users and admins
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging is clearly a priority
The dashboards are super comprehensive and reporting looked easy and accessible for people of all levels

Con:

No predictive analysis as a part of the platform offering now
Can’t mass load data yet
No Hello Sign integration

Personio

Pro:

Has an app
Can mass load data
Letter build and signature features
Can add different user groups and customise these, time off, employee fields and such

Con:

No dashboard feature
Long implementation
Manual for admins
No pronouns and demographic data fields weren’t automatically added in as standard fields
No predictive analysis
Catered a little more to mid-large companies

Key Insights

Do you think HiBob delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with HiBob's feature set?

Did HiBob live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of HiBob go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy HiBob again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Culture Amp, Slack, Notion, Microsoft 365

Likelihood to Recommend

Bob is well suited to house documents, build organisational charts, request and authorise time off or sick leave, as well as displaying teams, their time off and their current status (on holiday, on parental leave, active, etc). Bob is also well suited to automate tasks, for example if there is a new starter, it's easy to tell everyone involved what they should do automatically - that's a big weight off the People Team's shoulders.

Unfortunately, not everything is possible with Bob. For example, the creation of templates for documents is not ideal, with lots of formatting oddities and building different version of the same documents being generally difficult. Furthermore, the signature function is not legally binding, so can't be use (for example) to send employment contracts for signature.

HiBob Feature Ratings

Using Hibob

Users and Roles

20 - All functions

Support Headcount Required

1 - PATIENCE is the main one, perseverance close second. Not everything is easy on HiBob, and a great degree of curiosity and perseverance is required to make things work.

Being a little tech-savvy also helps, especially to build the architecture of the automations.

Business Processes Supported

New joiners
Probation
Parental leave
Offboarding

Innovative Uses

Automating tasks for parental leave
Promotions and salary changes - all automated
New starters immediately know what to do during their onboarding

Future Planned Uses

Overtime tracking
Enhanced parental leave payments tracking

Likelihood to Renew

We are not fully satisfied with the way support is offered, especially because you will need support quite often to understand how things work.

Evaluating Hibob and Competitors

Products Replaced

Key Differentiators

Product Features
Product Usability

The possibility to automate workflows and tasks

Evaluation Lessons Learned

I would ask how support is delivered before signing up :)

Hibob Implementation

Implementation Rating

It's very quick and can be automated easily with the right instructions

Implementation Details / Implementation Partner

Implemented in-house

Implementation Phases

Implementation Issues

Mass data import wasn't explained particularly well

Hibob Support

Support Rating

A lot of support is self-service from the users themselves, via a guide hosted on HiBob's website. I have found the guide helpful 10% of the time when I needed support.

The support team is quite quick to reply, but not everyone is helpful unfortunately, and in many cases a lot of emails, messages and back and forth were needed to get to the bottom of an issue. When I pointed out that a video call would be a quicker way to tell people "this is how it's done", I was told that it's not the way they deliver support. I had to beg our account managers for a video chat with some skilled users to show me how to do certain things that (a) were nowhere to be found on the guide, and (b) the support team wasn't able to solve.

Additionally, to find solutions, I was pointed to a forum where other users exchange tips on how they managed to solve problems - again, not really helpful as I would like to know this from Bob's team themselves since we're paying for the product, and I shouldn't rely on other users to tell me how they managed their way around a problem.

HiBob Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response	Slow Resolution Problems left unsolved Escalation required Need to explain problems multiple times

Premium Support

N/A

Exceptional Examples of HiBob Support

The last time we had an issue, an agent was able to identify the root of the problem quickly, then send detailed screenshot on how to solve it. It was still a limitation of Bob but at least we were told how to fix it without having to try ourselves!

Using Hibob

Usability

The majority of things are pretty intuitive, but the more complex things (that might be really useful) require convoluted workarounds to overcome the platform's limitations.