What BambooHR does
BambooHR is an HR system for small and mid-sized companies. It holds employee records and handles onboarding and offboarding, time off, documents with e-signatures and HR reporting, with optional modules for hiring, performance and payroll.
Decide who owns it
Name an account owner and at least one other administrator. The owner is the person who will keep the system accurate after launch, which is a recurring job and not a one-time project.
Decide your structure
- Departments, divisions and locations, named the way you want them to appear in reports.
- Job titles, cleaned up so the same role has one name.
- Reporting lines, which drive approvals and manager access.
- Employment statuses, such as full time, part time and contractor.
Decide who can see what
Access levels control what employees, managers, finance and HR can view and edit. Decide these before you invite anyone. Compensation, personal details and documents are the fields to think hardest about.
Decide your time off rules
- The types of leave you offer.
- How each accrues, when it resets and what carries over.
- Who approves requests and who covers when they are away.
- Your company holidays.
- Each person's balance as of a specific date.
Build onboarding and offboarding
Write out the tasks for a new hire and for a departure, with an owner for each: paperwork, equipment, accounts, introductions, and on the way out, returning equipment and removing access. Add the documents that need signatures to the new hire packet. Our onboarding and offboarding checklist has a full list.
Get the data ready
Most of the effort is here. Collect records from wherever they live, put them in one clean spreadsheet in the format BambooHR expects, and check them before importing. Fixing data after import is slower than fixing it before.
Decide what to connect
- Payroll, whether you use BambooHR's or keep your current provider.
- Single sign-on through your identity provider.
- Your compliance platform, if you are working toward SOC 2, so it can see hires and departures.
Roll out in stages
Start with records and time off. Add hiring and performance modules later, once the basics are trusted. Give employees a short guide to the two or three things they will actually do, and retire the old spreadsheets on a set date.
We set up BambooHR and other HR systems, migrate the data and can administer them afterward. See systems selection and setup.