Overall, BambooHR is a place to have a very comfortable, yet average career. After 1-2 years, you will advance nearly all you can within Bamboo’s sales system and at that point, you can cruise along, doing your daily grind. If you make it that far, it can be a comfortable life-style. Chances are though, you’re in sales because you’re ambitious and you want to make good money and provide a better-than-average career for yourself or your family. That is pretty difficult, if not impossible to do here. The full salary pay methodology sounds great in theory, but in practice it is pretty handicapping. In most software companies, the top performing individual contributors are some of the highest paid employees within the company. At BambooHR, nobody out-earns a manager.
The sales department has a strong hierarchy. There is a prevalent “we-know-better-than-you” feeling and if you provide open, honest feedback, (a crucial conversation, one might say) be prepared for some retribution. That being said, some managers are better than others. I’d say the top 1/3 of the managers are actually really solid people who can run a team well. The other 2/3 are flying by the seat of their pants and provide absolutely no value to their teams.
There are a lot of politics and ambiguity around promotions and performance plans. Many people are promised a promotion or raise if they just do XYZ, yet when it is done, turns out there just weren’t enough promotion spots, so it continues over and over again. For performance plans, I’ve seen people fired after hitting metrics, I’ve seen people fired before they had the chance to hit metrics, but I’ve rarely seen anyone actually hit the needed numbers and hold onto their job.
The software has an excellent UI and is very easy to use, I can’t knock that at all! However, the competition in HR software has really picked up and Bamboo is trying to make up for lost time when they didn’t make many improvements or strategic moves to further the company. The new CEO should really be helpful in that regard, I hope they can make those catch-up strides.
Bamboo has done quite a good job of isolating themselves over the last few years, (ie. Not joining Silicon Slopes or mentoring many people or companies). This, on top of not much “top-of-the-funnel” experience, has lead to a strong bias to not hire former BambooHR employees in the Lehi area. If you do choose to be here for a couple years, be aware than you’ll need to to interview well and many Bamboo employee’s resume’s are thrown out before the first call happens.
You don’t see many negative reviews on here because leadership typically conducts a witch-hunt to find the perpetrator when it happens. After one of the previous reviews from a couple weeks ago hit, leadership interviewed nearly every SAE, trying to narrow it down. I don’t typically post reviews, but feel it is my duty to speak up for those who can’t. I don’t hate BambooHR by any means, I learned a lot and made some of my best friends there. But if you’re seriously considering, please weigh out some of these pros and cons first. Good luck!
