Meet Lisa Marino

Growth can be a challenge for many small companies. Avidbots, a robotics company in Kitchener, Ontario, was no exception. When Lisa Marino joined Avidbots as HR Manager in 2016, she quickly found that she needed more tools than the current spreadsheets to support her workforce.

“My biggest pet peeve was the vacation tracker that I had set up in Google Sheets,” Lisa said. “You’ve got emails coming left, right, and center, you’re updating the spreadsheet, and then you’re giving that to payroll on a regular basis so they can update the financials.”

With 70 employees at the time and no other HR staff, Lisa found herself spending 1.5 hours each day sifting through redundant time-off emails from employees and managers as well as responding to other interruptions. It wasn’t long before she approached her CEO directly and told him, “Look, if I don’t have a tool to help me manage and automate time tracking, I’m going to have to hire an HR Coordinator for more than $40,000 every year.”

Avidbots had a main reason for selecting BambooHR: cost. “We’re a small business,” Lisa explained. “It sounds super cheap, but it’s the truth. I needed a basic tool that I could roll out and use for the next few years. But the cost of some of these HR software options was phenomenal.”

Getting executive buy-in can be intimidating for HR professionals, but the process went well between Lisa and her CEO. “Whenever I show my CEO something, I say ‘Look, this is the cost, and this is what it’s going to save,’ and he’ll make a decision. With all the ways that BambooHR simplifies, automates, and integrates, he says he’s really happy with it.”

Hiring (ATS): “Managers like the independence [of the ATS]. They don’t have to depend on HR. They can go in and look at resumes any time, they can star them, delete them, put them on hold. And when they close a role, they click ‘HIRED!’, the stars come up, and it’s very satisfying.”

Onboarding: “When we click ‘Hired’ in the ATS, the description comes off the site, and IT gets notified to start the IT onboarding process. New employees receive the BambooHR welcome email. We do an orientation where we bring up BambooHR and show them the org chart. Our managers also receive push notifications to have a one-month check-in and a two-month check-in with new employees.”

Document Storage: “BambooHR is our intranet: we have all of our documents stored and organized really nicely. It gave employees the ability to self-serve personal info. Our IT department told us that it saved them from building an intranet. We didn’t have to build our own directory—BambooHR is very helpful in a growing organization to help track people down.”

Scalability: “We’re a young robotics company. We’re not trying to roll out features that are used in Fortune 500 companies because we’re not there yet. BambooHR grows with us. We can use the file structure, we can reorganize it, we can add things to it. I think it will scale really well over the next few years with us.”