Add a New Employee
How do I add a new employee?
Purpose: To teach you how to add a new employee to your BambooHR account. Additionally, we have added some helpful tips to help you connect your employees to other amazing features.
Hire a Candidate
If you are using BambooHR's Hiring feature, you will want to create the employee from the candidate profile. Navigate to the candidate's profile that you would like to add to BambooHR. Change the candidate's status to Hire, then click the Add New Employee button.
Manually Add a New Employee
Sometimes you need to add an employee or contractor who hasn't gone through the ATS. If you want their information housed in the ATS for reporting purposes, add the new employee or contractor as a candidate, then hire them from there. If you do not want their information housed in the ATS, follow the instructions below.
Add from your Home tab
Add from the People tab
To begin, navigate to the People tab and click + New Employee.
Add New Employee Form
Whether you added your newest team member through the ATS for from the people tab, filling out the New Employee form is how you will complete the process.
Complete the employee's basic information and click Save to add them to BambooHR.
Additional features are available when you add a new employee, which includes:
- New Hire Packet: If you use employee self-onboarding, do not forget to check the box to send a New Hire Packet.
- Payroll: If you use the Payroll integration and you add a new employee who gets paid through BambooHR Payroll, check this box. This action will update the required fields when you add the new employee to avoid missing any important payroll information.
- Employee #: To turn on automatic employee numbering, please contact a support hero.
- Hire Date: An employee's hire date will determine specific functionalities within BambooHR (i.e., time off, automatic benefit eligibility, onboarding assignments, email alerts, etc.). Be sure to add this information when adding an employee to BambooHR.
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Self-service access*: If you add a work or home email address, you can enable employee access for an employee when adding them to the system, and it would help streamline the onboarding process. Keep in mind that when you allow employee access from the Add Employee page, the employee will receive an email on their hire date to log in to BambooHR and access their information.
- If you are wanting to add an employee to the Full Admin access level, please review this guide in detail to make sure that you configure their BambooHR access accurately.
The Full Admin user(s) can customize the fields that appear on the Add Employee page by clicking Customize Add Employee Form in the top right corner. If you want to require a field, please reach out to a support hero.
Once fields are available in the Add Employee form and depending on a field's settings, you will have the option to add a field to your New Hire Packet for your new employees to fill out before their first day.
The Social Security Number field requires validation. The employee or admin user must enter a valid SSN, or the field can be blank. The employee or admin user entering an invalid SSN will see an error that asks them to enter a valid SSN. If the SSN field is required,* you cannot save the changes on the employee's record until the employee or admin user enters a valid SSN.
If you are using the Payroll integration, the SSN field must be complete for it to sync to Payroll.
*If your account requires the SSN field and you would like to make it optional, please reach out to a support hero to assist you.
*When you add a new employee and enable their access, check if there is already a created email account for the employee. If you allow an employee access to BambooHR and there is no created email account, the welcome email will bounce back to BambooHR and is undeliverable. The Account Owner will receive an email notification (shown below) to fix the suppression and have the employee receive future emails. Upon receiving the email, the Account Owner can correct the email address or click Yes, it is to remove the suppression.
If you do not enable an employee with employee access when you first add them to BambooHR and their email address is incorrect, you will receive the suppression email the first time ANY email sends to the employee through BambooHR.
For example, if you do not enable an employee immediately, you may send out a company announcement that includes the employee. Company announcements do not require an employee to have access to receive them. The employee must be active to receive an announcement. If the employee's email address is invalid, this will create a suppression on the email address in BambooHR and notify the Account Owner.
This happens most often if you have a non-employee user with that same email address. It’s common to use this type of user for external contacts who need to have access to BambooHR (e.g. a contractor). In some cases, you may want to add that non-employee user as an employee. When you try to add a new employee, the system will recognize the email is linked to the non-employee user. You can fix this by deleting the non-employee user profile. Check out the “How do I delete a non-employee user?” section in this guide for those steps.
The user will lose access once the non-employee profile is deleted, but the email in that profile will no longer be linked; it will be available for the new profile. Access can be enabled, once again, on the add employee form or in the profile after it is created.
- Assign a time off policy to enable an employee to accrue time off automatically.
- Enroll the employee in benefit plans.
- Will an employee be tracking their hours in BambooHR? If so, be sure to enable Time Tracking (add-on feature).
- Training: If you have created training that applies to an employee, the training will automatically add to the employee's Training tab so you can record completions.
- Performance (add-on feature): If you use BambooHR's Performance Management feature, a new employee will automatically start participating in Performance Management.