The Results
In August, 2021, southern Haiti was struck by a 7.2 magnitude earthquake. It’s exactly the kind of crisis Hope for Haiti was created for, but when the dust settled, the veteran non-profit had not only lost two of their three clinics to structural damage, but they were in desperate need of additional staff. They only employed about 75 people at the time—not nearly enough hands to adequately respond to a crisis affecting hundreds of thousands of people.
Hope for Haiti’s HR team and hiring managers took action. In a matter of weeks, with help from BambooHR, they more than doubled their team, empowering the organization to deliver a much greater benefit to the impacted community.
GROWING FROM 73 CRUCIAL EMPLOYEES TO 160 IN WEEKS: With so many hands rallying together to save, repair, and improve lives, this non-profit’s incredible story can’t be told from a single perspective. Here’s what a few of Hope for Haiti’s executives, HR leaders, management staff, and employees have to say about using BambooHR to increase their effectiveness during a season of crisis.
THE VIEW FROM HR: Linda Thélémaque, Hope for Haiti’s Chief Program Officer, says she’s “blacked out” much of how it felt to complete HR tasks prior to the non-profit’s adoption of BambooHR. “It was such a manual process—100 percent,” she says, “and now…it’s just so much easier.”
And while Linda knows the Hope for Haiti team would have moved mountains to meet their staffing needs even without the automation and streamlining of BambooHR, she believes “it would have been almost impossible” if they’d still been mired in manual HR processes when the earthquake hit.
A MANAGER’S PERSPECTIVE: “Using BambooHR [for] hiring and onboarding, we were able to onboard 96 contractors very efficiently,” recalls Monica Perez, Hope for Haiti’s CFO. “BambooHR has just been an amazing tool for us to grow our team.”
“The growth reflected the need,” adds COO Meg Jean Louis, “[because] we’re also coming out of a year of social and political unrest. We’re coming out of COVID-19. We’re coming out of a presidential assassination. There was a huge need for medical and healthcare. Some of the nurses and doctors that came to us—their facilities were damaged; they didn’t have anywhere to work. We were able to get them onboarded within days.”
THE EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE: James Declerus, Donor Experience Coordinator at Hope for Haiti and its first Haiti-based remote worker, is in Port-au-Prince, five hours from the non-profit’s main Haiti office in Les Cayes. He’s been hired by the non-profit twice, in fact—once before they began using BambooHR, and again after.
While James recalls a positive experience both times, he was especially impressed by the simplicity of the application process within BambooHR, the convenience and efficiency of e-signatures for his offer letter and other digital documents, and now, as an employee, the org chart and performance management tools.
“I can set my goals, provide my assessment, and my manager also has the possibility to review my assessment and give me feedback about what I’m good at and what I need to work on,” says James. “That’s helped a lot. That’s a great tool. As an employee, I really appreciate it.”
ADVANCING THE FOUNDER’S HUMANITARIAN MISSION: BambooHR helped Hope for Haiti grow quickly when it mattered most. “[BambooHR] has really transformed our work and our ability to accomplish our mission,” says Hope for Haiti’s CEO, Skyler Badenoch. “Especially during one of the hardest times our organization’s ever faced. We just felt compelled to make sure you all know how important it was for us and how much it meant to us to have this at our fingertips. [We want] to let others know—especially in the non-profit space—that they can also have this type of experience.”
The Challenge
While the earthquake presented a sudden and acute challenge for the Hope for Haiti team, and while the country’s health and political crises remain ongoing, the non-profit also contends with the unique challenges of its industry, discipline, and international reach—from hiring and compliance to data wrangling. Prior to adopting BambooHR, all of these challenges were exacerbated by clunky, time-consuming processes.
LABORIOUS HIRING PROCESS: Linda recalls all the steps that went into hiring someone before she had BambooHR: the tedium of tracking and rating applicants via email, Google Drive, and Excel; the endless downloading and printing of resumes and cover letters; creating folders for each person. “I’m blocking out hours of my day [for this],” she says. “It was such a manual process.” And error-prone.
“So many things got lost in the shuffle of paperwork,” adds Meg, which would sometimes lead to losing track of candidates. All these steps and delays resulted in months-long times-to-hire, not to mention valuable hours lost for the HR director and hiring manager trying to fill these positions.
CONTINUOUS RENEWAL OF SHORT-TERM CONTRACTS: Another time-consuming task for Linda was the continuous renewing of three-month and six-month contracts, which made the initial hiring and onboarding of a single employee only two pieces in an ongoing paperwork chase to keep contractors employed for as long as needed.
“I am the final signature on these contracts,” says Linda. “I would get an influx of emails [and] have to download each document, sign in Adobe, send it back, then our HR person would download it...It was just a lot.”
THE STRUGGLES OF INTERNATIONAL COORDINATION: “Our HR files were split between our various locations in the U.S. and in Haiti,” shares Monica.
“That caused delays with our information sharing and incomplete record keeping…[T]here was a lot of printing of forms, scanning them, emailing back and forth, because we didn't have an actual system in place that helped automate those processes and to house our records all in one place. This definitely caused a lot of challenges with us just because it was such a long, drawn-out process, and it was not an effective use of our team's time.”
The Solution
Hope for Haiti adopted the BambooHR all-in-one HR platform back in 2020, which immediately put hours back onto everyone’s busy schedules, improved the candidate and employee experience, and simply made it easier to function as a non-profit offering critical services to the community.
A COLLABORATIVE EXPERIENCE ACROSS BORDERS: “Hiring and onboarding [with BambooHR] has really met our needs for having that centralized location of HR information,” says Monica, “...all of that has allowed us to streamline our process so we're able to quickly communicate, see the audit trail of information, see the next steps, which is a vast improvement from sending various emails and attachments back and forth. So it's really become a more collaborative experience throughout our departments and locations.”
ROBUST REPORTING FOR BETTER NON-PROFIT TRANSPARENCY: Taylor Hebble, Hope for Haiti’s Chief Marketing Officer, is particularly grateful for the employee record and reporting functions in BambooHR. “For a lot of our charity rating profiles, we report on demographic data [which affects] transparency scores. [B]eing able to utilize those pulse surveys and…demographic collection data is really important as a non-profit because that's what a lot of those evaluators want to see.”
A BETTER EXPERIENCE FOR ALL: From push notifications (“I love them!”– Monica) to automatic job posting and the mobile Hiring app (“Priceless.”– Linda), to email templates (“I think that’s one of the best features.” – Meg), and everything else (“We really love the talent pool.” – Meg), BambooHR has created a better, more intuitive, and streamlined experience for everyone who interacts with the software.
“HR can be a scary topic,” says Meg, “[and] we have to understand we’re working with two different countries…different tech literacy levels and experiences. There’s going to be a learning curve, [but] as an employee using BambooHR…I think it’s very fun. The platform is user-friendly.”
And no more printing binders of paperwork and policies! “It’s better to have everything electronic, especially for our employees,” says Monica. And Taylor agrees: “One of our core values is Accountability, so just being able to have that kind of one-housed place where everything is secure, everything is efficient…[It’s] a really big perk.”
“I’m not just saying this,” adds Meg. “From the people management,…the documents,…the trilingual staff,…there’s been a lot of things that the flexibility of the platform has allowed us to streamline. I don’t know what we would have done without having a platform like BambooHR.”
