Homebase Review—HR Platform for Small Businesses

Homebase is a human resources information system (HRIS) aimed at small businesses like restaurants, retailers, repair shops, services, and education companies. In the words of its creators, Homebase takes care of “HR for people who don’t do HR.”

Source: Homebase

With Homebase, you’ll get a platform that covers various HR and employee management needs. In this review, we’ll focus on Homebase’s applicant tracking system (ATS) and check how good it is for sourcing candidates and finding new employees. We’ll also introduce Workello, a platform entirely dedicated to recruitment, which combines an ATS with pre-hire skill assessment software.

Homebase: Key Features

Homebase is much more than a regular ATS—it comes with dozens of functionalities that manage existing employees and new ones once you onboard them. Some of those functionalities focus on:

• Time tracking—Tracks employees’ attendance hours, breaks, and overtime bonuses. You can put time clocks on POS and other devices to track exact working hours
• Employee happiness—Helps you provide feedback (individual and collective) and give shoutouts after a finished project. The platform allows employees to access their data related to shifts, hours, and time off to build trust between the employer and the employee
• Time-off and PTO management—Tracks accruals and balances according to your PTO policy automatically
• Onboarding—Reduces manual work by helping you create and store documentation (welcome packets) so that onboarding goes smoothly. The platform keeps new-hire paperwork at the ready, such as W-4, I-9, and direct deposit forms

Hiring With Homebase

When it comes to its ATS aspects, Homebase helps you post a job ad on job boards automatically (albeit a limited number of job websites are available), and you can sign up for sponsored job posts within Homebase directly. If you’re struggling with creating your job ad, the platform has 100+ job description templates that you can copy for free.

Once you post your job ad and applications start coming your way, Homebase creates a single candidate database, regardless of where the application comes from; it also supports walk-in and referral applications. You can add prescreening questions to your job post to get to know your candidates a bit better and automatically eliminate those who don’t meet the minimum requirements.

With Homebase, you can create a shortlist of candidates that best fit the description. You can message candidates and schedule an interview with them within the platform. After the interview process and selection, Homebase’s platform allows you to onboard your new employee.

Homebase: Downsides

When it comes to hiring new employees, Homebase is relatively limited. It offers job ad distribution to only a handful of job platforms. While you can send emails from the platform, it has no correspondence automation or email templates that would speed up the process and remove the need for manual work. You need to stay attentive and make sure you don’t miss out on a top-quality employee because you’ve forgotten to respond to their email on time.

Another aspect that’s missing is candidate assessments. The only way you can assess applicants before hiring them is through prescreening questions and a one-on-one interview. This may be enough depending on your industry, but the platform cannot test candidates’ job-related skills. It also lacks the option of creating reports about the hiring process and job ad performance.

Homebase lacks an external page that candidates can visit to learn about your selection process and their application status. This would remove wasting time on needless correspondence between applicants and your recruiting officers. Without automated emails, you may forget to reply to a candidate, leaving them to wonder what’s going on and eventually give up on the position.

Homebase: Pricing

Homebase offers a 14-day trial of their top-tier subscription model, after which you need to choose a plan that suits you. The company has a free plan (stays free always) with limited features, and you can use it for one location only. Some of the features it lacks are PTO tracking, performance tracking, and employee paperwork management.

The price of each plan depends on whether you opt for a monthly or a yearly deal. Check out the table below to learn about Homebase pricing:

Each price listed is per month per location. For example, if you’re running three restaurants and choose the annual Plus plan, your total cost will be $144 a month.

Source: Homebase

Note that some features are unavailable in any of the pricing plans, and you need to pay extra for them as add-ons. These features include:

• Payroll—$39 per month base fee, plus an additional $6 monthly per active employee
• Access to HR resources and advisors—$99 per month (included in the All in One plan)
• Job posting boosts—$79+ per post

Features per Plan

So, what do you get with each plan? Check out the table below to find out:

Homebase: Integrations

Besides integrating with job boards for job ad distribution, Homebase supports various integrations that can help you run your company more smoothly. These integrations revolve around HR duties, such as issuing payslips, creating shift timetables, and scheduling interviews. Homebase integrations include:

• Square
• Clover
• Vend
• Shopify
• Toast
• Poynt
• Rippling
• ADP
• Gusto
• QuickBooks
• SurePayroll
• Ctuit
• ZipRecruiter
• Indeed
• Google for Jobs
• Craigslist
• Facebook
• Glassdoor
• PayAnywhere
• Talech
• Revel
• Lightspeed

Homebase: Customers

The majority of Homebase’s clientele is U.S.-based, and the only supported language is English. Over 100,000 small businesses use Homebase, including:

• Hollie Ray Boutique
• Wonderland Gear Exchange
• Aunty’s Kitchen
• Mid Iowa Gymnastics
• Tash Cosmetics
• PowerCycle
• Hello Birdie Nail & Lash Lab
• AquaSprings Dental
• Vital Family Practice Center
• Modern Optometry
• Sunik Roofing
• Hellamaid
• Global Lighting
• Blue Pack Marketing
• Bloom Consulting
• The Brownstone
• Play Street Museum
• Warriors Axe Throwing
• National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame
• The Woods Inn

Alternatives to Homebase

If you’re looking for a standalone ATS that supports different assessment options, Homebase won’t cut it for you. Don’t worry; there are hundreds of options to choose from, and we’ve reviewed many of them so that you can make the best choice. Check out our other ATS reviews:

Workello vs. Homebase

Unlike Homebase, Workello is a platform dedicated solely to high-volume recruiting. It’s aimed at SMBs looking to hire content team members, but you can also use it for other departments and industries. It’s an easy-to-use software that helps employers and recruiters with no prior experience set up their hiring funnel in under 3 minutes.

With Workello, you also get a platform that helps you create job posts with job description templates, distribute them online, and create a single candidate database. The difference from Homebase is that you can use written assessments instead of interviews only. This way, you can get a first-hand example of the quality of the candidates’ work, and you can assess their job-related skills. Workello allows you to quickly spot unqualified candidates with impressive portfolios.

Unlike Homebase, Workello also supports automated correspondence. When you change a candidate’s status, they will receive an automatic email from you, informing them about the change and the next step in the selection process.

The whole hiring process is done from your single-page dashboard. All you need to do is change a candidate’s status from the drop-down menu, and you can review their resume, send and assess tests, schedule interviews, reject unqualified candidates, and hire the best ones.

Another difference is the pricing. Workello doesn’t have pricing tiers and doesn’t force you to pay extra for some functionalities. All of the features are available in the introductory plan. The only difference between plans is how you get billed and how many candidates you can assess:

1. Growth—$299, billed quarterly (up to 30 assessments)
2. Scale—$597, billed annually (up to 300 assessments)

Homebase vs. Workello: Pricing & Features

Check out how the Homebase compares to Workello:

Conclusion

Homebase is an HR platform for small businesses that rely on handling multiple locations with ease. These businesses are not strictly office-based—the software is aimed at companies in hospitality, retail, caregiving, and other service-providing industries. It contains some recruitment features, but they are far from what most standalone ATS solutions provide.

If you’re a company that wants to hire professionals in various niches and require them to test their knowledge before you give them an offer, you might struggle with Homebase. Some job positions attract thousands of applications, and you’ll have a tough time answering thousands of emails manually since the platform has no automations.

Workello automates email correspondence, allows you to assess candidates before hiring them, and optimizes the entire hiring process to minimize manual work. Sign up for Workello for free and launch your hiring funnel in under 3 minutes with our pre-configured settings.