Blake Ostrander
People Operations Manager · 11-50
1 review written · 4.0 average
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Reviews by Blake Ostrander
★★★★★
The thing that finally sold my team on Zoho People wasn't the attendance tracking or the self-service portal. It was the integrations. Six months in, and that's still the part I talk about most when someone asks me how HR admin works at a growing startup with 30-some employees and a dozen different tools in constant rotation. The Zoho CRM connection alone changed how we handle onboarding paperwork for new hires who get client-facing roles right out of the gate. Timesheets link up, data flows where it needs to go, and I'm not manually exporting CSVs at 5pm on a Friday anymore.
The broader ecosystem story is genuinely compelling. Zoho's own suite plays nicely together, and for a company our size, that's a real advantage. We're not a Fortune 500 with a dedicated IT team to stitch things together. What I need is for the tools to mostly talk to each other without a lot of hand-holding, and Zoho People mostly delivers that. The form customization is also solid. Drag-and-drop adjustments that would have taken a developer request at my last job took me about twenty minutes here.
The one gripe worth naming: integrations outside the Zoho universe are a bit thinner. We use a project management tool that isn't part of the Zoho family, and getting that handshake to work cleanly took more effort than it should have. The native connections are great; the third-party ones feel like an afterthought sometimes. Customer support was helpful but slow on that particular issue. Still, for what we pay at this stage of the company, the value is hard to argue with.
