Download the Talent Management Buyer's Guide including reviews and more. Updated: July 2022
IBM Kenexa was previously known as IBM Smarter Workforce, Outstart.
"Kenexa was fairly priced. However, in 2019, before I left my previous organization, they significantly increased their pricing. It can be affordable, but their pricing is going up. It is not just licensing; it is how many applicants you have in your system on the database side."
We used Kenexa BrassRing as our recruitment database, where we received all applicants. We also used it to run compliance reporting based on our applicants. When you are a large employer, certain reports are required if you are federal contractor, such as, affirmative action plans. However, we did utilize it's onbaording capabilities.
1. Very easy to use, flexible, customizable UI for recruiters.
2. eLinks feature allows recruiters to easily share candidate resumes and covers letter with Hiring Managers via email. Hiring Managers did not require a login, so doesn't cut into user costs
It is extremely user friendly. It is very flexible in managing recruitment, especially when you have thousands of applicants as we did. On average, we had over 20,000 applicants each year, and Kenexa Brassring made it easier to manage a large application pools.
It was very easy to customize by recruiter preference. Each recruiter has the options to customize their own view, which personalizes the recruitment experience. We really liked that is was flexible in and each recruiter could set up their preferences. It didn't have to be set up so that everyone had to have the same landing platform, which was very helpful. As someone who trained other HR people on how to use the system, it was very easy to pick up and learn.
The reporting tool is helpful, but it is not as user friendly at the recruitment tool.
Their Workbench site, which is the administrator site that you use to update your website, is not user-friendly. When updates are required, it is not easy to manage, mostly because Workbench is not user friendly. Their virtual Workbench training was lengthy (about 8 hours) and ultimately did not help end users become pros at using Workbench.
The last time I used it was in 2019. It was the SaaS version.
It was very stable. We rarely had outages with Kenexa Brassring.
It is easily scalable, it is owned by IBM which is a global organization. I would guess they could scale anything. We had about 15 to 20 people in HR using Kenexa, and while hiring, managers did not have login access to Kenexa Brassring, we could easily share applicants and they could provide feedback without ever logging in.
Technical support was not always great. They tend to push you towards workbench admins or paid support.
It was already set-up prior to my arrival on the job. Kenexa launched the updated UI platform in 2019, which required me as the admin and Workbench user to go in and make decisions on what the website would look like while updating our applications.
It does require maintenance on occasion, especially if you need to make updates to applications, which sometimes maybe required if there are changes in the law, for example.
Kenexa Brassring was fairly priced. However, they recently increased their rates significantly. I believe the pricing was based on licensing and how large the database was.
Overall, from a recruiter's perspective, it is an excellent product. It is probably one of the best recruitment products out there in terms of usability, ease of understanding, and management of large applicant pools. However, the person who is trained on the backend to manage the site should likely be maybe more of an IT person with an understanding of managing websites from a backend perspective. Although Kenexa Brassring tries to make it easy by using an easy-to-understand language, it is still very complex if you are not experienced.
I would rate IBM Kenexa Brassring a seven out of ten overall.
