IBM Kenexa Reviews

We're using a couple of programs from IBM Kenexa. We are running the annual survey with IBM Kenexa. We use the Viewpoint Platform. For the Viewpoint Platform, we have the OrgMapper, which is extremely helpful to actually be able to copy our internal HR data on OrgMapper to reflect the same setup.

The most valuable feature of the survey is that it's a link we can use. We can share the link with all of our managers. Managers can use the link 24/7, so we don't have to support the managers and it actually frees up the time for HR and the support to be able to do other more useful things for the managers, instead of just copying reports and sending reports.

We are much faster delivering the reports. We are able to do different analysis on the verbatims with the survey analytics tool. We use the Viewpoint and that is an absolutely powerful tool; it is extremely helpful to get more insights, and to start a conversation with our employees to grow and improve.

There are tools that actually are not there where clients need them, especially the survey analytics to analyze verbatim in different languages. We survey in 14 different languages and analyzing the verbatim other than English is not possible and that is a downside for us, absolutely. I would like them to offer that in more languages. Especially those at the global companies need that.

The stability of the tool is okay. We didn't have major issues.

I have not used technical support.

We had regional and local surveys, but there was a decision made to get global surveys and then we were looking for vendor.

At the beginning, initial setup was complex. We had to learn. We are in contact with Kenexa since 2008 and working with them since then.

There were other vendors, but I don't want to provide details. The main reason we choose Kenexa in the past was the big benchmark data they had.

In general, when selecting a vendor to work with, the most important criteria for me is for them to understand what I want, the strategy, to actually deliver what they promise, and to be a partner – not vendor/client but partner.

Be open about what you want; be straightforward and challenge.

In my opinion, the reporting tool and configuration features provide a better customized solution in regards to applicant tracking.

This tool is very powerful and the ability to tweak it in order to meet desired processes and controls is valuable. We could get data on recruiting and effectively utilize it to make business decisions. Furthermore, we could comply with regulations owing to the right controls within this tool.

The user interface could do with an overhaul. Also, some screens that are not configurable should be opened to clients for customization.

I have used it for almost two years.

Rarely any stability issues were encountered. There were a few minor issues from time to time but overall this product is fairly reliable.

We did not encounter any scalability issues.

Technical support is required for configurations but integrations with other tools would need a technical resource. Most tasks can be accomplished within the user interface with a little training. IBM provides a lot of support for this as well.

We had used KRE, the other ATS offering from Kenexa before BrassRing and switched to this tool for better functionality.

Initial setup was complex because BrassRIng is quite flexible. Essentially, it required a lot of decision making such as drawing on a blank slate.

We went through a RFP process. However, I do not have details on which vendors were evaluated.

There is a need to have a dedicated resource for maintenance and training. The tool is configurable but can also get complex to understand, depending on how the recruiting process is designed.

With IBM Kenexa BrassRing, we can search for past requisitions, we well as edit and open candidates’ talent profiles. The DIT reporting tool is extremely crucial in creating our own reports. The “my candidates” overview that shows the statuses is very helpful. I like the "Admin tool" with regards to communication templates and forms, and the ability to change them.

BrassRing integrates into our internal employee platform (workday) as well as our background check vendor (TalentWise). Without this solution, we would have more administrative functions and would need to hire more HR employees. This solution also allows for easier external communication with potential employees.

In regards to the requisition search function there is a ton of filter options, of which need exact matches. The other thing that is missing here is the Business Title option. For example a position will have the HR Job Title “environmental scientist 1” but the real business title field is “Biologist.” If I want to search for a biologist requisition, I have a tough time doing that because nothing comes up if I put it in the job description which really is my only other option of a field to use.

In regards to the errors - sometimes the HR Status will freeze, or the communication option.
The tool functions inconsistently. In the past year, there has been a significant increase in the amount of “internal errors” that are displayed.
Other errors include when you click to add a form for example it will come up with an error and you have to exit and try it again. What I was trying to capture here is that a lot of our recruiters have had problems with errors and having to do the same command/clicking the same thing multiple times before it works. In addition, the search function is a bit complicated in terms of requisition searches.

I have used this solution for three years.

We encountered IT stability issues in our attempts to get the pages to load. This occurred almost daily.

The technical support with IBM is very responsive. I don’t usually open tickets anymore, but in the past I was pleased with the technical support.

I would advise other customers to link this solution to your other systems for a streamlined ATS.

Of all the current talent analytics offerings on the market today, IBM Kenexa Talent Insights is the most comprehensive end-to-end, data-agnostic analytics tool. It has instant infographic and dynamic dashboarding capabilities. You can literally click, drag and drop a massive data set into the tool, wait about 3-10 seconds, and suddenly be looking at 10 instantly relevant data analytics cases.

What Talent Insights is really is an aggregate of several different statistical and correlative tools like SPSS and others that use the computer power of IBM's Watson technology to derive deep insight into mountains of data points at incredible speed.

The output of these calculations is often a spread of possible patterns that a practitioner can then explore, or choose to ignore and instead type in, using natural language processing, their own inquiries.

The myriad number of choices that are available to explore result in a fairly daunting set of options that a more simplistic UX might 'dumb down' to appear simpler and easier to utilize and explore. So, getting trained on the user of Talent Insights is crucial to unlocking its full capability. It's a grown up, more advanced version of a data analytics tool vs an over simplified version, which doesn't necessarily require advanced expertise, but does require a user to at least be a critical or empirical thinker, such that you can properly interrogate the patterns and trends emerging.

If you compare Talent Insights say to what Workday offers (in module insight vs data agnostic insight) it appears more complicated, but Talent Insights is really just the sort of tool you want if you're serious about mashing up commercial, HR, customer data to solve for real value added business challenges. Workday, Oracle, SAP or other tools whose primary objective is managing HR days only won't give you that option.

This it appears slightly more complicated, but if you are looking for real statistical computational capability, then IBM is your answer.

This tool is not a 'quick fix' bit of magic, but rather a sophisticated statistical package that utilizes machine learning (think of it as self-driven insight and pattern matching – one step short of true artificial intelligence). It does this by analyzing and matching data points across a vast array of information that you provide in an Excel spreadsheet.

Imagine being able to pull data from your CRM, Finance, Marketing, Customer Service and HRIS systems (ATS, LMS, HRIS, employee survey, etc), and lump all of that into one spreadsheet. Then the statistical package inherent within IBM Kenexa Talent Insights goes to work linking, matching, correlating and seeking statistical significance in the relationships in those millions of data points to put forth insightful connections. It also tells you, on a percentage basis, just how statistically significant those relationships are. This is basically a score to indicate just how relevant a particular line of interrogation of the data is. You can ignore those elements with low significance and look at those with a greater than 60% significance rating that might yield powerful insights.

How does this improve your business? You can look at literally every aspect of your business where people are involved and interrogate who your best people are and why. You can address career paths, training, recruitment, pay and reward programs. You can find out just about anything related to individual or team performance (depending on how narrow your original information set was), and derive some incredibly powerful insights like you've never been able to before - in a matter of minutes, or perhaps hours, as opposed to days, weeks and months. You can then download your findings, correlations, and potential causality into PowerPoint presentations using one of 10 different infographic displays to help you tell your story to the Board or CXO members.

Finally, HR is not simply about HR anymore. It's about improving the business across all talent management and employee lifecycle-related aspects. It's like we finally have a microscope to see organisms at a cellular level, opening up a world of insight we've never before had.

I would say that it could likely be made slightly easier to consume and work with - less scientific or engineering oriented - but IBM Kenexa Talent Insights is about the most powerful and useful tool I've seen. You quickly get used to the interfaces, features and functions, as it only takes about a few days training before you are able to wiz around it and master its capabilities, which I've still not found the bottom of yet!.

I've been an IBM Business Partner since March 2016, so I only started using it very recently.

Sometimes there is a slight delay in calculation time, about a minute or two (not hours) while Watson is crunching the numbers. This usually owes to the fact that there are huge data sets that the supercomputer is chomping on, and you're not the only person out there using it. There are no core stability issues, as the software is rock solid: classic IBM resilience and polish.

Absolutely not: this system was built for scalability at its heart. Using a supercomputer like Watson is all about scale and size. IBM Kenexa Talent Insights can manage over a million cells of information. Its capacity is increasing by the day, as IBM keeps adding to the overall scale of the computing power.

We received excellent technical support. IBM is working hard to ensure that this product line goes to market with plenty of support and customer care. I've been able to reach out to the sales engineers and data scientists. If they can't help me, they connect me with people who can.

There were really no other solutions available. Certainly, there is nothing out there for HR analytics today that comes close to this level of holistic capability.

It was somewhere in the middle. This has more to do with sorting out data sources, cleansing the data, narrowing and improving the data before inputting it to Talent Insights. As the old adage still holds: "garbage in, garbage out." So the up-front work, which you'd have to go through with any HR analytics implementation, is paramount. IBM supplies you with the consultants and data scientist support to ensure the best possible outcome. After it's up and running, and you have been trained to use the tool – easy peasy. You immediately get the hang of things, can generate your own insights, interrogate the data anyway you like, and build presentations within minutes. From that perspective, I'm thoroughly impressed. If there are any issues with the complexity of using this tool, it's usually with the client organization’s data challenges, not with the tool.

IBM currently offer a minimum 10 licenses that generally land at about £35,000/year. Additionally, consulting and implementation (which depend massively on the size and complexity of your organization), can add an additional £20k - £40k to that price; but that's a one-time, one month time frame cost. IBM are also now looking at being able to offer Watson Analytics for general data analytics use (not IBM Kenexa Talent Insights - and thus not necessarily HR-oriented in its approach). Monthly, non-recurring costs are around £100/month without any obligations; but again, this is just using the Watson Analytics capability without the HR wrapping.

I looked at Visier, CruncHR, OrgVue and others. None were nearly so all-encompassing, end-to-end, highly flexible, information and data agnostic; easy to plug and play, or as powerful on the back-end reporting, dashboarding, and infographic display variability. IBM is carrying a very big stick with this product set, perhaps the biggest in the market at the moment.

ERP companies like Workday, Oracle, SAP, and the like say that they offer workforce analytics; but they are married directly to the modules they were built to interrogate. So with the other companies, you are immediately locked into looking only at absence management, performance management, pay management, each in isolation from the other.

IBM Kenexa Talent Insights allows you to go way beyond that and look at all HR data simultaneously, not to mention just about anything you can drop into a spread sheet format, such as Finance, Sales, Marketing, Customer Care, Survey, you name it. You can interrogate all of it at once: can't touch that.

Make sure you work with the data scientists via your sales representative to examine your data set availability within your organization. If you are a mega multi-national, you could run into data protection regimes, pockets of isolated data that haven't been connected to global corporate data, and other similar challenges where systems are not fully integrated. Again – these are your hold ups – and the more you understand what a task it will be to unlock these data sets, the better.

You will also need executive sponsorship to help support the implementation of this stuff across the organization (which you should have for any big, multi-departmental implementation). It can help to have well-placed advocates, superusers trained and ready. Don't forget to share those insights when you get them because they will open doors all over the company to leaders, managers and employees looking for more insights as to how they can do things better, smarter, faster, and more intelligently.

The most important features are that the instrument can be customized, that we can get important and relevant data about our employees, and the responsiveness of our client team from IBM has been phenomenal. It's been a real partnership.

It's given us data from which to make better decisions about what we need to do in order to have a highly engaged workforce. It's helped us specifically align the engagement information with business strategies and link addressing some of those issues to better business outcomes.

I don't know if the issue is what can be improved upon in upcoming releases. It's about understanding how we can adapt and be more flexible, because the survey that we've been doing is one of those point-in-time surveys and not real time. The minute we roll it out, the organization changes, and then all of a sudden there are issues such as, “This isn't my team. How am I supposed to manage this data?” There’s probably a solution that exists already with IBM or Kenexa. I'm just not that familiar with it.

The team didn't find the reporting tool that easy to use, in terms of pulling their own data, slicing and dicing it, combining groups. Some of them did, but for the most part, it felt like a bridge too far. With regard to our managers using it, the minute we saw that some of the HRBPs were having an issue with it, we didn't even dare suggest that our managers run their own reports.

As a platform, it is highly stable.

It is highly scalable.

I haven't personally used technical support. I think my team has.

I wasn't involved in the original decision to get Kenexa. I'm involved in our ongoing decision to remain with Kenexa.

I wasn't involved in the original setup.

For us, the decision isn't, do we use another solution? The question is really: Do we use a solution? It's not about another solution. Do we try and create something? Do we do something more informal? I think that the 2016 IBM HR summit convinced me that we need to continue to do some of the work we're doing, and maybe even get more sophisticated and work with IBM to do something more sophisticated than what we've been doing.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is, in general, value for money. Their understanding of our business needs and how that solution really solves a business problem or helps us avoid one. Also, we look for a responsive, flexible partner, and that's what we have with our team, with IBM’s Rob Ball and the team in London.

Definitely consider it. I knew Kenexa before they were IBM, and at first I thought, "Oh no, here we go, get swallowed up by this big, mammoth organization." Now I think that being part of IBM just means that I've got a whole rich array of other things to choose from that can plug and play with some of the other solutions. I think there's been real value to having Kenexa be part of IBM, and I think the 2016 IBM HR Summit was one of them.

I think they've got a smart solution. I want to see what else we can do with Kenexa, and I think that they're part of an outstanding culture of customer service.

The most valuable feature is the standardization of all of the basic aspects of recruitment process management. I think it's the idea of opening and closing requisitions, and the workflow to enable efficient movement of a mass number of candidates through a product to get all the way from job sourcing through to hiring and onboarding.

Our organization require large volumes of hires on an annual basis. It's the nature of our industry. We bring in 35,000 people a year, so it's a necessary thing for us to have technology in place to do that in an efficient way with as few people as possible; to enable 700 different restaurants to be able to manage their own hiring experience; and so it's an adaptable tool. It's flexible, but it's also engineered for simplicity.

If you look at Kenexa's direct competitors – and we always look at the landscape of who's doing what in the ATS space – for a company like ours that does high volume hires of relatively low skilled workers, simplification's important; simplification for the hiring manager, simplification for the applicant. I think the more we can incorporate engineered ease of use, I think that's better. Same thing on the system admin side; the more we can engineer ease of use so that you don't have know HTML, you don't have to really go through days of training to be able to easily configure pages, I think all of that is an important thing for Kenexa to continue to make progress on.

I've found that there's a consistency to the product that we have not had concerns with downtime issues and looking forward that there's always a robust road map that gives us some idea of where the technology is moving so that we can be prepared for those shifts.

As we add new locations, we're able to quickly bring on. Any given location’s going to hire 100 to 150 people a year, so it's pretty easy for us to just bring on a new location, add them to our account, get them up to speed, and train the management teams; it's not that difficult.

I have not personally used technical support; people on my team do use tech support often. We've logged tickets. We've found the process to be very easy to navigate. We understand who to connect with and again we think that they're on top of things as far as getting issues resolved quickly.

We were using Kenexa at the time we separated and we had the opportunity to either decide to move away or to keep what we had. We did a quick look at the landscape and we balanced the cost associated with change and change management, what we thought the upside benefits were of going somewhere else, and we didn't see that the landscape offered meaningfully better solutions. We felt like Kenexa was robust enough and dynamic enough that it met our needs, so it didn't make sense for us to disrupt 700 locations and reteach them something. That was a primary factor why we stayed with Kenexa.

I was involved in the initial setup. We configured our own instance. We were separated from a former parent company about 2 1/2 years ago and at that time, we set up our own instance, so I've been a part of it ever since we stood that up. It was straightforward; it was good project management. Wwe had the resources we needed from the IBM side to make sure that we stayed on time and on task. It's not different from a lot of other large system implementations. There are a lot of moving parts. There's data migration. There are other things that have to be taken into consideration. Yeah, I think it went as well as it could, given the size and scale of the project.

We've looked at talentReef. We've looked at WorkDay. We've looked at a number of other solutions, including People Matters. We also use IBM assessments, so we've had an integrated platform on the assessments front.

We also take a look at who's playing in the ATS space, as well as who's playing in the assessment space, and make sure we feel like our solution is competitive with what our alternatives our, both from a functionality and from a pricing standpoint.

One of the most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor is partnership. By which, I mean it's a combination of support on a daily basis, as well as planning for the future, and it's also about the business side of things, being able to work effectively on the contract itself, extensions of the contract, how engaged is that business partner in meeting our needs. The important thing is to know that we don't want to be just 1 of the vendor’s 500 customers. We want our needs to be uniquely heard and uniquely met. We feel that we get that attention from IBM. We've got the ears of all the right people. We get the dedicated time. They've partnered us with other similar customers, but they never lump us into a big group where we can't state what's most important for Red Lobster.

Do your homework. Make sure you know your own organization, your own processes, your own needs, and that you make sure that the vendor that you're considering fully understands that, can embrace what you're trying to accomplish, can paint a picture for you of where you're going to go, and that they will be there post-implementation in a support capacity and a continuous planning capacity, etc.

In my mind, it’s at the 80th percentile of the solutions out there. I think if there are 20% of solutions that are better, it's probably only because they were invented more recently and engineered with social in mind, with text in mind, with a more modern dynamic user in mind. I think the great thing about it is they've got a lot of invested time, energy, and knowledge. The downside is it's a system that was created many, many years ago and so it just evolves. You think of where it goes next and you add something, but you keep bolting on or adding on. It's probably not as clean or as efficient as something if you start it from scratch and said, "What's the simplest, easiest way to get a person from here to there?"

BrassRing, the applicant tracking system, has brought a high level of automation, specifically for our mass-volume hourly processes. It has allowed tremendous labor savings and efficiency across our recruitment processes.

Kenexa is highly configurable in a way that has allowed us to bring all of our varied businesses into a single applicant tracking system platform. That's allowed us a level of consistency and centralization that's brought efficiencies.

The lead manager tool is still very new. We are excited to see where that goes. Right now, it's not advanced enough to meet our needs, but we would hope that at some point in the future, it can advance to the point where we could have one platform of systems in that area.

The upside of Kenexa is that they're constantly reinventing, so they have constant releases with new features and upgrades. The downside of that is that they do experience fairly regular issues with stability that they're not always as quick to respond to as we'd like them to.

We're currently using the system in 44 countries from everything from frontline to executive recruitment. The tool works very well across all of our groups. It’s very scalable.

Our other tool was purchased by another vendor and was planned for retirement, so we had no choice.

Initial setup was definitely a major project for us. We're a multinational, global corporation, so it was a phased journey. Once we got a few of our clients into the system, it became much easier. Now, as we're continuing to bring on smaller areas, we're getting very fast at being able to bring people on.

We evaluated other options, but it was a while ago. I don't even think the other ones are still around.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor is whether the functionality can actually support the needs of the diverse client groups that we have within our business.

Try to keep it simple. Don't over engineer things. Kenexa comes with a lot of customization ability, so it's easy to configure something that is highly complex and more complex than you need. It's difficult to undo some of that later.

Make sure you spend plenty of time testing, because the tool is always evolving. There is always going to be room for changes or issues that you want to make sure you catch before you launch.

For us in particular, I love how configurable the system is; I can use the same technology for different parts of my business. I can run a unique process for store hourly hiring as I do, and then create a different and separate process to use for corporate applicants as well. If you design it, you can build it.

The level of configurability and the partnership are huge for me. I’m not in it alone. If I'm trying to nail down a business process, if I'm trying to build something, they're there, no matter what. If something happens with the system – it's technology; stuff happens – they certainly are there to help us get on board as fast as we can.

It has given us the ability to have a unified platform. Previously, we had more than one technology that we used for applicant tracking, so it's given us the ability to have one technology, ensure that we're compliant, consistent and repeatable on everything that we do. It gives us great flexibility to do that, and being in the cloud gives us great flexibility. We have 1,750 locations, and it gives us great flexibility to ensure that they all have a great experience as well.

I think additional features or improvements will be all about mobile and responsive design, continuing to see what the possibilities are there and anticipating what could be next. I don't know what's next, and it's great because they help us try to all get together and brainstorm about what could be next.

Maybe there's some room for improvement in the functionality around the actual tools that we build with. I'm looking forward to them continuing to make improvements on that, on the back end of the house, where we use it most of our time. I’m looking forward to process improvements with that and with ease of functionality; I think we'll look forward to those as well.

We have been live with Kenexa for seven years.

I had been using this system for five years, and very rarely – you can probably count on one hand the number of times – there would be a significant impact to down time in the system, which is huge for a company like us. If the system is down, because of our volume, every minute counts. If something does happen, they're always extremely reactive. When things happen, we've been on the phone late at night not just with tech support, but with engineers and some heavy duty hitters, which is huge.

We are in the middle of growing and using it in new parts of our business. We have some allied businesses that we've purchased, so we are in the process of looking at adding them on. You can develop because of that configurability that I’ve mentioned. I can make a very branded process for other parts of my business; on that same system, but it can be specifically for that particular business.

I was not involved in the implementation, which was just before I came to Lowe's. We've done lots of significant projects since then, but I wasn't on the direct implementation.

When we renewed our contract, that gave me the ability to look at competitors that are out there and confirm our decision that, yes we are with who exactly we need to be with. We looked at SuccessFactors and Taleo. By far, the system with Kenexa was worth us continuing down the path that we were on. We chose to continue with IBM because there aren't a lot of people that can truly handle our volume, so you wouldn't want to test the limits with just anybody. One of the key things is the partnership that you have with them, and it is very much of a partnership and being involved with them directly. That makes a great reason to continue the relationship with them.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are support, partnership and scalability. Can we use it? Can they handle our volume? Is there system up? Whether it is configurable is huge for us, to be able to have custom fields is something that I've taken for granted. I realize that not all companies have something simple such as custom fields to be able to import in your process. We all like to think we do it differently than everybody else.

Know what you want, because when you are taking a look at a whole bunch of different companies, it all starts to look the same. You have to be able to ask those in-depth questions, and be able to probe and better understand what they're presenting to you, because it's a shiny object. Even with our other business partners, as we were going through this, they were distracted by the shiny objects. You have to dig behind those and understand. There have been people in the past that have said, “Oh, this looks like a great system. Here is the PowerPoint.” Unless I can actually look at a live demo of something, I'm not really interested. It's interesting how some people still use sales and use PowerPoint slides.