IBM Kenexa Reviews

I think, for us, the most valuable feature is obviously beginning to understand the various components of our employees – how they're feeling, how engaged they are – in addition to obviously being able to attract the right talent to our organization based on who we're looking for. Obviously, talent continues to be a highly competitive space that all organizations are playing in. The retail side or the retail industry is highly competitive. It also faces unique challenges in terms of our proportionally high number of part-time workers.

We're looking very forward to getting the BrassRing application in, so that we can really create a unique offering and a unique relationship, in particular with that part-time workforce, as well as how do we create almost a one-on-one recruiting relationship and then building on that relationship as people move forward with some key talent areas, in terms of ecommerce, the whole digital space, as well as analytics and finance folks. Those are pretty hot competitive spaces for talent.

First of all, for Kenexa in particular, the tell-it-as-it-is survey has improved our organization. We acquired a pharmacy retailer three years ago. Kenexa enabled us to actually standardize our employee engagement across both of those organizations. We knew at an enterprise level what was going on but, most importantly, how were people starting to feel about being acquired and joining the broader company space. It's really helped us focus and target activities around communication, leadership, and synergies in terms of bringing people closer and more into the fold of the broader organization.

I think for us it's still really early days. We're getting the survey settled in. At a recent conference, I was looking forward to the employee voice regional user group because I really wanted to understand the employee voice piece. Once-a-year engagement kind of seems to be a little bit lagging in terms of how we can actually shape and improve organizations, so I was looking forward to understanding a bit more where IBM Kenexa's thinking is going in terms of pulsing with the employee voice and how that kind of integrates and works with tell-it-as-it-is, and the other two applications we have; it's just too early to know.

I think the only opportunity maybe we have is to be more intuitive on the tell-it-as-it-is survey side for end users; for leaders to be able to kind of run the data and cut it the way they want to. Right now, we still run it out of our C of E for engagement, who actually does training with the HR business partners. It would be nice if that could be simplified into a way whereby it's really intuitive for our leaders and make it really super easy for them just to go in and pull what they want. That's an additional piece of administrative work that we still do. It's important work that we do, but if there was a way to simplify that, so that leaders can just directly go in and manipulate that, that would be great.

We have not had any issues to date in terms of stability. With Kenexa, we have just implemented Workday, so we are hoping that we'll have a pretty seamless integration with the talent acquisition module, so our fingers are crossed on that front. We'll see. We're going though that work right now.

Right now, from everything I've seen, obviously based on actual experience with Kenexa, scalability is not an issue on the tell-it-as-it-is survey side. We're in the process right now of figuring out how we should scale that to our franchisee businesses. We've had a very positive experience to date on scalability. In terms of the Watson, again, it's early days. I think there's lots of potential application for us to leverage that, but I think the starting point for us is to figure out what are the insights that we're actually looking for in order to leverage that technology. Based on a conference session I recently participated in, in terms of talent acquisition, I'm looking really forward to actually getting the BrassRing piece installed in our organization in the new year.

I personally haven't used tech support. I know that my folks particularly on the tell-it-as-it-is side have used it, and they have an absolutely fabulous relationship with IBM Kenexa. We've always found them very supportive, very responsive, and very open as far as finding solutions, even if it's not kind of necessarily already in a cookie-cutter solution.

The acquired pharmacy retailer was previously using Aon Hewitt. We were using another solution through a third party, and it was somewhat customized. Again, we're happy to really have that baseline from which we can compare across the entire enterprise, so that we know that we're comparing apples to apples.

I was not involved in the initial setup at my organization. It was just before I joined. It was about a year before I joined, so I wasn't involved, but I have not heard of any issues other than the normal understanding what needs to happen and IT being clear on how we're going to integrate it into the broader network. We haven't had any issues.

When selecting a vendor to work with, I think the most important criteria, first and foremost, is that the technology has been well thought through. It's been tested. It's ready to launch. What's really important to me is the relationship side. Do we understand each other? Do we trust each other and are we on the same side, in terms of the values of both organizations and what it is we're looking to achieve?

I think the advantage of Kenexa is the degree to which we can configure to meet our specific needs. It is very configurable.

It makes it easy for us to assess whether the candidates that we're looking at. We use BrassRing to determine whether the candidate that we're looking at meets the requirements for various jobs. It helps recruiters review applicants quickly and be in touch with candidates on a real-time basis. It also keeps recruiters informed throughout the process because of the rules automation manager (RAM) and other items that we've set up to advise them when certain conditions are met.

Improved integrations: There are all kinds of issues with integrations, hires failing. It's on us as much as IBM, but we need to work together to figure out how to make integrations work better.

It seems fairly stable. It's a stable platform in terms of what has been released in recent upgrades. They're all pretty minor; hasn't been anything revolutionary. The updates that have been made are all for the better.

Scalability is not really a concern for us. We're only in the US and we deployed to everybody immediately.

We use the global support center pretty extensively whenever there's an issue. They have been phenomenal.

We were replacing our HCM on our ATS. It was an outdated system.

When selecting a vendor, the most important criteria for me are consistency, configurability, being on the front edge. All those things.

Initial setup was pretty complex; relatively complex. We just have the applicant tracking system, not the whole HCM, so comparatively speaking, it's not as complex as it could be.

Look at maintenance as well as initial investment, and the ability to work with you after the initial deployment.

From an ATS perspective, I think the most valuable features are the ability to get candidates through the process quickly and cleanly, and to maintain OFCCP-compliant documentation.

We're able to adequately screen all of our candidates across the board through all different business units, and maintain accurate reporting and analytics as a result of that.

I would like to see them continue to make things easy and quick for the recruiting partners internally, or any recruiters who use the system. Faster load times would be great, instead of waiting for the little load window to close out.

It's been really stable the last couple of years. I've seen a huge improvement on the BrassRing Kenexa side to improve their network connectivity and systems overall.

Kenexa’s scalability has been great. We can grow and expand our use no matter what. Right now, we're doing a launch in Hillerod for a new manufacturing plant and we'll be able to seamlessly incorporate our business process for that launch.

I have used technical support sometimes. It's good. It's very responsive. I have a CSM, so I have personalized service, which is always great.

The decision to invest in Kenexa was made before I arrived at the previous company.

I was not involved in the initial setup of Kenexa at my current company. In a previous life, I was. It was a little rocky, as they always are, but we went live on time and that's all that matters.

I have not directly used any of Kenexa’s competitors.

Make sure it can fit your needs. Do a mapping and an outline of your end-to-end process, and make sure that BrassRing or Kenexa can meet those needs.
The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor is compatibility with other systems; to be able to integrate seamlessly.

The most valuable features are its ease of use and the ability to customize it; making it really individualized for each company’s needs and each of our different business unit’s needs.

It has allowed us to reach more candidates, and in a quicker, simpler fashion to get the data we need to improve our hiring process.

I’d say the things that we’re most looking forward to that are on the roadmap are the mobile abilities that they’re coming out with and always improving on. We’re excited for those. When they have all the features we need with it, we’ll definitely implement it.

Some of the analytics that we heard about, we’re excited to see some of those and how we can implement and maybe use those in our business.

The reporting feature currently is our biggest struggle point. Getting the data we need and in the fashion that we need it is a current struggle point for us.

We use BrassRing and we’re implementing Onboarding soon.

I think it functions well and they’re always innovating and adding new features that we’re always implementing and making the process better.

I don’t see anything that we haven’t been able to apply it to. We work with basically, five unique different types of business functions in our company. I think it’s very far reaching.

Technical support is very helpful, thorough. They’re usually fairly quick, unless it’s a really complicated issue that no one can figure out.

I have not used similar solutions since I’ve worked here, except for onboarding; we currently use other companies for that.

Kenexa definitely has the customization. The system works however you build it to work; when you set it up, it’s going to work the way you set it up. Generally, if there is an issue, it’s not a Kenexa issue. It’s a setting you have or the way you originally set it up to make it do something. If there is an issue, I would get with whoever your agent is to see a better way to do what you’re wanting to do, rather than looking for another solution in another program or something like that.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is whether their product can be used across our wide variety of business units effectively and customization, as well as follow-up support, trying to get features to work the way we want or it to work across those business units.

From everything I’ve seen and heard, I would think Kenxea is probably one of the top three, if not the best, in the business that they do and the things that we use them for. Not working with another company, it’s hard to really give them an accurate rating, but from everything we’ve seen, and all the support and work with them, I’d say I’ve given it a fair rating.

As a system administrator, the automation tools via RAM are probably the biggest bonuses for us to facilitate automation and to reduce the manual workload on our end user internal customers.

We rely heavily on RAMs to automate activity in Brassring, including:

• Autoupdating HR statuses based on form completion (e.g., update to HR status background passed when background check results post)
• Autodelivering notifications to recruiters and candidates when specified milestones have been released (e.g., when a candidate completes onboarding, the recruiter can be notified to start first day prep)
• Automoving candidates from evergreen folders to ‘real’ reqs as new jobs are opened

I think one of the biggest benefits that Kenexa brings is the scalability. As an organization, we are an extremely high-volume organization and what we found is Kenexa is one of the few platforms that can effectively manage the amount of concurrent sessions from both candidates and internal users and allow the flexibility to continue to scale up.

I think a lot of the things that are already on IBM's roadmap are what we're looking for: better candidate engagement tools, better social media tools, the responsive platforms, making the candidate experience that much better.

If there was one thing that I would love to see, it's improvement in the back-end tools, what the sys ads and the configuration leads engage with. Those seem to be trailing the front end development.

The reason I’m not rating it with five stars is because of its sheer size. Some of its time-to-market enhancements are slower than I would like, but that's the nature of the business I guess.

By and large, IBM has maintained a tremendous stability record over time, both in terms of end-user access as well as candidate access.

We have used technical support quite often. We have a dedicated support team that is part of our overall master service agreement. We have had the luxury of developing a long-term business partnership with them so that they understand our setups, our processes, our operational execution of work.

Candidly, getting support from our dedicated help desk team is highly efficient. They also take a tremendous burden off of a very small system admin team to allow us to focus on improving the database, and allow them to triage and solve for the day to day issues.

I do not have any experience with other solutions on the scale of Kenexa, but I've worked with probably eight different ATS platforms over my career.

The most important criteria when I’m selecting a vendor is the people because, regardless of how well a tool works, it's going to fail sooner or later or the users are going to fail in how they engage with it. Being able to work effectively with both your account management team but also your support team and your day-to-day interactions really makes or breaks the relationship, my commitment to how we interact with those people and what my long-term goal is with any particular vendor. People come first, absolutely.

Again, I think my company switched to Kenexa based on scalability. This is the third organization I've worked with that leverages Kenexa as its primary ATS. Each of those organizations had a unique need in terms of stability and scalability. I think that's why we continue to engage with Kenexa and keep them as our ongoing partner. We don't tend to scan the marketplace regularly looking for the next best thing. Kenexa seems to be doing a real nice job of keeping current and delivering the solutions its customers are looking for.

Listening to the customer is probably also another reason why I appreciate IBM's partnership; they not only take the feedback but they give you actionable road maps against that feedback and/or explain why they don't. Your feedback doesn't go in a black hole, which I truly appreciate.

Most of the other applications I've used are mid-tier, so SilkRoad provides a pretty robust tool. It's not, in my opinion, as mature as Kenexa's product. There are some limitations in how much configuration access you have to it. Probably, one of the best things and worst things about Kenexa is it gives clients a lot of flexibility regarding how they customize the system. In other platforms, it's more off the shelf; use it as it's configured and you're not able to build your own workloads into it as robustly as we would like.

The best piece of advice I could give is understand what your users truly need and what they don't need. Don't buy the entire kitchen sink because it's hard to leverage all those tools until you've actually been able to test them in a sandbox environment and be able to do proof of concept. I think the product leads and the support staff at Kenexa are great at leading you down a path, so listening to that guidance as opposed to coming forth with your own vision and not wavering off of that is probably another piece of advice I'd give.

We use BrassRing, the recruiting tool. The reporting feature is what I use, the data insight tool, to be able to pull the data and then provide some analytics on the data behind it.

That's the most valuable feature, for me personally, in my role.

It has definitely improved my organization by being able to help the recruiters move candidates through the interview process. We just recently started to use more of the capabilities with the different statuses such as the RAM triggers and so on; we’re starting to streamline more of the processes. They definitely save time and make sure things are happening at the right speed and when they need to happen. They're definitely a big help, I would say.

Improvements can be made from the back end, with the workbench.

Even though I know lots of people have mentioned issues with publishing from staging to production, and I know that's something that IBM said they're aware of and they might be working on already, that's one of the bigger things that would be helpful.

I've never had any stability issues. There’s been no downtime. Occasionally they'll let us know that there's an update happening, but usually that's during off hours; things like that, so no biggies. It's not affecting my business.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

So far, we've been expanding throughout the US and we'll be expanding to use it globally in the next year or two. We'll be seeing it scale more but so far, expanding throughout the US with Kenexa BrassRing has been helpful getting everybody on the same page.

I have used technical support a couple of times such as filing the tickets and getting them to work through the issues. They've always been helpful, whether it's helping on the call or with the email resolution, it's all been pretty good.

I did not previously use a different solution. I just wasn't part of the HR talent acquisition world yet.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I think one the bigger advantages is that it is backed by IBM with the ability to bring in a bunch of tools to build an entire platform. It's not just one tool that does the ATS and another tool that does HRIS. Being able to have IBM that supplies all of those and create a platform is, I think, pretty useful.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is definitely brand recognition. If you see other companies that are in your industry using the same tool, it let’s you know that it can be applied to your business. Something with a proven track record.

There's obviously some room to improve and they're making updates all the time but I think right now, even with talking with some of my colleagues, they say it's better than some of the other solutions that they've used. Drawing from some of their feedback, it seems like it's a good tool. I don't have any previous experience with other tools.

Applicant tracking is the product’s most valuable feature. We're a federal contractor, so we can run reports to comply with all of the federal government regulations.

We are able to make decisions based on real data, reporting and metrics, and we're able to flow a large number of candidates through the process in a short amount of time.

We're about to launch the Talent Suite, so we're excited about that. Just the ease of use of setup for implementing new regions would be really helpful; if they would get that more templatized and make it easier to launch in new parts of the globe.

My rating is not higher because of the support, honestly; the global service center model. We have 20 hours per month and we're a big, giant company. It's a struggle, honestly. The ticketing system works great, but it's a struggle sometimes to get changes fixed with their model: You create the system and then hand it to the customer.

We've had really good luck with uptime and run time. Typically, it's very low time when things go down; maybe once a month or something, for a short period, and they're very quick to fix.

We are in currently three regions. We have US, Latin America, and Asia Pacific, so we have it all over the globe. We're a global company, obviously, and we're launching in one more region. It's a struggle sometimes to implement new regions. I will say that. If I were to be honest, it is a struggle, but I heard that they're working on some ways to fix that.

I have used technical support. My team owns the relationship with the global services center, so we use them frequently. Their ticket system is fairly straightforward. It's a little slow, but they do a good job.

I did not previously use a different solution; paper. Ridiculous, I know.

When selecting a vendor, the most important criteria is whether they can manage a company our size. It's really about, can they scale? Are they large enough to support a really complex organization?

Before choosing this product, we looked at the top five, including PeopleNet and Taleo.

In 2011, the company chose Kenexa because they could do both RPO and applicant tracking system. We've since separated the RPO, so we are 100% applicant tracking with them now, but originally that one-stop shop is why we went with them.

I would definitely and highly recommend the applicant tracking system. It's a very good system. I would not recommend RPO, honestly.

I think the feature that really stands out for us, at least lately is, the fully responsive experience for applicants. We have our end-to-end application experience fully mobile responsive. They also host our career site, so having that be mobile responsive, and really configurable for us has been awesome. I'd say the most valuable feature is being responsive, and then a close second for us is probably the automation capability.

They call it RAM, the Rules Automation Manager. The fact that basically any action in the system can trigger something else to happen automatically, allows us to really automate our different processes and accommodate our business needs. We have a lot of volume, so having things happen automatically is a good thing. Those are probably the big two.

First of all, it has improved the applicant experience. We went from, last winter, if an applicant went on through a mobile device, they would actually be told, "Stop, now you have to go to a computer to finish your application." If they did manage to get through, past that, it was a lot of pinching, and a lot of pages, and a lot of text.

I think having the responsive be something that's standard – we're not paying a third-party vendor to get that functionality, it's just something they do – is one of those game changers for us. There aren't many companies out there that can say, Our end-to-end applicant experience is responsive, but on top of that, we didn't have to engage another vendor to do it. We're able to just do it with our current tool, and do it pretty well.

We have about 50 requests for enhancements in the system right now. We're a little anal. To be honest, it's smaller things. It's making sure that the responsive recruiter experience includes all the functionality that the non-responsive recruiter experience has today, before we transition to it. It's just simply continuing to see that evolution, without loss of functionality.

I also do want to see more robust reporting capabilities. Not getting into talent insights necessarily, but the embedded tools offering a little bit more dashboarding capability, tables, that type of thing, is something that I'm chomping at the bit for, because if I have to do another pivot table in Excel, I'll go mad. I would love it if you could set them up in the reporting tool to happen automatically and deliver. I know from the feedback I've gotten from the Kenexa development team that they're working on it.

I've been with Best Buy since 2013, but prior to that I was with another client. What I will say is, I feel like it's more stable now than it was a few years ago. I think what I noticed was when IBM purchased them, there was that time where they were trying to identify where Kenexa fit. What I've really seen over the last two years is a commitment and a doubling down by IBM to do that talent component right. It's really made the product feel, not only stable, but they're investing in it. It's evolving much faster than it was a couple of years ago.

We're huge. It's plenty scalable. We have multi-million applicants a year, and we hire almost a 100,000 people a year. It does it great; we don't have issues during our highest volume time of year, when we're getting 30,000 applicants a day. It processes them just fine. The size and volume have not been an issue.

Part of why I think we're actually expanding our relationship with IBM is their Global Support Center is fairly standard, compared to other support centers from other companies. Where I think that they're different is we have our clients success manager, as a contact. They're our personal person, for helping us become expert; for helping us better understand the product. They can help us solve problems in the system. They're a technical expert. There's a really big benefit to having not just the tech support from a point of view of, "I have a ticket, I'm going to enter it", and having that be done well, which it is. The real benefit is, "I don't have a problem; I'm just trying to solve a business problem, but I don't know how to do it.". They are experts who can help me find that answer.

We previously used Kronos for our retail operation, we previously used Taleo for our corporate operation, and we used SuccessFactors for our career site.

For us, IBM evolving to be able to provide that end-to-end responsive experience was a lot of what drove our decision to go away from SuccessFactors, because we really utilized SuccessFactors or Jobs2Web to provide a responsive careers site and search engine optimization. The world's changed, and you don't need to be quite as intentional about that as you used to be, and then our real priority was a great mobile experience. That's something IBM could provide, and have it more naturally integrated with the ATS, which was why we went there.

The reason we went away from Taleo was we had implemented Kenexa for our entire retail organization successfully. After having two years of success with that in retail, it didn't make any sense to have multiple platforms. We like IBM. IBM has been great partners for us. They're really invested in our success, and they see us as a valuable client. I think when your vendor treats you like you're important, listens and responds, that's a differentiator, and that's something IBM does very well. We weren't getting that with the others.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I was brought in five months after the initial setup to help with some challenges.

I wasn't with the company when they decided to go with Kenexa for retail, so I'm not entirely clear on all of the vendors they looked at. The only ones I know of are: of course they looked at expanding the relationship with Kronos; I know they looked at Taleo; and then I know they looked at IBM. I feel like there were likely more involved, but I was not part of that decision.

If you're going to purchase this, it's awesome, and it can do pretty much anything you could imagine. Don't over-engineer it. Start simple. Start clean. If you want to add more later, you can. I'd say that the ability to dramatically customize this tool is a blessing and a curse. If the people involved don't understand how to do it, you're going to do it wrong. Get the right talent on board to be able to do it right.

During a presentation at a conference, somebody said, First optimize your process, then systematize it; don't systematize a process, that isn't ideal. Take that time, before you implement the system, to get it as clean as possible, and then make sure you've got experts involved in your implementation, and you're not over complicating it.

As far as selecting a vendor, I think there are two pieces to consider. Number one is we want them to care as much about our success as we do; it's not just a matter of, they get the contract paid, and then we're on our own.

Number two is seeing that they're evolving the product. We don't want to invest a ton into implementing them, and then have them stagnate. We need them to continue to evolve with the industry. Beyond that, we also need them to really prioritize our success, and if we're not successful, they view that as a failure by them and they will help us resolve that.

My rating reflects the technology; there are always opportunities. I think their commitment to doing something special and their commitment to taking a care of their customers supports the four-star rating.

I would be concerned. IBM has a different legacy than Kenexa has, and I hope that Kenexa keeps its identity, because if it does, it will maintain that really customer-focused mentality, and stay at four stars. I would be concerned that it would get a little too big business, if it gets more IBMified – if you get what I mean by that.