IBM Kenexa Reviews

The most valuable feature of Kenexa, I believe, is the flexibility to configure the tool the way that you need it to work; with the various tools, offer letters, forms, and the way that the system's structured. Being that it's an off-the-shelf system, the flexibility makes it easier for companies to configure the system, to suit their needs.

It's benefited our organization, because we don't have to worry about all of the background configuration, and coding, and development. They provide the tools, and Kenexa behind the scenes does the work of all the coding and developing the product. They give us the flexibility to do what we need to do in our business.

Being in a silo of my own world, my wish would be that everything that's available in their legacy views would be moved into their new Talent Suite products, so we could move over to that. We have certain features and functions that we cannot move away from due to government regulations and compliance needs, and some of those are not available yet in the newer UI.

Overall, the stability is very good. Very few blips here and there, but overall it's excellent.

Scalability seems to be there; falls in line with the flexibility to configure the system. You bring in new business areas, you have the flexibility to configure it and set it up to where you can roll those portions or new companies right into your existing system, seamlessly.

I have occasionally used the help desk. Their help desk support works. They are responsive. They do their job.

We were previously using a home-grown system; one that was developed by Lockheed Martin. It didn't have the scalability or flexibility that we needed to modify and adjust to the growing needs of the staffing world.

For our company, initial setup was pretty complex, because we were trying to combine multiple systems into one. There were a lot of differences between our internal business areas. However, all that was overcome and we were able to implement it, on time, with the solution that worked for everybody.

I do not know the other vendors that were considered, now and why the company eventually chose Kenexa. I was not involved in the RFP process.

When selecting a vendor to work with, the most important criteria for me is that the vendor has a proven track record, and good referrals from other customers. Somebody that's going to stand behind their product, and be there to help you out when you need the help.

It's a great company to work with. I've been using the Kenexa BrassRing since 2007, so I've been using the product for quite a long time, and seen how far it's come. I just think it's a good tool, with great flexibility.

I’m giving it a high rating because, whenever we do run across critical issues or things that we need to get addressed right away, they always seem to rise to the occasion, have our back, chip in, and do their part to help us get the task accomplished on time.

There are a lot of valuable features in Kenexa: being able to bring a lot of data together quickly; to be able to join the data; and then to be able to get insights in a time-frame that's a lot shorter than the regular SAS or process like that.

The biggest improvement for us is it's made us think; the outcomes coming out are something that we possibly wouldn't have thought about. The idea is to be neutral going into it, understand the types of insights that come out and to be able to pursue them as hypotheses; see if they make sense for us to continue with.

We're still putting our notes together on where we’d like to see improvements. We haven't got a detailed list yet, but the cool thing is we've got a process to document what we want changed, to promote that and show it to IBM. Most cases when we did that in the past, they've been able to say it was on the roadmap already. There are no examples right now, but we do have a list that we're gathering right now.

The price can always be better. I'm not saying the price is high, but of course I work with a budget. Bottom line is it's basically fine.

We're looking at ways to, for instance, to be able to get outputs, and drop it into Excel, if we want to. Right now, we can only do part of that, but not as much as I want to.

Stability has been fine. We've had some timeouts but they've been quickly fixed. Stability has been fine. There have been no issues at all.

It’s scalability is changing. At first, we had a problem getting a number of the transactions in there; now, that's changed. Every time we've had issues or problems, they've been addressed and have been fixed. We've got no problems with scalability or outages or anything.

We’ve used technical support, and it’s been great, fantastic. We have ways of submitting tickets if we need to. We've been updated on potential upgrades, etc. The support has been fantastic for us.

We were tired of thinking of what we wanted solved a year and a half in advance, because it took that long to get a project set up and get the budget approved and processed. The ability now to be able to take data, load it yourself, ask the business questions and get the answers on your own process with the business just made it a lot faster, and the cognitive solution gives us some insights for us to think about. It just made business sense in so many ways: time, money, etc.

I was involved in the initial setup. I've got a person by the name of Kevin Rush. He's been more on the technical side but as far as the setup, I was involved since day one. Initial setup took some time. Once the tool was set up for us to be able to use, it took a bit of hand-holding from IBM, but now we're at a place where we can load and link, and do a lot of things with it ourselves.

To set it up was tough, and when I say tough, it was more about learning for us, but we're laughing now with it, for sure.

Basically, we didn't consider any other solutions, because we've had such a long relationship with them and we did some work with them before this process. Our working agreement and their commitment to service didn't take us long to pick them.

Don't be afraid to start. The longer you wait, the more money you probably spend on new people leaving. The biggest thing is, if you're looking for faster ways of getting information about your people, about your customers, I would say start with what you have and to grow it. A lot of people are scared to start because they don't think they have enough information. Their information isn't big enough for this to use but the fact of the matter is you can use this on any kind of scale.

My rating is partly because I need to know more and learn more, and also I know there's some things on the roadmap they're looking to develop and once those come in, I think it's going to be even better. I love the idea that they have roadmap ideas. I love their support, but like all of us, we have a little bit of room to grow.

The two most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor are: 1) obviously, the product has to have some kind of nuts and bolts behind it; and 2) also the support. We've seen a lot of sales people come through, but after the deal is signed is when you see the true signs of how they're going to support us. For me, I'll look at the support people before I look at the sales people.

Great value and flexibility in an ATS, mainly through the automation and the configuration through Workbench you can do to manipulate the candidate experience to really be something that candidates like and allows them to apply to your site easily and put them in a pipeline for recruiters to access and move through a process and get somebody hired.

We've really used Kenexa to, at this point, look at the application process, make sure that it is as clean as possible and be able to get that time down, so candidates don't walk away from the experience, as well as automate a lot of things for recruiters, administrators, all those types of folks, so they aren't having to do manual tasks. The system is really doing that for them.

I think IBM is working with a lot of analytical tools and with Watson and analytics, diagnosing system pain points, problems, queues, those types of issues to enhance the system. I really like the roadmap where they’re going. Also, the enhancements they are doing to gateway questionnaires, those types of things, to improve the mobile process is really good, things that we're trying to implement at T-Mobile.

I think there is some administrative things that could be easier in terms of Workbench and streamlining that process; configuration of different things. I think the overall experience is great. Branding is something that I think can always be worked on. It seems to be really hard on the marketing side to keep up, to be honest with you, but I think overall in terms of an ATS, it's a great tool. There's a few things there that could always be improved with anybody. It's really hard to give a perfect rating.

We have great up-time with Kenexa. I've used some of the competitors before. I hadn't had that experience. We've had really great up-time with that. A lot of our questions are answered within a reasonable time.

Scalability with Kenexa is very easily done. For us, we have three administrators that serve over 100 recruiters, 30 recruiting co-coordinators, multiple managers on top of that; talent acquisition staff of about 150 people. We've actually taken some implementation. We have an email box where we get system issue questions, problems, troubleshooting, learning all those types of questions from folks. We originally started with implementation of over 1,000 emails a month. Now we're down to 200 or 300 emails a month, and that's I think contributed to the scalability of Kenexa because we can put everything in place and allow just a few folks with an email box doing enhancements, those types of things, to make the system work and run for everybody.

I think technical support is really good. You definitely have to give them the right information to go ahead and get the problem solved, to get the questions answered, those types of things. I think people are very willing to help and once you learn what they need, it's not a problem.

It wasn't really my choice to choose Kenexa, but I was very happy when we did because of the experience I had with those competitors.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I was hired post-implementation to go ahead and help with some of that.

Think about what your business needs, talk to your customers. What do your customers want? Do process mapping, do some Lean Six Sigma sessions with those customers and really find out what the core needs are. Then provide those to the customer. Kenexa may not be the option you want based on those needs, but I think it's very likely that it could be.

I think stability is an important criteria when selecting a vendor to work with. How long have they been around? Who do they work with? You don't want to get somebody on their first shop or their first job. You really would like to have somebody else be the guinea pig. The vendor should have that experience, so you need something there for that.

I think Kenexa's history, along with IBM, is a great point for them on that. Then you need somebody that does the work. You need them in the presentation to be able to really look at your business requirements that you give in the RFP, be able to answer those questions thoughtfully and correctly, and provide some information for you to make a decision on that product based on what they can do for you.

For us, the most valuable feature is the ability to completely onboard our associates online, their electronic onboarding portal, as well as the automation that they have in their hiring system that allows us to automate a lot of our hiring process and eliminate those manual touchpoints.

It allows us to streamline our hiring process, and also standardize our hiring processes across the organization.

We're really looking forward to what Kenexa has in store for data analytics in the future with their Talent Insights tool. We're also really looking forward to some of their enhancements to their onboarding portal, specifically for recruiters and hiring managers.

We just recently upgraded to their Talent Suite, which is their latest version of the software. Their onboarding portal saw the most change, and I would say it's been really improved from a new-hire or a candidate experience. We are looking forward to some additional enhancements from a hiring manager perspective.

There's always more work to do. There's always improvements that can be made, but overall, we're very happy with the product.

The stability's very good. Overall, we typically don't have any unexpected downtimes during the month.

Scalability is great. We use the system for everything from a very low-volume, high-touch corporate recruiting model to our tax office, high-volume approach, which is 80-100,000 people each season.

Technical support is good, responsive and efficient. We always get same-day response on our tickets. We may not always get same-day resolution, but we always get same-day response. Their customer-service agents are always very friendly and knowledgeable about the system.

Prior to Kenexa, we were on a homegrown system for recruiting, but our corporate recruiting was on another system. We switched to Kenexa because it was important for us to have all of our recruiting, both for corporate and our tax offices, under one system. We wanted to make sure all of our candidates were together; we were looking at a holistic candidate pool, really, one database for an applicant-tracking system.

Also, just the functionality that Kenexa provides in comparison to the other vendor that we were using.

The decision to get Kenexa happened before I joined the team.

Functionality, I think, is the number one criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with, but a very close second would be the customer relationship – really, the relationships and partnerships that we have as a client, and knowing that if we have a problem or a question, we'll have somebody that's there to answer it for us and to help us on our journey.

The streamlined, simplicity approach of Kenexa makes it simple for me to navigate.

It makes us, I think, more efficient when it comes to candidates and making sure that, with the candidates that we have, we are able to resource and search candidates in an efficient manner.

As with pretty much anything, it could be more efficient.

No solution's perfect but in the same token, that's not for me to decide. I'm just looking at it being user friendly for what I'm doing, and that's providing great talent to our company. As far as being a user of it, I don't see any problems as of right now.

I think it's very stable, I don't see it going anywhere anytime soon. I have not encountered any stability issues at all.

No scalability issues either. On a broader scale, I think it's a great program that we could use. I think a lot of companies are using them now; using Kenexa a lot more now.

I have not recently used technical support; I haven't had any opportunities there at all.
We do have technical support available to us. We have a person who's in charge of tech support. That person, if she has any kind of problems that we have in the field, we send it to her and she gets us an answer back. She does it in house, and then if she needs to take it outside of corporate headquarters, she'll go there as well.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor are transparency, reliability, and also reputation.

Basically, for what I use Kenexa, it's good for me for right now. It's perfect for me right now, if I have any opportunities as far as from a technical standpoint, I know I'm going to answer within a day or so.

One of the best, possibly worst things if not controlled, is the configuration and permission control possibilities within the system. These possibilities provide the opportunity to automate and control processes that would otherwise be manual and/or not locked down. If you are not in control of your system, it can become a nightmare.

Prior to implementing Kenexa, our basic data quality was poor. We were unable to provide the required transparency to the business about recruitments in process, or empower them to take control of their approval processes. Now, having provided this, amongst many other things, we have a much closer relationship to the business.

Enhancement releases can't come fast enough, and you only know what is being released a week at most in advance. The documentation of the changes and configuration requirements are often following months after the initial release.

If you happen to be an early adopter of enhancements, it can be a frustrating process, as it is hard to decipher together with their support whether an issue is a bug or working as intended (a change in the way something works).

I have been using it for four years.

There was a two-year period after IBM bought Kenexa during which things were rough. But for the last two years, the system is quite stable - as long as you are in control of your own system.

Technical support is 7/10. Sometimes it is hard to make the first level of support understand basic issues, even if it is clearly documented.

Yes, we previously used a different solution. We switched because we placed as much weight on the vendor being a sparring partner, as much as providing a powerful system.

Initial setup was complex, but the system is! I wish that I had spent more time understanding what we were saying yes or no to.

We implemented it in-house. Take the time to understand what you are saying yes or no to. If a functionality is not available to you, and you are requested to log it as a RFE (Request for Enhancement) - there is little chance of it happening in the near future.

Two years after IBM bought Kenexa, we are really starting to see the system evolve for the better. It is the best ATS on the market, and IBM are one of the better vendors to work with.