What is our primary use case?
Cornerstone covers learning, recruitment, succession, and performance. For me, Cornerstone is the best for learning and performance. It has the core functionalities, but it's not a module in itself. It just has some data, and this data helps to use other modules, such as LMS.
What is most valuable?
Its user-friendly interface is most valuable. You can configure your welcome page and design it the way you want on your own.
It is the best one in the market for learning. It has a good functionality where you can follow your learning, stop learning, and remove learning. You can do a lot of actions. They invest a lot in learning. Every three months, there is a release, and any bugs that we have found are solved every three months. They have a good support team.
What needs improvement?
A minus is that Cornerstone doesn't provide the admin the ability to create their own content for learning. So, you can just manage the content.
They don't invest a lot in some of the other modules. For instance, Succession is a very good module, but it is still a small module. You cannot do everything that you want. Similarly, with the HR module, it is complicated to put all the strategies in Cornerstone because it is very hard to find a workaround.
They should also work on the Recruitment module. There are a lot of bugs in this module. From my experience, even their support team is not proficient in this. They don't have a level-three support team experienced in the Recruitment module.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Its stability varies. It is a stable solution. If you have found a bug, you can escalate it to support. They have a very good support team, and they can solve it, but sometimes, it can become unstable. When Cornerstone releases some patches, they can have an impact on the solution. If a fix is already implemented, they create a patch, but they don't inform. They just publish a paper on this patch, and if you don't go and look for this information, they will make it live, which can have an impact on the solution.
You have a lot of rules. You need to be a little bit experienced to know all the tips to have a good implementation without a lot of bugs. So, it's stable when you have all the support of the team so that if you have any bug, they can find a solution very quickly. On the other hand, like any other solution, when they do new releases, sometimes, these releases can have an impact on what you have already done.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is definitely scalable. Cornerstone is built for big companies. Mostly, all people in the clients' organizations use Cornerstone. They have a portal, which is like a virtual HR. It depends on the module, but they can see their career and their training.
When Cornerstone is for the whole company, it's just the rules that change. You have end-users. You have managers, and you have functional HR managers. The visibility is different from one user to another. You can put a function in the solution that's deployed for all.
How are customer service and support?
It depends on the client because it's a part of the package. All the clients do not have support, but if they do, it is a good thing because you can communicate with someone who can find the solution for you.
Their support is good. There is also a help page, and you have all the functionalities on the help page. Sometimes, you just need to go to the help page, and you can find the bug or issue that you are facing.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I am a consultant. I go to companies that have other information systems, and they change to Cornerstone. They usually change because it's simple. The budget might also have a role to play in it, but it's more likely because Cornerstone is very well-known for learning. Sometimes, they change just for learning. They try the Learning module, and then they find it better to also take the Performance module so that they can link both modules and have more information about all the paths for the career of the employees. So, it starts with the Learning module, and then they start to deploy everything. They end up deploying Performance, Recruitment, Succession, and other modules.
Like any information system, it has ups and downs, but for talent management, it is a good solution where you can find several functionalities to help HR. I saw the value of Cornerstone when I worked with other information systems.
How was the initial setup?
A plus point of Cornerstone is that they give you the steps to deploy the solution for each module, which makes the process easier because you have the methodology. You just need to follow the steps, but it also depends on the client. You cannot follow the same process for all clients. So, you take the key steps of the methodology, and then you adapt it for your client.
The number of people required for deployment varies. Sometimes, you need more than 10 people. For instance, for a company here in France dealing with water and waste, we needed about 20 people for the project. It also depends on whether it is the first deployment. If it is the first deployment, you would need at least five people. You would need one to two junior consultants for implementation, and you would need others to better understand the need of the client and analyze the impact. Cornerstone is super, but it cannot do everything. So, you need to analyze the project.
The implementation can take a year and a half if you don't have anything else previously, or if you have another information system and you want to move everything to Cornerstone.
When we deploy Cornerstone, sometimes, we first deploy it on a small scale to see how they react. That's because we need to do change management for the users, but we can extend it to the whole company and business worldwide. The more we extend it, the more interesting it gets because we have a lot of information and reports regarding the whole company.
What was our ROI?
Clients do see an ROI but not in the first year. They need to wait for two years at least to have some data and start seeing the improvement in learning. They can see that people are doing more learning because they have more reminders. They can see the performance and the percentage. It helps to have a global idea.
What other advice do I have?
I can recommend the product, but you need to find a good consultant to implement it. That's because the first implementation will play a big role in the future of the tool. If you implement it in a good way, you don't need to hire someone to fix all the bugs later on. So, the first deployment has a big impact on the future usage of the tool. You have security rules and other things in Cornerstone, and if you don't know the solution very well, things can get very hard in the future.
I would rate it an eight out of ten.
*Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: partner
