IBM Kenexa Reviews

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?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

It has the ability to manage international postings. You can also move the candidate through the selection process. Kenexa does an extremely adequate job with this.

It allowed for truly global listing for all open positions. That is about it.

There are tremendous opportunities for improvement. Unfortunately, it would require a total scrapping of the existing system and completely building a new system from the ground up. Kenexa BrassRing (2xB) is a completely mediocre system that does an outstanding job of being completely average at doing all the basic applicant tracking activities. If you want cutting edge 1997 technology, then 2xB is definitely the tool you're looking for.

Configuring 2xB is painfully difficult. Changing the initial setup is even more difficult after you go live. Customer support is some of the worst I've ever encountered. In some ways, it is like a case study in how to provide world-class terrible, awful, slow customer and technical support.

I have been using it for three years.

The product was so fussy to make any changes that we tried not to do anything different. Clearly this isn't a great way to support a business. I was not around for the implementation, but I had to deal with the outcome. Unfortunately, the system was slammed in without much thought to, well, anything. Cleaning up this mess was so difficult, it took weeks to get anything changed or modified, even for the simplest stuff. It was easier to live with what we had and work around it than it was to change it.

Terrible, but not just terrible. World-class terrible. Truly the worst I've ever had to work with. It felt like someone knew exactly how to provide world-class customer service and purposely did the opposite. It felt like this was an experiment to see how much abuse and frustration their customers could take. My poor contact was stuck with way too many clients to support. He was put in a position where he had to rely on other Kenexa team members to do anything... and they were awful about responding to him. (I don't know why he didn't quit; it was such an awful job and position to be in.) This meant that it took WEEKS and MONTHS to get anything done. It is the WORST customer service I have ever dealt with in any vendor, either in my personal or professional life. Kenexa is the primary factor for leaving my previous employer and working for another company that does not use Kenexa.

2xB is extremely complex and convoluted to set up. I joined the company after the implementation of 2xB. I had to live with the consequence of that implementation. From that perspective, 2xB was an admin nightmare. Their Benchmark tool required specialized training at significant cost. Documentation is spotty and filled with gaps. The Benchmark tool was not designed for customers. It was for developers, so there are fields and functionality in locations in the tool that don't make any sense as an Admin user. I would have to jump to three or four screens to do something simple. Even after the training, I only had 80% access to the configuration. The 20% required working with the account management / tech support contact (which was difficult, at best). Simple changes became month-long projects. Glitches happened where it would take weeks to sort out. It was generally one hot mess after another.

I did have the misfortune of trying to implement a garbage piece of software called BrassRing Onboarding or 2xO. 2xO was created by brain-damaged monkeys in front of keyboards. It was so buggy, so inflexible, so difficult to configure and so unfriendly to the candidate that it was literally faster to have the candidate fill out a piece of paper (not a PDF...paper) and mail it back to us than it was to use 2xO. IBM did virtually no development around this tool. It was an orphaned product that no one wanted... including any customer who tried to work with the product. Truly atrocious customer support did not help either. 2xO wins the award for WORST applicant tracking software of all time. 2xO should be and is an embarrassment for IBM. IBM should refund every dime and profusely apologize to any customer every laid eyes on this piece of... well, I'll keep this professional.

An in-house team implemented it; however, it would not have mattered what was done. There is no way to fundamentally be successful implementing technology that is this fundamentally flawed. It is not designed for today's recruiting world. My advice: Don't buy or implement Kenexa. If you have bought this product, you have made a horrific choice and you should cut your losses now and start over. BrassRing 2xB is the equivalent of the rotary-dial telephone in the age of smartphones.

Don't buy Kenexa, even if it is offered to you for free. There is no return that will ever justify the cost of purchasing, implementing and the ongoing support required to use Kenexa.

I was not part of the selection committee that picked Kenexa; I used Kenexa after it was selected and implemented. However, I have selected and/or used iCIMS, Taleo Enterprise, Taleo Business Edition and Deltek Talent Management. iCIMS by far was the best ATS I've used and should be the one to seriously consider. iCIMS is reasonably priced, provides great customer support and stays up with technology (especially the social media tool). There are many, many, many other applicant tracking/talent management tools that are better priced, have more functionality, cutting-edge technology, provided better customer service and really streamline and positively transform recruiting. Kenexa fails on all these areas.

DON'T BUY KENEXA. Literally any other applicant tracking solution is better. Well, one exception. I would encourage my competitors to use Kenexa. Diverting my competitor to burn up time, money and resources with no return on all this effort would give my company a competitive advantage. That would be the only scenario I would encourage to use Kenexa.

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.

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?