IBM Kenexa Reviews

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.

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.

We are using IBM Kenexa for onboarding employees.

It reduces the amount of time it takes to share drives and search for a person. It is quicker joining documents when you can just put in a person's name and find the entire onboarding history and recruitment options. 

That makes it easy because it's all centralized, it's easy to download and navigate.

The most valuable features are that we can upload documents and download them on demand. This is very useful. It could be joining documents, or employment screening, or your employment history. 

It's easy enough to upload, find, and retrieve whatever you are looking for.

It does not synchronize well with other ERP tools, such as SuccessFactors or Workday.

I would like to have a better and more user-friendly interface. It needs to be a bit more intuitive. It's not as intuitive as SuccessFactors.

In the next release, I would like to see a better user interface, better speed, and a bit more customization without having to reach out to IBM.

It is quite stable. There have only been a few IT downtimes. 

Also, it is quite dependent upon how SAP functions. 

It is more or less stable most of the time and in general, I do not have any problems with stability.

It's pretty scalable. It's currently onboard deployment.

As long as you have the server capacity, it's scalable.

My current team supports approximately 20,000 employees. The data for approximately 20,000 employees is uploaded on it, year on year 20,000 to 25,000 a year. We also have 35 people who are active administrators on any given day.

At this moment, we do not have plans to increase our usage because our hiring has come down due to the COVID. There are no current expansion plans, at least until the middle of 2021 maybe 2022, given the current trend.

Technical support has been fantastic. Anything that we raise is generally resolved in 24 hours. 

Complicated issues might take a while, but we haven't had many or even any in the last year.

I have not used another solution prior to IBM Kenexa. I have been using Kenexa for a while.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The deployment was done in-house.

This solution requires maintenance. We have a team that is designated to maintain this it.

I would recommend this solution to others, but I would say make sure that you have the basic infrastructure and training for the people. It's essential.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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?"

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.

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.

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.