Using BrassRing was helpful because it made our processes more digital, which is important nowadays. IBM, in the beginning, provided great support and showed us how to connect with other tools, which was valuable. But recently, since the ownership changed, it hasn't been as innovative, causing some clients to look for better, more modern options.

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.

It has given us the ability to have a unified platform. Previously, we had more than one technology that we used for applicant tracking, so it's given us the ability to have one technology, ensure that we're compliant, consistent and repeatable on everything that we do. It gives us great flexibility to do that, and being in the cloud gives us great flexibility. We have 1,750 locations, and it gives us great flexibility to ensure that they all have a great experience as well.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

Using Kenexa and the conversations I think that we have now had, we have focused and worked really hard with the team in London. They've been great. I think what they've done as well is they've really challenged the thinking. What we've benefited from is having a partner who challenges us, who is not afraid to call out stuff.

Basically you want a partner who makes you think. We don't need a partner who delivers surveys. There are numerous companies out there, suppliers, that will run a survey for us. It's about the ability for a partner to make a bank as complex and large as ours to really take stock and think about what it is we want, where it is we're going, and the progress we're making. I think that's really what we get from the IBM team.

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.

BrassRing integrates into our internal employee platform (workday) as well as our background check vendor (TalentWise). Without this solution, we would have more administrative functions and would need to hire more HR employees. This solution also allows for easier external communication with potential employees.

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.

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.

1. Very easy to use, flexible, customizable UI for recruiters.
2. eLinks feature allows recruiters to easily share candidate resumes and covers letter with Hiring Managers via email. Hiring Managers did not require a login, so doesn't cut into user costs

I haven't dealt with it that long, but the obvious improvement is that the Applicant Tracking System has provided us a system to provide a better candidate experience as opposed to other systems. However, I'm not really sure regarding long-term impact, because I haven't been working with it for very long.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This tool is very powerful and the ability to tweak it in order to meet desired processes and controls is valuable. We could get data on recruiting and effectively utilize it to make business decisions. Furthermore, we could comply with regulations owing to the right controls within this tool.

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

It's given us data from which to make better decisions about what we need to do in order to have a highly engaged workforce. It's helped us specifically align the engagement information with business strategies and link addressing some of those issues to better business outcomes.

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.

We are much faster delivering the reports. We are able to do different analysis on the verbatims with the survey analytics tool. We use the Viewpoint and that is an absolutely powerful tool; it is extremely helpful to get more insights, and to start a conversation with our employees to grow and improve.