After evaluating several options, including BrassRing and Taleo, BrassRing was chosen because it offered the best balance of cost-effectiveness and compliance. While the other system matched compliance requirements, it was deemed too expensive in comparison to BrassRing, which made it a cost-effective choice while still meeting compliance needs.

I wasn't with the company when they decided to go with Kenexa for retail, so I'm not entirely clear on all of the vendors they looked at. The only ones I know of are: of course they looked at expanding the relationship with Kronos; I know they looked at Taleo; and then I know they looked at IBM. I feel like there were likely more involved, but I was not part of that decision.

When we renewed our contract, that gave me the ability to look at competitors that are out there and confirm our decision that, yes we are with who exactly we need to be with. We looked at SuccessFactors and Taleo. By far, the system with Kenexa was worth us continuing down the path that we were on. We chose to continue with IBM because there aren't a lot of people that can truly handle our volume, so you wouldn't want to test the limits with just anybody. One of the key things is the partnership that you have with them, and it is very much of a partnership and being involved with them directly. That makes a great reason to continue the relationship with them.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are support, partnership and scalability. Can we use it? Can they handle our volume? Is there system up? Whether it is configurable is huge for us, to be able to have custom fields is something that I've taken for granted. I realize that not all companies have something simple such as custom fields to be able to import in your process. We all like to think we do it differently than everybody else.

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.

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.

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 decision to get Kenexa happened before I joined the team.

It's part of the formal tenure process. We would've considered several different providers and both the large players that all of us, the suppliers that you would typically expect a large bank such as Lloyd's Banking Group to consider, but also a number of players that were slightly new to the market as well because everyone comes with a different model. It was understanding at that point in time which is the right model for us and the high-performance engagement model and the kind of connection between emotional engagement and rational engagement made it a very difficult decision for us, but in the end it was the right decision for the group.

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.

I have not directly used any of Kenexa’s competitors.

I have not used similar solutions since I’ve worked here, except for onboarding; we currently use other companies for that.

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.

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.

We went through a RFP process. However, I do not have details on which vendors were evaluated.

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.

For us, the decision isn't, do we use another solution? The question is really: Do we use a solution? It's not about another solution. Do we try and create something? Do we do something more informal? I think that the 2016 IBM HR summit convinced me that we need to continue to do some of the work we're doing, and maybe even get more sophisticated and work with IBM to do something more sophisticated than what we've been doing.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is, in general, value for money. Their understanding of our business needs and how that solution really solves a business problem or helps us avoid one. Also, we look for a responsive, flexible partner, and that's what we have with our team, with IBM’s Rob Ball and the team in London.

There were other vendors, but I don't want to provide details. The main reason we choose Kenexa in the past was the big benchmark data they had.

In general, when selecting a vendor to work with, the most important criteria for me is for them to understand what I want, the strategy, to actually deliver what they promise, and to be a partner – not vendor/client but partner.

We looked at PeopleSoft.