The most valuable features of BrassRing are its ability to keep us compliant with local laws and its organized structure. It is great at making sure we follow all the rules in the places we hire, which is very important. The way it is set up, with requisitions and HR, just makes sense and works well, especially for big companies.

I think the feature that really stands out for us, at least lately is, the fully responsive experience for applicants. We have our end-to-end application experience fully mobile responsive. They also host our career site, so having that be mobile responsive, and really configurable for us has been awesome. I'd say the most valuable feature is being responsive, and then a close second for us is probably the automation capability.

They call it RAM, the Rules Automation Manager. The fact that basically any action in the system can trigger something else to happen automatically, allows us to really automate our different processes and accommodate our business needs. We have a lot of volume, so having things happen automatically is a good thing. Those are probably the big two.

For us in particular, I love how configurable the system is; I can use the same technology for different parts of my business. I can run a unique process for store hourly hiring as I do, and then create a different and separate process to use for corporate applicants as well. If you design it, you can build it.

The level of configurability and the partnership are huge for me. I’m not in it alone. If I'm trying to nail down a business process, if I'm trying to build something, they're there, no matter what. If something happens with the system – it's technology; stuff happens – they certainly are there to help us get on board as fast as we can.

The most valuable feature of Kenexa, I believe, is the flexibility to configure the tool the way that you need it to work; with the various tools, offer letters, forms, and the way that the system's structured. Being that it's an off-the-shelf system, the flexibility makes it easier for companies to configure the system, to suit their needs.

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.

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

Great value and flexibility in an ATS, mainly through the automation and the configuration through Workbench you can do to manipulate the candidate experience to really be something that candidates like and allows them to apply to your site easily and put them in a pipeline for recruiters to access and move through a process and get somebody hired.

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.

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.

We chose Kenexa for a number of reasons. One was because of the science that sits behind our survey approach. What we liked specifically was the high-performance engagement model and then, over the course of the relationship, in helping us to understand much more than we've ever done before, the relationship between emotional engagement and rational engagement. This is where behavioral science and business psychology is really starting to play a much more important role in Lloyd's in helping us to be able to ask the right questions in the right way through the right channels.

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.

With IBM Kenexa BrassRing, we can search for past requisitions, we well as edit and open candidates’ talent profiles. The DIT reporting tool is extremely crucial in creating our own reports. The “my candidates” overview that shows the statuses is very helpful. I like the "Admin tool" with regards to communication templates and forms, and the ability to change them.

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.

The streamlined, simplicity approach of Kenexa makes it simple for me to navigate.

It is extremely user friendly. It is very flexible in managing recruitment, especially when you have thousands of applicants as we did. On average, we had over 20,000 applicants each year, and Kenexa Brassring made it easier to manage a large application pools. 

It was very easy to customize by recruiter preference. Each recruiter has the options to customize their own view, which personalizes the recruitment experience. We really liked that is was flexible in and each recruiter could set up their preferences. It didn't have to be set up so that everyone had to have the same landing platform, which was very helpful. As someone who trained other HR people on how to use the system, it was very easy to pick up and learn.

I'm just taking over the account, so I'm still pretty new to the whole system. I would say the support that we get from the CSMs is the most valuable for me right now, because I'm still leaning on them pretty heavily to understand everything that I'm doing within the system.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think the advantage of Kenexa is the degree to which we can configure to meet our specific needs. It is very configurable.

In my opinion, the reporting tool and configuration features provide a better customized solution in regards to applicant tracking.

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.

The most important features are that the instrument can be customized, that we can get important and relevant data about our employees, and the responsiveness of our client team from IBM has been phenomenal. It's been a real partnership.

We use BrassRing, the recruiting tool. The reporting feature is what I use, the data insight tool, to be able to pull the data and then provide some analytics on the data behind it.

That's the most valuable feature, for me personally, in my role.

We're using a couple of programs from IBM Kenexa. We are running the annual survey with IBM Kenexa. We use the Viewpoint Platform. For the Viewpoint Platform, we have the OrgMapper, which is extremely helpful to actually be able to copy our internal HR data on OrgMapper to reflect the same setup.

The most valuable feature of the survey is that it's a link we can use. We can share the link with all of our managers. Managers can use the link 24/7, so we don't have to support the managers and it actually frees up the time for HR and the support to be able to do other more useful things for the managers, instead of just copying reports and sending reports.

I like how we can copy a req as we have many duplicates. That saved a lot of time when opening reqs.