AkkenCloud vs. Bullhorn ATS & CRM

Akkencloud has worked extremely well as an ATS software for our recruiting firm. We deal with a huge volume of clients and candidates and it is difficult to track and manage the different orders and people we have in play. The statuses and on stop shop for requisition details have made things tremendously easy to give real time updates to our managers and client partners.

Incentivized

For recruitment businesses there really is no better tool out there. Bullhorn ATS & CRM integrates flawlessly with other software making it less work for consultants in having lots of different tabs open at once. In addition to this, the support team are fantastic they are quick to assist in fixing issues should they arise. I accidentally deleted a lot of tasks which are essentially diary reminders and leads which upset the sales floor as you can imagine. it was a quick fix for this to be undone quickly and without issue. Day to day, adding a candidate is as easy as dragging and dropping a document in either PDF or word format. the system pics up duplicates quickly also ensuring the system is not clogged up with lots of the same information.

Incentivized

• Notes about candidates are the most helpful because as a recruiter, we talk to so many people a day that it is common to forget the details of some conversations.
• Being able to notify other people in the organization about notes that are put in is very beneficial if the note needs to be in the system and someone should know about it!
• Being able to open "candidates" or "job orders" or something else in a new tab is great because then we can have the inbox open while also the candidate notes open, for example.

Incentivized

• It provides the contact details of a candidate relevant to the job. All details are with a user-friendly interface that anyone can use the application.
• The specific details given by Bullhorn ATS & CRM are unbelievable. One place and you can make a decision about hiring or not hiring.
• The messaging automation feature again helps to save our time.

Incentivized

• When a candidate applies via applicant tracking, there is a glitch that you have to submit that candidate a different way than other candidates by using the applied function, then submitting from there. That is a glitch that should be fixed. You should be able to submit the same way and allow the system to track that he was a candidate from applicant tracking.
• The new alerts from notes works well. The only change I would make is it is rather slow to attach a note now since the new messages have been added to notes.
• Email should be a bit quicker. Rather than going to the server every 5 minutes, it should pull much quicker. That ability is rather easy to fix. Especially since we receive emails on our phone much quicker than we receive from Akken.

Incentivized

• Reporting: out of the box reporting is not very detailed or easy to navigate. In order to get better detailed and specific reports, you either need their Canvas product or pay for a 3rd party vendor.
• Customization: will get better with NOVO Experience update, but many users still don't have it. Right now many fields and order are not customizable
• Many features Bullhorn can do are not apparent to the user, often times you have to call in the figure things out.

Incentivized

There is no reason for us to make a switch. Everybody in the office is familiar with it and it allows us to get our work done faster. There are no pressing issues that would warrant a change at this point

Incentivized

We have about 2 years left on our current contract; It would take a major change in the ATS marketplace for us to strongly consider opting out of renewal given the time and effort we have dedicated to building our our Bullhorn system. I will take the time to revisit with some of the competition down the road, but Bullhorn acquired our runner up, MaxHire, about a year back and continues to offer a solid product suite for our current and future needs.

Incentivized

Akken is quite easy to use however there are a few more complex functions or multi steps to go through to run reports and find historic information.

Incentivized

I found Bullhorn ATS & CRM to be extremely user friendly and quick to learn how to navigate it. The integration to Xero is extremely beneficial and really helps us to manage and monitor our recruitment activities and what stage of recruitment we are up to and to ensure we are invoicing our clients accordingly which we do in three stages.

Incentivized

It's an average tool. The calendar function isn't great, email is slow, and there always seem to be day-to-day issues. The functionality is mostly there for a staffing firm, but there are plenty of areas of improvement still needed

Incentivized

The best support we have received has been from sales. Customer success is pretty much a joke. We have been yelled at by customer success reps; been told to take a screenshot of something we are not seeing; been told there are no issues on there in when Akken hadn't been working for hours, only to have it magically fixed shortly after we reported the problem; and been told engineering was working on a problem for weeks without resolution. If you are going to be working with IT Staffing companies, you have to understand that we have a modicum of knowledge in IT, and you can't BS us. Honesty will get you a lot farther than stringing us along with BS.

Incentivized

It's been a nightmare experience. The initial sales team were brilliant, and the customer service is great from the tech team - they get in touch with you quickly. However; I was often finding workarounds myself, or being advised workarounds instead of having issues resolved (example - The DPA/Non DPA issue - an Excel spreadsheet can do this, yet a CRM cannot?). I was debited on the incorrect date & then when I requested they refund until the due date, I was re-debited again on the correct date. The communication was poor - their billing team are based in the US and there was no acknowledgement of the mistake. My initial consultant chased them down for me, and advised me of their error. Lucky. The product was oversold. For example; I was advised their 'merge docs' feature would allow me to pull data directly from the 'Overview,' 'Work Histories' which later proved to be false. Finally, when I requested to end my contract & transfer my data (I advised a specific date I needed it, when my CRM would be ready) they advised it would take 15 business days & I was to put no further data in my system during that 15 days, and then gave me my data after 3. I now have no CRM for 4 weeks

Encourage your team to watch the training videos available.

Incentivized

At the time we purchased Akken, it was the least expensive on the market that met our needs. It was fairly intuitive, which is important, and we liked the idea that it was hosted remotely because we had had several instances with our inhouse system going down and nearly lost all of our CRM/ATS databases at one time.

Incentivized

With the exception of Job Diva, which I don't know if it's available on Android or iOS, Bull Horn was much easier to use. Bull Horn is also quite beneficial in tracking the application of candidates and updating their statuses in order to check their availability for future references. I enjoy the feature that allows you to enter various candidate details and the capacity to create massive groupings based on candidate characteristics.

Incentivized

• The company has pumped enough money into trying to make Akken good that they aren't interested in changing again.
• Seriously a terrible ATS which slows people down due to the useless functions.
• More time lost from people needing to fix issues that arise due to the system requirements.

Incentivized

• Bullhorn has helped with the standardization of data which allows us to track our high, low and in between individuals. It allows for corporate bench marks to be tracked. It also allows for a closer look at all of the data points to make decisions versus making decisions based on perceptions. The data has definitely helped us make better business decisions because of the reporting capabilities.
• Bullhorn has some great marketplace partners and additional products like VMS Access that help with your VMS clients. This is a real time saver.