Brassring vs. Lumesse (Discontinued)

Kenexa is is well suited for any organization that has more than 3000 employees globally. I would not recommend this to startups or a growing organization with less than 3000 employees. But once you cross this number, Kenexa becomes useful and is a brilliant tool for global operations - recruiting. I would recommend this tool to any organization that has offices in many countries/geographies as well.

Incentivized

Lumesse is well suited for global companies, that are not too large and may get enough attention/support from other larger vendors.

Incentivized

• Kenexa allows Boolean key word search within a particular requisition so it makes sifting through a high number of applicants manageable and effective
• Kenexa can be tailored to meet individual business needs. During the time we’ve had Kenexa here I’ve used it in support of a few different business segments and for each the way the system was used to “position” candidate statuses have varied based on the individual need of the business. One example is when interviewing a high volume of applicants internationally, we were able to send qualified applicants through to the “event manager” and it would enable the candidate to select his/her interview date/time based on previously submitted options inputted by our Kenexa users.
• Kenexa allows one to customize and score questions for each open requisition that applicants complete as they apply. The system then sorts applicants according to the score of candidate answers allowing for easy sorting of top qualified candidates.

• It has open text boxes to add notes, on the individual candidate home page. Which is helpful when making a quick look at an individual, these notes are very obvious.
• It has a search function; however it lacks a wild card (*); so if a req or candidate are spelled differently or referred to differently, there is no way to find them
• Its a simple, no frills lay out

• BrassRing's application system for candidates is prone to freezing and crashing in the middle of the application causing potential candidates to lose all progress. I filled out the application myself and witnessed these issues first hand, on top of several complaints I received via phone and email from candidates attempting to apply via the BrassRing service. Also, the Parsing system within the application is not capable of pulling any meaningful information out of text documents.
• Each user must be added to each job in order for that job, and the candidates in it, to show up in relevant searches. This becomes a problem when a new team member joins the account and needs access to all of the previous openings just so that they can find candidates already in the system. The account I was working on involved literally hundreds of new openings a month, meaning that any movement of personnel on or off the account would mean having to update potentially thousands of old positions just to allow them to be able to mine the ATS for candidates. I don't see any particular reason why someone with access to the system should have to be given access to each individual job. If a particular position needs to be kept confidential for whatever reason then that individual position should be able to be set to only show to authorized recruiters. The rest of the positions should automatically be searchable by anyone with appropriate access to the ATS to allow for basic level candidate mining and movement.

• I have found the system to be very inconsistent and "buggy", for lack of a better term. Today I searched for an internal requisition number and the system could not find the data. I found it by scrolling through manually, and verified that I had entered the information precisely as it appeared. There seems to be no explanation as to why it could not locate this particular entry, but I have been able to use the function without a problem in other instances.
• The navigation is not intuitive or user-friendly. It takes an exorbitant amount of clicks to accomplish a task. Each action is confusing and time-consuming.
• The system requires a large amount of redundant information in order to enter a job and does not auto-populate. If I indicate a position is located in Chicago, it would logically follow that the state is "Illinois", the country is "United States", and the currency is "USD". I have to manually input these details in both the requisition as well as the separate job advertisement page.
• Changes to the job requisition are not reflected in the job advertisement, as they are separate entities. If you need to make a change, you have to update the details twice.

I am confident that the Kenexa product will continue to evolve to meet the needs of our business in an ever changing work environment. The affiliation with IBM also plays a factor as we have a long standing successful relationship with IBM products. We will be looking to integrate other Kenexa products in the near future to streamline our HR processes.

This seems to work for us because of all the things we can do with the system (i.e. create all kinds of reports).

I feel like I am pretty decent with computers and systems. It was fairly easy to use it after about a week or two . But I have seen people struggle with it as well as some people not use it at all. It can be slow at times and not work at times. But Its a fine system.

Just slow for what we are doing here

It is a very basic system. It may be OK for entry level positions only. The practice of removing CVs while the recruitment process is ON is disturbing and there is no one to explain or to inform why it is being done. Even a routine mail is not sent to the client/consultant. I am surprised how this system is continuing without too many complaints.

We purchased an out of the box solution and that worked well for us.

Incentivized

SF ATS was not available at the time and Taleo was thought to be too expensive. In retrospect, given the amount of customization and leveraging of other vendor technology for things like analytics I suspect any cost advantage we realized evaporated

Incentivized

Lumesse is an average to abover average ATS in my opinion. We work with Lumesse because they came to us with our new client. I don't have an overall issue with Lumesse like I do with some other ATS's.

Incentivized

• Kenexa has assisted us in identifying top talent within our target market of applicants.
• Kenexa may exclude potentially good associates that don't test well.
• Kenexa clearly defines specific categories and general notes for training, development, & coaching of associates on areas of opportunity.

Incentivized

• Decreased employee efficiency -- There are so many steps to create an entry that our recruiters use the system as little as possible. We had hoped to use Lumesse for centralizing information and reporting, but have not been able to do so. Instead, each recruiter keeps a separate Excel sheet, defeating the purpose of having an ATS in the first place. We only use Lumesse to post to our website now. We are very disappointed.