PayScale MarketPay vs. SumTotal Talent Development

If you have someone in your organization well-versed in compensation and compensation analysis, PS MP is a great fit and they will be able to onboard and leverage it very quickly. Moreover, if you have roles within your organization that are fairly standard and akin to similar roles in other organizations, you will get a lot out of the majority of matches that PS MP suggests. However, if you've made your roles a little bit more nuanced or "outside of the box" you may have difficulty finding a sufficient match and have to make concessions. If you are in a region where PS MP might not provide enough data, you may need to do a bit of extra leg-work and analysis on your own to settle on where your pay ranges and the like should be. Given the cost of PS MP, it's worth considering based on your workforce and your commitment to compensation analysis and the conversations around it whether it's truly going to provide adequate ROI.

Incentivized

I personally, am not a fan of SumTotal. I have worked on several different HRIS and Payroll systems which outweigh all aspects of SumTotal (Lawson Interface Desktop, Ceridian Dayforce, ADP Enterprise, and Ultimate Software's UltiPro). As antiquated as Lawson felt, it had more functionality than SumTotal. Of course, all others I worked on were for the most part cloud based and had modern functionality to go with it.

Incentivized

• Detailed view of the market rates for roles within the organization provides the ability to pay our employees at our chosen rate with confidence.
• Updated data to ensure that we are keeping pace--you're not stuck with outdated data that some annual salary surveys provide.
• The market available for analysis are robust, and we're not simply looking at a single city, region, or country. You can usually get as grand or as granular as you like in reviewing available data.

Incentivized

• SumTotal has a very user friendly design, making it easy for non-programmers to configure their LMS interface, customize various environments for different groups, and to integrate numerous external web applications through iFraming, such as social media or news feeds. I was able to configure a custom environment for several different clients, making it feel like their own LMS, such as a custom color scheme and logos, custom widgets (which are section of any page), news feeds, training messages, and custom learning plans.

Incentivized

• There is a bit of a learning curve--if you're looking to get others involved who are not fluent in compensation data and analysis, it can be complicated and involved. It could benefit from additional tips and walkthroughs for newer users outside of the support that PayScale provides through your designated PS employee/account manager.
• Being a Canadian company, the data isn't always as robust as it is for American companies. Larger cities are almost always represented and while you can often get data for the smaller areas, the data is not sufficient enough to always provide the best confidence (e.g. 5.0 reports vs. lower rated ones).
• It does not work for every job, and you may find that you need to stretch definitions a bit as you may have roles that don't fix the exact mold that they are closest to in PayScale. This is especially true in insurance, where the role of underwriter or claims adjuster may differ significantly based on the organization's business.

Incentivized

• JasperSoft Reporting - it is difficult to use and manage.
• Exams could be more robust. Offering alternate types of questions.
• Too many clicks on the administrator side. Adding new activities is not intuitive, you need to click through each section to determine what needs to be entered where. Would be better if it was guided for new activities, just prompting for 'required' fields.

Incentivized

I have transitioned from a position who supported the product to a position where I use the product. I continue to be impressed with the robustness of the product and how efficient it is. It is a user friendly software that can be used to navigate and accomplish tasks to meet organizational requirements.

Incentivized

I do not find SumTotal to be intuitive. I feel we need to adjust our needs to meet the functionality available in the tool.

Incentivized

Support is great as PayScale provides you with a dedicated staff member similar to Account Manager that helps ensure you stay on track and you get what you need out of the product. Additionally, onboarding support is provided where needed, and you never feel as though you're not close to the support you need. PayScale support is great!

Incentivized

We have our own IT support to assist in SumTotal issues, however, we have had to log in cases directly. Support is mediocre at best.

Incentivized

We haven't used any similar products, as the organization previously relied on salary surveys completed within a group of similar companies and market surveys. The downside of such surveys was the limited or not relevant datasets and the timing of them as they did not keep pace with the market and were always essentially 6-12 months behind the curve.

Incentivized

SumTotal Talent Development is a very competitive product. In my opinion SumTotal Talent Development is better than Freshteams, Darwinbox, but not as good as Skillate, SAP SuccessFactors. SAP SuccessFactors is enterprise grade and used only by large organizations and has too many modules and hence a tough learning curve. While SumTotal Talent Development has a small learning curve.

Incentivized

• Positive: Ability to better understand where our pay is relative to the market and ensure that we are paying competitively and attracting the best possible talent.
• Positive: We can have more informed compensation conversations with staff about their pay and why we pay the way we do. We can define our compensation philosophy and build a plan to move forward and ensure we keep staff informed.
• Neutral Impact: While PS MP can be robust for certain jobs, using it as a unified platform within the organization is not without its challenges as some jobs just don't quite fit the data provided and we need to make some concessions. While there are benefits to the data, the additional work and less confidence makes those benefits a bit of a wash in the end.
• Negative: There has been no negative impact of using PS MP overall to this point.

Incentivized

• Clean front-end user interface for easier course catalog management.
• Reporting has been more difficult than previous LMS.
• Audience building has more variables making it more difficult to manage.
• Slower overall client turnaround due to admin side interface.

Incentivized