PeopleAdmin Higher Ed Platform, from Powerschool vs. Top Hat

PeopleAdmin handles the process of recruiting very well. It integrated into the jobbing.com web pages as well as other job websites. The learning curve for users is not too steep. The web page format is intuitive to users. The user interface looks good. The initial issue would be the number of candidates the organization handles per year. Due to our business, we handle a large number of candidates, but US and international. PeopleAdmin facilitates this process.

I think Top Hat can be used in any classroom size to help student learning. it is user-friendly for both students and teachers.

Incentivized

• Applicant tracking was a good use of this tool for our department. I think it could use a few more customization features but overall it was a good tool to weed out applicants who were not qualified for the position.
• The system has some canned reporting tools that also worked well for our department and management needs.
• It was a great place to house our position descriptions and provided a readily accessible source for hiring managers to make requested updates and changes and for employees to see and have access to their position descriptions.

• Offers a good variety of interactive tools such as polls and quizzes
• It is relatively easy to create and customize pages on the class site
• Educators have access to good analytics and insightful performance information

Incentivized

• Moving applicants through workflow is not a very fluid process. When the number of applicants spans multiple pages one is forced to work with each page individually; moving applicants to a status that requires approval precludes moving any others in workflow without filtering them out but it is not obvious that one needs to be aware of this.
• One can't search for a job description by simply typing in the employee's name - it requires using the position number and often the name is what is at hand.
• When one changes positions within the organization and requires different access there does not seem to be a way to be added globally to job descriptions in the new unit - the process is far too manual. Although I believe adding new units to ones profile is fairly simple, apparently one can't remove the old units so I continue to see things that I no longer need to.

Incentivized

• It would be great if the exams could have settings to set-up start and finish times.
• The grade book still needs improvement in the formatting.

Incentivized

We are evaluating our options as it relates to PeopleAdmin. We are likely to renew as we can not find another product that gives us the functionality we have with PeopleAdmin 5.8 in the area of Position Description. Outside of that, we would likely be close to finding another product solution.

The initial rollout of Top Hat was not without its issues. Top Hat was very responsive, and even sent representatives to be onsite during the first couple of days of the start of class to help instructors and students. They were very knowledgeable about the product, but the sales team was pushy at times. At several times, we had to inform them not to reach out to instructors directly to pitch their service while we were still piloting.

Incentivized

I've used both Target Recruit and HR Smart. When working with Target Recruit it quickly became apparent it was not the right solution for us. Another solution we examined prior to selection PeopleAdmin was iCIMS. iCIMS is a very social system but was not as familiar with the Higher Education recruitment processes as was PeopleAdmin.

Incentivized

Top Hat generally stacks up pretty well against other industry leading or popular learning management systems. Top Hat is comparable to learning management systems used in most educational institutions. The features such as allowing the educator to create an interactive experience by leveraging tools such as quizzes and polls is comparable. Data on student performance is also a helpful feature that is comparable to that of other similar learning management systems.

Incentivized

• We are now able to track our recruitment sources to determine our ROI on university paid subscriptions.
• We have reduced our recruiting approval review times by 50%
• We have identified areas for improvement substancially by having robust reporting available at our fingertips.

• One of the better ways to track attendance in a mostly secure and automated way.
• Promotes more active learning, especially in large classrooms.
• Unpopular if students have to pay.

Incentivized