TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Cornerstone OnDemand

Score6.5 out of 10

433 Reviews and Ratings

What is Cornerstone OnDemand?

Cornerstone OnDemand is a cloud-based application for talent management. Cornerstone offers suites for recruiting, training, performance monitoring and planning, learning, and HR data management. It is scaled for enterprises.

Media

A personalized, modern user experience and self-service capabilities to engage employees, ensure productivity, and centralize employee data
With Cornerstone Learning, go beyond compliance and training - truly develop an engaged and collaborative workforce.
Cornerstone Recruiting takes care of all talent acquisition needs and provides candidates with an amazing experience.
With Cornerstone Performance, benchmark your people's performance, align them with your strategy, and provide feedback that matters.
Cornerstone HR offers a personalized, modern user experience and self-service capabilities to engage employees, ensure productivity, and centralize employee data.
With Content Anytime, quickly deliver hundreds of eLearning courses covering key soft-skills such as communication, time management, leadership, teamwork, and emotional intelligence.
With Cornerstone Careers, provide continuous career development and expert coaching​.
Actionable insights

1 / 8

Top Performing Features

  • Mobile friendly

    Students or employees can access content from mobile devices. Course authors can develop responsive learning content.

    Category average: 8.4

  • Individual goal setting

    Individual goal setting is the ability to define individual goals that align to organizational and subordinate goals.

    Category average: 8

  • Candidate development

    Candidate development is the ability to assign learning and development goals.

    Category average: 8.1

Areas for Improvement

  • Learning administration

    Administrators can manage the content and people (students/employees, course authors, instructors, etc.) on the platform.

    Category average: 6.8

  • Learning reporting & analytics

    Provides insights into course completion, engagement with learning content, etc.

    Category average: 6.6

  • Course authoring

    Users can develop and assemble online learning content.

    Category average: 5.5

Cornerstone Learning will be the Cornerstone of your Organization.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We utilize Cornerstone OnDemand to support all learning across the organization as well as offer training opportunities to an affiliated organization. It assigns training based on need of the staff as well as is used for optional training and registration into larger organization sessions when needed. It solves out need for compliance training assignments and tracking as well as support the administration side and professional development opportunities.

Pros

  • Automatic recurring assignments are easy to get that refresher training out without needing to assign it fresh each time.
  • Reporting 2.0 makes it easy to write and share your reports with just selected filters. Making it easy for people receiving it to just change what they need to see.
  • Learning Admin Console makes it easy to peek at what is going on in your portal and open up connected reporting when needed.
  • Success Center is a great resource for getting peer answers to questions and learning about the releases and suggesting changes that should be added to the roadmap.

Cons

  • Their Product Support can take a long time to respond and/or give incomplete responses so you have to go back and forth to get the correct response.
  • Certifications exist but are in bad need of an update to make them more user friendly as they are the only way to set an expiration date.
  • Reporting 2.0 can have more latency issues then other parts of the system and it is always when you really need to grab that report.

Return on Investment

  • We needed a system that would help us switch from all in person training to online content and blended content and it does that with an easy to use interface.
  • In person session scheduling and tracking used to be a pain and the no show rate was high using ILT and having the registration easy to use and have calendar appointments emailed on registration has increased our attendance.
  • Playlists have allowed up to move our learning culture forward as we can connect content by topics and it makes it easy for our staff to pick what they want to take on that topic.

Alternatives Considered

Workday Human Capital Management, SumTotal Talent Development and Saba Cloud

Other Software Used

Workday Human Capital Management, Articulate 360, Rise

Usability

Cornerstone-Modern and customizable LMS!

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

[Cornerstone OnDemand] is used organization wide. We have a complex, co-op type of setup with many subordinated divisions that function as isolated business entities. We get regularly audited and have highly individualized needs. Cornerstone [OnDemand] enables us to have unique settings across many areas for a variety of divisions. Unique performance reviews, welcome pages, and training needs across divisions enable us to operate each division uniquely.

Pros

  • Reporting: completely customized reporting modules allows us to have targeted and specific analytics
  • Automated learning: The learning assignment tool enabled automatic and varied learning assignments to a variety of audiences.
  • Performance reviews: Enable us to have very complicated and automated performance review assignments.

Cons

  • The forms functionality is old and very "windows-95" looking, would love to see this improved.
  • Building performance reviews can be very "steppy," we would love to see you be able to do this in the flow of work.
  • I would also love to see the ability to customize the look and feel of the custom page widgets more.

Return on Investment

  • I was not a part of the initial purchase decision to run with Cornerstone.

Other Software Used

Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Illustrator CC

Usability

Best in class, but opportunities remain

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a medical device company, we are highly regulated. We must keep training records for all employee training that relates to their performing their job duties and tasks. Historically our company used different learning management systems in different product areas as these likely came with an acquisition of that area in the past. In 2018 our company set on a mission to steamline our organization to a single LMS. After a thorough analysis of the leading LMS vendors, Cornerstone OnDemand came out on top due to its ability to meet the compliance needs of a regulated company such as ours, in a way no other vendor could. Implementation has been challenging as we are not only learning a new system but also changing the way we operate by bringing onboard areas long left on their own. So some unique ways of working have been challenging to solve with the system as customization is not possible as some ancient 'on premise' solutions used to offer. However, we still feel Cornerstone OnDemand is the best tool on the market for us.

Pros

  • Keeping training records
  • Keeping audit trails
  • Maintaining quality validation documentation about the system

Cons

  • Back end functions are complex and unforgiving; takes us 1 month to train a new administrator properly due to the complexity of the system.
  • The navigation and user experience are not modern or easy to use out of the box. It requires a significant investment with partner firms to configure the UX.

Return on Investment

  • While we have saved the company overall, the costs for the many previous LMS were spread across the business. Now centralized it draws negative budget attention for the significant spend to have a single LMS against one departments budget.
  • The continued investment to improve usability has been nearly double the licensing costs themselves. You do not get everything you need from Cornerstone OnDemand, but need to enlist partner companies to deliver your configuration needs.

Other Software Used

LinkedIn Learning (Lynda.com)

Guide employees through custom learning paths!

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cornerstone OnDemand (CSOD) has been a part of our company's success over the last three years and has allowed us to deliver training programs for employees, track employee progress and development, and help to identify high-potential employees. Through CSOD we have been able to create learning pathways for our employees based on their role, starting with the compliancy courses for ann employees and then branching off by each role into our custom-made courses to support them further through their onboarding. CSOD allows us to create curriculums that unlock when an employee has completed the prerequisite and to auto-assign our courses based on the hiring timeline; which are both very useful aspects to help our learning paths be a success.

Pros

  • Integrations with other software programs to save time.
  • Options to add on quality courses created by CornerStone directly to blend the training with your own.
  • Great reporting resources and the ability to send reports and pull dashboards to be on top of course relevance and completion.

Cons

  • Overall the system takes time to become an expert in.
  • Employees need training on how to use the platform as there are a lot of "clicks" to accomplish what they want in the interface (for example, withdrawing from a training).
  • When the platform is not working properly, it requires a lot of time to have support from CSOD.

Return on Investment

  • Time and cost savings when moving from print to digital.
  • Increased learning engagement through our live and virtual sessions.
  • Creating custom certificates that are automatically awarded when the employee meets the requirement.

Alternatives Considered

Adobe Learning Manager and 360Learning

Other Software Used

Microsoft 365, Adobe Acrobat

One of the best learning management systems I have managed.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cornerstone OnDemand is our global Learning Management System solution. It is centrally managed out of our Training and Education department, with second-level learning admins throughout the various global regions. The system allows us to manage the corporate training record for all employees, for both online and classroom instruction. It also provides us with a social learning platform for cohorts and a tool to complete observation checklists.

Pros

  • Single admin console with granular control over user access and reporting. They continue to keep the admin in mind when rolling out new features. Giving us additional tools and improvements to more easily manage a large organization of learners.
  • A complete solution. Cornerstone OnDemand is a human performance management solution. This includes: compensation, on-boarding, performance reviews, succession, training, and social interaction. All of the areas of the product are cohesively tied to one another for convenience and powerful cross-feature functionality. It has been developed organically from the ground up, so everything works together for a competent experience.
  • Increasing support for mobile learning. Our field is relying on mobile devices to stay connected. Cornerstone OnDemand continues to improve their support for mobile through web browser support and mobile apps.

Cons

  • Global Product Support. Their support team can be slow to respond and resolve issues. They are constantly blaming it on growing pains. However, that cannot be an excuse. Every company wants to grow bigger and they need to adjust their support model to accommodate it.
  • Multimedia support. Cornerstone OnDemand does support video learning and embedding videos on custom pages, however, they just rolled this out to everyone and it has some catching up to do. Competitors have supported this feature for quite some time and are ahead of the curve on it.
  • Responsive design support for Welcome and Custom pages. Cornerstone OnDemand is making much of their system responsive for mobile use. However, the page builder that is used to make your Welcome and Custom pages has not been updated for some time. It doesn't always support some HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript functions. The work-arounds to get some designs to work correctly is troublesome.

Return on Investment

  • Cornerstone has saved us a significant amount on travel costs for training. We still use classroom training for certain position in the company, however, it has allowed us to distribute ongoing training to the field employees as it is available.

Alternatives Considered

Absorb Anywhere LMS, Blackboard and SuccessFactors Talent Solutions

Other Software Used

Articulate Storyline, WebEx Event Center

Usability