AkkenCloud
is a cloud-based ATS developed by Akken Inc in New Hampshire. This product
offers the full suite of features typical of applicant tracking systems:
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user-friendly interface and mobile device integration Batch
or mass communication with potential candidates via multiple channels such as
email or by leveraging its integration with social networking sites (e.g.
LinkedIn) Instantaneous
posting to multiple job boards Job
alerts and category sorted…
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BambooHR®
Score 8.3 out of 10
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BambooHR is an cloud-based human resources solution that provides onboarding, payroll, and benefits management. It also offers automated time-off management and employee self-service.
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 …
This tool was the first of its kind that we
implemented in our company. This tool has a vast variety of great features that
have made my life so easy. The system has an inbuilt smart referral tracking
I've used Sendouts, Bullhorn, Primepoint, and ADP's Workforce Now. If I had been here, I would have never selected Akken. It is truly the worst ATS I've ever seen and I can't believe they are in business. It blows my mind because they are really a horrible, horrible ATS.
AkkenCloud was the first software I used in my career as a recruiter. Since using Akken, I have used TempWorks, Avionte, and JobScience/SalesForce. I do like Akken.
We preferred the ability to go with Mac computers. That was the number one selling point for us. Besides that we liked the ease of the product. The email interface looked exactly like Outlook. The calendar the same. The price was also a big selling point. It came in slightly …
We've been using BambooHR for many years now, so I don't really remember what PeopleForce was like. But what I know for sure is that BambooHR is a much more refined product and provides more capabilities than PF overall.
I've used a few different tools for payroll and benefits. I used Rippling a while ago. I remember it was also pretty easy to use. Paylocity was also pretty easy to use, as far as I remember. Since I'm not the HR rep evaluating the tools for the benefits side, I don't have much …
These are the three that come to mind, and we use each program for different things. We stick to HR driven areas for Bamboo, as we haven't shifted to it for payroll or project management. I do find Bamboo to be the most user-friendly, with the smallest learning curve of all …
Mavenlink is a much more expensive tool, but allowed a greater visibility into time tracking against projects and resource allocation all in one place.
In the past, I've used Paycor to handle all HR and pay info and things. Paycor was fine, but it felt clunkier and more like a chore to use. Logging into BambooHR is quicker and easier, and the user experience is more friendly. Things are easier to get to, and more info is …
I have used salesforce on several different occasions ranging from customer service to client management. This is a different situational occurrence however I will say that Bamboo is the much stronger system. The UI is much more pleasant and easy to navigate, and so far it …
Its so much easier and cero complicated to use. Info is right there if you need it. I find myself looking everywhere before I foind the info i need and Bamboo is just there.
I don't know that I would say they are very similar as we use Trinet because of their PEO offerings. Trinet has everything built in and is a good platform for companies with 50+ employees. Trinet also is very legally sound given the type of reporting they do for multiple states …
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.
For companies with a "complex" PTO policy, it's one of the easier solutions to use I have seen. By complexity, I mean having different reasons for your time off and different amounts of time you can request on that end. If you need simple file sharing, it will work as well. For people who require more robust training material, it might not be the best fit.
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.
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.
The biggest issue is on performance assessments. We are not able to customize the reminder dates so the automated reminder dates shown to people and on the email reminders is often misaligned with our actual internal deadlines. This causes a lot of confusion each review cycle.
Also on performance management, there is no way to push feedback to a supervisor for their direct report. The only way is if the manager requests the feedback from you. This limits the opportunity for people to give real time feedback throughout the half.
I wish we had a way to track notes from employee 1:1s in BambooHR® so when we do our performance reviews we can track. That may be a module we didn't purchase but it would facilitate more continuous and comprehensive evaluation of people at review time.
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
There's nothing wrong with this platform. I would recommend it to any business starting with more than 10 employees. I will continue to use the program for as long as I need to, hoping they continue being tremendous and finding other ways to incorporate more technology.
It is pretty intuitive and easy to use for most functions! This is helped by the clean and simple interface. The drop down filters and prompts are definitely strong points, and could be easily enhanced with more AI/automation features built in in future to make it even more efficient. I also like the playful icons, making it less dull as a HR tool :)
Yes, there is a huge team in the back of the online platform or it looks like it because I have never been left without an answer when I have a question or waiting from a response on my chat .... There must be a huge team, this is so great and I always seem to have someone that is very knowledgeable too. So many times in the past I had to leave with customer service that would connect you with someone else because of the expertise, here everyone seems to be some kind of an expert in the HR function.
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
I love BambooHR. Reports are easy to run and download and it usually covers any types of requests I get from the management team. You get excel or .csv downloads/reports and it is fast and simple, not too crowded so it is easy to read through. We don't integrate the tool yet but again, soon we will. we just did not had the time to utilize it yet but that's the plan.
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.
I have used their support team over a dozen times. They have chat agents available throughout the day. They have support ticket submissions. They have their own resources website with different programs to learn BambooHR®. They also have onboarding support.
As far as I can recall, everything went well with doing it online and got questions answered. Was thankful to work with a dummy file to get used to some practices prior to getting our own domain within bamboo to then place our personnel information in the system, this helped a lot!
We implemented bambooHR in Fall, 2023 then implemented Payroll 1/1/24. A vital piece of information was not known or missed in that we are exempt from State Unemployment Tax and have a Reimbursement Set-up, so bambooHR did not send Payroll Reports to the State. Those reports need to be sent regardless if we are exempt or not.
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.
These are the three that come to mind, and we use each program for different things. We stick to HR driven areas for Bamboo, as we haven't shifted to it for payroll or project management. I do find Bamboo to be the most user-friendly, with the smallest learning curve of all the other programs, though.
There is so much you can do with this platform, it is incredible and so welcoming. We don't utilize it 100% yet just because we are growing and the HR team has not been able to concentrate on other areas offered to us but but we will soon. Which is also why we got the product, specifically because what BambooHR can do to help us meet our growing business needs.
improved onboarding- adding documents and due dates to tasks
time expenditure- we had printed documents initially. BambooHR® has saved me so much time with the electronic documents that automatically save in the employee record
streamlined processes- key features such as the signature documents, onboarding/offboarding tasks have streamlined my processes also allowing for increased time savings
