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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Vincere
Score 6.2 out of 10
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Vincere is a Recruitment Operating System for recruitment & staffing agencies worldwide. It includes a core suite of modules, and users can expand their tech capabilities with pre-integrated Access Group products from Website Design (powered by Volcanic) to Screening and Pay & Bill (powered by FastTrack360). The solution helps users unite front, middle and back office on a single recruitment tech platform.
I don't know many other scenarios, as I have been with this company for 13 years and in this industry for roughly 25 years. It is a tool that is well suited for our company and this industry in general. As a staffing company, you can accomplish nearly everything imaginable with this tool. The only area I have seen that might not be ideal is if you wanted to run all kinds of metrics. You can run a variety of reports in Akken, the data fields are limited sometimes and one would think that wouldn't need to be the case. You should be able to put whatever data you want in any field to create the report you need.
The training videos are a great tool for someone new to the system, and lines up really well with the ease of use that the system demonstrates overall - my team all watched these over the course of a week and became fairly proficient in using the system before we had it rolled out. Previously systems i have used haven't allowed for the extraction of financials in enough detail from the system. Vincere allows us to break our data down by contingent and retained, then by stage in order to truly see our pipeline in detail.
Pipeline management: the system gives a $ value for every part of the recruiting pipeline so I can accurately forecast what revenue is coming in. I've never seen this in a recruitment CRM, I believe it's quite a unique feature.
Price: although pricing was not the #1 criteria for me when I am choosing software, we are saving big with Vincere. I am paying $39/licence each month. This is a saving of 70% on our previous vendor yet the quality of the system is much better.
Search: this is probably the feature that our consultants appreciate most. The advanced search allows you to search contextually across everything in the system and really refine and drill down into the nitty gritty.
This is the worst ATS I've ever used. It's hard to find what you need. It's not set up in a coherent manner and things are all over the place.
I have to download a resume just to view it.
The parse function only works in Internet Explorer and it works poorly then. Makes it impossible to tell if its actually a duplicate because it flags everything.
No section for meaningful notes. Notes are all just reports of action.
No way to make it efficient for direct hires. All geared towards staffing so it makes you fill out non-sense information that will be inaccurate and irrelevant just to satisfy field requirements.
While Vincere has spell check correcting keyboard, spelling and grammatical errors is more difficult than it should be. This is somewhat mitigated by ongoing development in other areas.
Vincere invoicing systems could be improved. This is not a huge problem if you don't have multiple accounts with parent company access group but we do and this can be confusing at times. Not a deal breaker by any standards so more a general comment than a complaint.
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
Great candidate management. A UI that could do with further visual development. Easy to use functions and great support from the Vincere team. Slightly clunky process for making a placement. Great candidate pics and star ratings. Overall easy of use that drives good adoption from my team
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
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.
Our Implementation Consultant Alan is super helpful 10/10 recommend!! If I have a question he gets in contact super fast. If he does not have an answer right away he talks to other departments and gets back in thouch within 48 hours. He was definitely the most helpful person out of everyone we talked to
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 cheaper than Bullhorn and other systems and in our opinion a better product.
I selected Vincere as it offered everything (on paper and in the demo) that Bullhorn did for half the price (the market leader at the time). I should have realised not every deal is a deal. The product from month one displayed performance issues with the speed of the product they remain and have been constantly a point of complaint from my team, we had multiple bugs from day one, these bugs remain now or have been replaced with other bugs. The demo, the literature all claimed one thing and we received another. In comparison we have received excellent service from Zoho and their best in breed, rather one product for all approach offers a far more powerful offering for genuinely half the price without the need for us to spend further money on 3rd party products because those built into Vincere did not work as advertised.
Sometimes the system is slow and the process of hiring someone is lengthy so it takes a long time to complete it so it takes away from other things I could be working on
It’s easy and quick to manage candidates to show what process they’re in
Accountability: Vincere has helped us shift the way we manage consultants. Everyone can see what they've done inside Vincere, the system is quite transparent so even your junior consultants can see where they need to pick things up.
ROI was fast for us. You move from an old system to a modern platform like Vincere and it's like turning on the lights. Just having the mobile app was a revelation to us! Then you add on the dashboards, the LinkedIn integration, the constant upgrades.
Analytics: we used to track everything on Excel and whiteboards. We've since shifted that to the automated reporting inside Vincere.
