AkkenCloud vs. LinkedIn Talent Hub

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.

Incentivized

In my opinion and based on my experience, if you are looking to hire professional "white collar" skill sets and establish yourself in that arena you must use LinkedIn. It is best to be very active and connect and reach out via InMails and emails to your skills sets and the groups they are in.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• LinkedIn Talent provides customized templates that can be used to quickly reach out to candidates via LinkedIn InMail.
• The pipeline feature allows recruiters and/or human resource directors to build, track, and manage candidates. It lets you organize candidates into folders and create lists with reminders.
• You can share your activities, projects, searches, candidate profiles, and applicant notes with other people throughout the company.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• InMails. The con of sending InMails is that many times you don’t get a response back. Linkedin should have a feature where a recruiter can know if their InMails was even viewed. Better mechanisms need to be put in my place for the InMails feature.
• Cost. LinkedIn recruiter is not cheap. I wish the cost could be a bit lower especially if there are multiple users.
• Connectifier is not helpful for global candidates. Many of the candidates that I reach out to are international. Unfortunately, Connectifier isn’t helpful in obtaining email addresses for these international candidates.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Akken is quite easy to use however there are a few more complex functions or multi steps to go through to run reports and find historic information.

Incentivized

The LinkedIn Talent Hub is a very easy to use and widely known by other users. If someone is hiring, its very visible and accessible. I have never had trouble posting exactly what I need. However, I have had trouble finding the candidate I am looking for. It tends to not bring in a lot of candidates

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I'm giving this a 6 only because in my 1 year at my current position we have had 3 different reps. The first was unresponsive and passive when attempting to help us. When she came out to do a demo on a new feature launch it was scattered and all over the place. The person we have now is great and is super helpful when ever we need him.

Incentivized

Encourage your team to watch the training videos available.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

LinkedIn Talent Hub is a really good product in theory and mostly in use. I just feel like listening to more of the feedback and reviews from customers this could be a top of the industry product. Indeed and especially Monster and Careerbuilder are just out dated and not relevant. LinkedIn Talent Hub has a great market opportunity to jump in and become a leader.

Incentivized

• The company has pumped enough money into trying to make Akken good that they aren't interested in changing again.
• Seriously a terrible ATS which slows people down due to the useless functions.
• More time lost from people needing to fix issues that arise due to the system requirements.

Incentivized

• Positive ROI because it didn't cost us anything (yet). The system was chosen (not by me but I went in with an open mind) because they offered it to us for Free. The team was desperate and made a hasty decision based on cost and lack of understanding what an ATS should be capable of doing.
• Negative ROI because it was a big waste of my time implementing it and finding workarounds and working with their support team on fixes and product participation meetings for them to improve the system
• Negative ROI - it's been really buggy with us. I don't even know if or what jobs are in sponsored slots and there is no way for me to confirm this in the system. Even when I click on each job to view, it's giving inconsistent info to the point I don't trust it. I cannot run a report to identify which ones are being sponsored or not. This may be hurting us a lot more than I know.