AkkenCloud vs. myStaffingPro

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.

Incentivized

myStaffingPro is very easy to configure and setup and takes less than 2 business days to configure and get it up and running. It facilitates the HR Business Partners in their recruitment activities. For the Open Position in the Organization, with the use of the software, they can quickly shortlist the candidates with quick mix and match of the requirements. Interviews can be scheduled with the candidate. If a Candidate is selected, the proper background screening process is initiated and finally, the Onboarding process is also tightly integrated within the software.

Incentivized

• Automatically keeps a record of activities such as email conversations related to a candidate.
• Time and date stamp on events logged to a candidate and customer is a great resource.
• Completing full company profiles with all contacts is very helpful for later efficiency.

Incentivized

• One strength of myStaffingPro is because of its heavy manual interface, there is a lot of detail and very specific reason codes. This is very useful for later reporting to get specific information on hires and rejects.
• Also the ability to upload documents (CVs, resumes, phone screen notes, etc) is all located in a convenient place
• The calendar function is good, there are stop measures to prevent double booking and the time zones are preset

• 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.

Incentivized

• This product is not particularly easy to use because it is not intuitive.
• It is difficult to generate accurate reports.
• It is difficult to add notes and find particular requisitions.
• Does not integrate well with our internal system in changes candidates to employees.
• If a step in the hiring process is missed, it does not give any notifications.

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

If I were a decision maker, I would not choose to renew myStaffingPro because of the overly manual process and lost productivity. I've found other ATS's that have the same functionality but are more intuitive, user friendly and appealing. Getting a hold of customer service and support was difficult and they were rarely able to fix the immediate issue.

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

I have used a lot of applicant tracking systems in my career. I've always gone back to MSP saying that it's always been my favorite. It's easy to use, I've never worked with a system so easy to use. It's also easy to figure out if you don't know where something is located - you can typically figure it out on your own without having to ask anyone.

They are good about scheduling maintenance during overnight periods. There have been a few server issues with the e-signature system over the weekends.

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

We recently had an issue where it was brought to our attention by a candidate that specializes in Information Assurance and Network Engineering that their site was missing a secure socket layer for entering in your ssn, which means that when entering it, your ssn is in plain text in plain site. It should hide it with dots or asterisks as you type it to make it secure like when you enter passwords online. I turned off the field that collects SSN's immediately and have been waiting for a response as to when this would be updated so I could turn it back on. I submitted this to our rep back in October 2013 and they said they would forward it to their IT team. I never received any further follow up as to whether or not they would be updating this. I sent a follow up email and left voice messages asking for a status update in Jan. 2014 with no response. I finally called again at the end of Feb. 2014 and emailed. The rep seemed put out that I was telling her I was frustrated with the lack of follow through and that I told her I needed a response on whether or not this would be resolved. She then forwarded me an email from the IT team that said they didn't think this was an actual requirement, they would look into it. Today she emailed to let me know the IT team will not be making any changes.

Whether or not the issue above is a DoD issue or not, the length of time to receive the final response was way too long and involved too much follow up on my part. The fact that they are unwilling to update the SSN field is also troublesome. Even if this is not an actual DoD violation or a mandate, it's a pretty common practice on most websites for collecting private information. Would you enter your PIN number into an ATM if it showed your PIN number until you hit enter? Identity theft is very high these days and people should feel like the company cares enough to help provide that extra layer of protection of their personal information.

This recent development has really changed my opinion of MyStaffingPro drastically since I last wrote my review

Encourage your team to watch the training videos available.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We thought it would've been better than ADP, but it wasn't. Also, the sales person who sold us on Paychex promised that this and Paychex would be able to do a lot of things we needed, which turned out to be a lie when we were implementing it, and the MyStaffingPro expert told us it wasn't possible, and it never was. It wasn't as user friendly either.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Positive - Went from tracking candidates to excel to having a proper tracking system to move candidates through the hiring process faster
• Positive - Always working to improve current program to make it easier to use for recruiter, hiring managers, and candidates applying
• Negative - Bumpy start, but after building a relationship with the staff, smooth sailing to what we invested in