Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Advanced Personnel Systems (SmartSearch)
I think our environment has stretched SmS and their capabilities (positively) but we have grown together and developed an enormously capable system together that is now very well integrated into our business. For doing applicant tracking, requisition management and offer management that has really been strong. I think we can partner together and build some better analytics and reporting capabilities that would be better suited for our business.
EJ Meier Vice President Human Resources, Global Operations
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Advanced Personnel Systems (SmartSearch)
The search functions are outstanding. It is the reason we originally went with SmartSearch many years ago. The ability to do very simple or complex searches gives the recruiting staff great flexibility in how they look for and narrow down candidates. The hire and onboarding traks allow us to create very specific processes we want our staff to follow to insure a consistent and repeatable result. I can create traks that can be very general or traks that literally provide emails and reminders to all of the players (recruiters, managers, candidates, etc...) every step of the way. This is particularly helpful where we have customers who have extremely stringent contractual guidelines that must be followed. Support. Their customer support is second to none. We always joke that they are our favorite vendor to deal with.... Anytime we have an issue or question. They are there to walk us through it. The training is on target and the staff has always been friendly and more than eager to help make us successful with the tool. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Advanced Personnel Systems (SmartSearch)
SmartSearch has a steep learning curve if you want to extensively use the features like automated tasks and the report writer Technical support is spotty and sometimes very frustrating, they don't respond for weeks at a time. SmartSearch user interface is old and has far less ability to customize the interface than other tracking systems SmartSearch has virtually no ability to connect directly with other software and allows now other software to connect in - so no Microsoft Flow, no Zapier, no mail parser, etc. and since Smart Search capabilities are limited, not being able to integrate it with other platforms easily is unfortunate. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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
Read full review Advanced Personnel Systems (SmartSearch)
I believe over the past 30 or so pages (or so it seems), you have every reason for my business to continue as a SmartSearch ATS client and user. The support is off the charts great the few times I need them (generally not even once per year). My business has been a client since 2004. That should say it all.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Advanced Personnel Systems (SmartSearch)
There are so many facets of SmartSearch, that to know everything about it is nearly impossible. While it is mainly straight forward, there is a lot. After using the program for a while, you become pretty comfortable with the basics and can start adding some of the other features.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Advanced Personnel Systems (SmartSearch)
My license for SmartSearch goes back to 2004. It has always been available for me - don't remember a single time it was not available in all of those years.
Read full review Performance 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
Read full review Advanced Personnel Systems (SmartSearch)
Support Rating 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.
Read full review Advanced Personnel Systems (SmartSearch)
Once you get the 1 person on the phone they are very knowledgeable and tend to solve the problem. The issue is there are not enough resources to handle all the clients. Their primary clients are "recruiting firms" and I think that is where most of the their support resources go
Read full review Implementation Rating Encourage your team to watch the training videos available.
Read full review Advanced Personnel Systems (SmartSearch)
Using the basic functions of SmartSearch is an easy implementation. But consider carefully what your organization needs to really drive placements. Because we only did a basic implementation first, we were caught off guard when later trying to implement more functions and realizing that the capabilities were limited or were difficult to learn and implement and realizing that tech support was not going to be consistent.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Advanced Personnel Systems (SmartSearch)
Functionally, SmartSearch is not on the same page as
ZipRecruiter .
ZipRecruiter as a platform is much more geared toward helping applicants and is essentially a glorified resume database. SmartSearch offers so much more in terms of features and abilities, that would not really be appropriate to try and compare the two. Similarly, the overall use of SmartSearch is an apples and oranges comparison to
LinkedIn Talent . LinkedIn is great for sourcing and attracting talent, but in terms of tracking candidates all the way through a hiring process and tracking a heavy volume of job orders across a variety of states and locations, the two just don't really compare.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 Read full review Advanced Personnel Systems (SmartSearch)
That's easy - they have helped us grown and make more money. The core element of their technology (e.g. the ability to search for, identify and contact candidates is excellent). They are a business partner and do their very best to help us succeed. Read full review ScreenShots