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 SterlingOne has had my background check in progress for nearly a month. I spoke with them 5 days ago about the issue and discovered there was a criminal record flag in Connecticut. I have never been to Connecticut. They said this can often happen if an individual has the same name, birthday, or last four digits of SSN. This is clearly a flaw in their system if someone with the same name or birthday can appear on the same background check. I feel bad for any John Smith who applies for a job with a company that uses SterlingOne, they'll never get past the screening. Not only is this a flawed system, but when I spoke with customer service about this, they guaranteed they would expedite this within 24-48 hours. It has now been 5 days and when I called back, they said they would expedite this as if I had never called in the first place. I have been through numerous background checks for work in my life, I have done live scans and had my fingerprints taken, and have been approved to work with children with special needs (which requires a very rigorous screening) and I have never experienced such a disjointed and unprofessional process.
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 The initiation of a background check is very simple by only needing the name and email of the new candidate and submitting that as the new ticket. Sterling communicates with the new candidate to keep the background check moving which saves us time by not needing to keep a close eye on the process of the background check. Sterling communicates with the employer to let them know if additional charges are needed to run the background check and we can either approve or deny the charge. 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 In my opinion, Horrible new platform "Sterling check" No designated account representative In my experience, Poor troubleshooting support Customer service often doesn't answer questions Many back and forth needed to resolve issues Recently changed platform and not offering the same services 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 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 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 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 Sterling Talent is an excellent company for performing the background checks for our new hires. However, the delay in processing times can be improved. Also, there should be automation from legacy systems to pick up the candidate details as much as possible instead of asking for more details from the candidate via email. Read full review Implementation Rating Encourage your team to watch the training videos available.
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 We had no issues with
HireRight . The system worked well and we had excellent service. The only reason we selected Sterling is we changed our ATS to
Compas and wanted to be integrated with a background check company. Sterling was only one of two options and offered onboarding capabilities. The other did not
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 Quick results allow us to hire people in short time frames and get them onboarded quickly. The product, and the customer service team, doesn't require much management from a vendor relations perspective. Read full review ScreenShots