Cornerstone Galaxy vs. Vincere vs. Sage HRMS

Cornerstone Galaxy is a good solution for larger companies that focus on training and want to offer a variety of options to their employees and departments. It is highly customizable. It does require a tech savvy team to set-up, and maintain. This is not a set-it-and-forget-it system. From an LMS perspective, it wouldn't be my top choice for employees who only need a mobile-friendly approach.

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.

Sage HRMS is a software that fits in all organizations whether small or large and this makes it the most suitable HR solution as it will help you manage your workforce even if it may appear small. The software has analytics and reporting tools that are applicable in performance management where you will use them in assessing the productivity of your employees and plan on how to improve further as a workforce. It further helps in employee on-boarding, payroll management, and talent management

Incentivized

• Ability to provide multiple customizable access roles from general end user to full system admin and anything in between
• Powerful reporting system in the LMS to track a plethora of data points within the platform (user data, training information, transcript information)
• Great options to customize the look and feel of your "home page" to best meet your company's needs and goals.
• Ability to customize the transcript view for learners (i.e. when Completed training will move to their Archived transcript, what to do with Inactive training on transcripts)

Incentivized

• 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.

• Ability to see history (like job history) easily at a glance.
• Ability to make changes easily.
• Organizing info in the employee record.

Incentivized

• Sometimes finding the right answer to your support question can be a bit more difficult than it should be.
• I would like to see more OSHA related courses.
• At times, the administrative interface seems to need to be updated, but the tradeoff honestly might be the absolute rock-solid stability of the platform.

Incentivized

• 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.

• We changed our chart of accounts. The system does not allow you to change the numbering format, so we had to start over with new databases.
• The tax return portion of the software does not file local taxes. We would definitely like to see this functionality in the future.
• The payroll piece does not handle complicated move up and move downs for union pay. This could definitely be improved upon.

Incentivized

As long as pricing stays reasonable, we will likely stay with Cornerstone for at least one more contract renewal. It would be a large task to migrate all of our content to a new system. However, the LMS landscape is diversifying with new startups that are showing some real innovation.

Incentivized

We just implemented Vincere and the chance of changing to a different soon is limited

Incentivized

I do not work with this software anymore, and I am not involved with the renewal of it. However, if I were, I would still suggest using it unless something better was introduced

Incentivized

Easy to use, easy to learn, lots of support during the learning process. There are a few parts of the system we don't use and I'm hesitant to begin using because other clients have said they're difficult and cumbersome (certifications) or outdated (libraries)

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

I haven't really had any major availability problems. The service is practically impeccable but it is true that at times, due to server and latency problems, the application has been slower. But these have been specific issues that have resolved themselves.

I haven't seen many issues at all with load times. Sometimes learning assignments will take longer then expected but it is still reasonable. They have taken great effort over the last couple years to speed things up like reports and search results so I expect that effort to continue in the coming year.

Incentivized

Its always important to have support when you are facing problems and when you are the main admin of the organization. Cornerstone Support is very supporting when you have not found the answer in the help guide. its very useful to have a team support to guide you.

Incentivized

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 use also to admin all our training in person events and sessions. Its easy to admin this kind of trainings and automatize some processes we have. Also de user experience and the integration with other systems helps to the employees to use more. All modules integrated oriented to develop people is the principal reason to have CSOD. The training administration is very complete and allows to automate many processes.

The online modules are pretty good. You can access them at any time, which we have done. You learn a lot in the beginning, but having the ability to retake short lessons when you are working on those items was very helpful.

Incentivized

The implementation was pretty difficult. We felt they (Cornerstone) didn’t properly allocate the resources to complete our implementation in the timetable we wanted.

For example, we worked on Workday and SSO integrations - work that we had specifically contracted for in advance. When we were ready to work on that project, they didn’t have the people ready to help us, so it took a lot longer than necessary. That was my biggest pain point.

The implementation approach we went with was a self-led implementation. We would speak to the implementation manager once per week, and self-trained. We met with implementation manager to discuss issues, review things that we’d learned for 1 hour. We found that wasn’t enough. Other things would come up outside that one hour window that we couldn’t get answers to. We didn’t have anyone to ask about those things and we had to wait to ask during our weekly meeting.

The advantage of the self-led implementation approach was that it was really inexpensive – significantly less than the implementation cost for the other systems that we looked at. I also liked that we could pace ourselves. There were however big roadblocks. We would have to make sure the right resources were available. We had an implementation/project manager with a lot of experience and felt that the person was knowledgeable but missed on a few things.

In hindsight, I would still go with the self-led implementation, but knowing what I know now, I would ask for the integration person to be available more. I would work that into the contract. With single sign-on, we needed deep linking to build direct links through a Single Sign-On tool, e.g. when someone gets an email, it directs them to training. But it has to go through SSO to get them to the correct link. Deep linking wasn’t turned on in our system and they had to activate it. We encountered little things like that – sequencing pre-requisites which were problematic. We tried to troubleshoot ourselves.

I recommend you consider contracting for some extra implementation hours and determine when they are going to be available. Work it into the contract that you have the ability to call tech support during implementation. In addition to weekly implementation meetings, they have technical webexes – 4 every week, but 2 didn’t apply to us – one as we were using SSO. The challenge is they were not always relevant – we had specific questions that didn’t fall into those categories

The user experience is a lot better than using SumTotal as an admin CSOD makes working easy. Without having workarounds. Reporting is a lot better than both platforms. Reporting in CSOD is complex however easy to manage and create when you understand the data points collected

Incentivized

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.

Sage HRMS was very cost effective for a non-profit. It does all that we needed as a company and more. It also allows us to handle payroll ourselves instead of outsourcing [it].

Incentivized

It is important to be familiar with the terms and annual increases in licenses and other aspects of the contract. I recommend analyzing this from the beginning and the permanence is relevant because Cornerstone updates its modules and brings out new features that may allow you to leave a module to acquire another

It's a great product with some pieces that are set but many things that can be customized as needed for individual needs

Incentivized

As I have said before, I have no doubt that the services of the Cornerstone sales people were very good. In particular, our salesperson spent a lot of time in contact with us to make the process go smoothly. Perhaps being a large company in some cases the times were slowed down but it is something normal to take into account.

• We are in the process of trying to increase employee engagement through content expansion. We are in the early stages of this.
• The Edge Import Tool, in conjunction with Reporting 2.0, has done a great job of helping to automate/semi-automate tasks for huge time savings.
• Maintaining compliance. Achieved through dynamic/automated groups, assignments, communication, and reporting.

Incentivized

• 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.

• there can be a high ROI when processing payroll in house compared to outsourced. Not to mention the flexibility you gain.

Incentivized