Cornerstone OnDemand vs. Culture Amp

I feel Cornerstone OnDemand is a great solution for companies that have a large amount of compliance training that needs to be assigned and closely tracked. The features of dynamic groups (based on specific user criteria) allows you to target very specific audiences. The assignment functionality gives you great flexibility on when the assignment runs and how often, and also provides many options for due dates (static date or dynamic date - x days from hire date, date assigned, etc.). This has allowed us to have a clear and consistent user experience for both our newly hired employees and our seasoned employees.

Incentivized

Culture Amp is a great tool for employee surveys, and has been able to scale with us for 5+ years. It's customizable and helps provide rich data on how employees are feeling so that we can continue to use that feedback to improving our company culture quarter over quarter.

Incentivized

• Automatic recurring assignments are easy to get that refresher training out without needing to assign it fresh each time.
• Reporting 2.0 makes it easy to write and share your reports with just selected filters. Making it easy for people receiving it to just change what they need to see.
• Learning Admin Console makes it easy to peek at what is going on in your portal and open up connected reporting when needed.
• Success Center is a great resource for getting peer answers to questions and learning about the releases and suggesting changes that should be added to the roadmap.

Incentivized

• The Culture Amp support team is unparalleled. They offer live chat support as well as office hours that you can attend for help on anything from technical issues to the best way to phrase a survey question. They are always willing to help and are experts in their field.
• The report pages are very detailed and it's easy to view the data in a lot of different ways. This helps with more insightful analysis.
• I love that you can benchmark your survey results to your industry/region; it helps a lot to give context to your results.

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

• They recently launched a text analytics feature but I think it still needs some work. I don't find the attributes of sentiment to comments to make complete sense. Text analytics are also not yet available for export so it makes it very difficult to share with others in presentations and reports outside of the system.
• Currently they don't have the ability to set an automated file with and connect with an HRIS (at least not with Ultimate) so every time you want to refresh your users you have to upload a new file feed manually (which is pretty simple, it is just impossible to set the refresh on autopilot).

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

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)

So I would give it a 10 once it is integrated, but because the integration was a challenge and I found the customer service to not be concierge level enough, I would have to lower it to an 8 for that reason.

Incentivized

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.

Pages do not load quickly. Often times any action or selection of a box, drop down, check, pretty much ANY Javascript interaction causes the whole entire page to load/reload/start doing something in the background. This makes a nightmare for having to mass edit courses or upload ILT sessions. It's the one of the archaic web designs they use that really bugs me as an admin and makes working in the portal at times intolerable and insufferable

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

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

Culture Amp is the first such tool I have used. I find it to be very well rounded and useful, especially since culture is one of the trickiest parts of a business to get a hold of as related to the bottom line. The fact that followup on goals and feedback can be done thanks to the platform is a very strong point.

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

• We use culture amp to measure engagement levels surrounding certain "standard" questions we ask on a recurring basis. this gives us a viable way to measure how we are doing overall in certain areas that are important to us.
• The Diversity survey helped us pinpoint some areas were we could work on improving. This came out in comments from several users.
• We have to keep in mind that comments are important, but sometimes it is just one person who is upset about one thing that does not affect anyone else. We must keep that in mind and set those aside. It is easy to get caught up in some of those comments.

Incentivized