Cornerstone OnDemand is a cloud-based application for talent management. Cornerstone offers suites for recruiting, training, performance monitoring and planning, learning, and HR data management. It is scaled for enterprises.
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iApplicants
Score 5.0 out of 10
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iApplicants is a cloud-based ATS that offers batch or mass communication with potential candidates via multiple channels, resume parsing, and data management. This particular platform is sought and used by small to midsize companies and is offered on a flexible payment schedule.
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.
In my opinion, they are well suited to any hiring scenario in which there are many applicants and you need to do an initial screening. The tests we use are effective in filtering out people who we have learned later or from experience would not work in our organization, those who have scored well have went on to be successful. It is an excellent tool.
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.
Innovation - iApplicants partners with other related businesses and develops tools to streamline processes. Their integration makes sense - e.g. integrated background checks or HR software integration.
Responsiveness - I don't think I've ever had a response that was beyond 24 hours of my request.
Training and Updates - The dashboard offers tutorials at your fingertips. Updates/announcements are displayed upon logging in. I appreciate having it there as a constant reminder, but without getting a lot of email notices that clutter my inbox.
Customization - I love that we can brand the application for a professional recruiting "portal" and add additional details about our company. Additional customizations are accessible to me as an end user via the GUI, so I don't have to make a request for everything.
The application is long enough to deter job hunters who are "click-happy" and apply to every job they come across - applications that allow job hunters to store their resume in the system and click to apply generated hundreds of unqualified people who were desperate for anything and didn't even read the job description. On the reverse side of the spectrum (particularly government systems), I've seen (experienced) online submissions that were so long and tedious and could take hours to complete online. While some fields are mandatory in the application, iApplicants doesn't require a candidiate to essentially re-key every piece of their resume into sections of an online form.
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.
The version we used didn't have the look and feel of more sophisticated ATS systems, which often feel more user friendly. It would be nice if it had less of a database format.
The posting feature utilized a third party which was great but didn't post to real time and required some follow up administratively. The feature of posting from the system is fantastic and the number of options is great but for sites that require manual entry and approval just knowing you are waiting on a third party company to manually enter those postings, have them approved and then verify they have actually been posted live requires a bit more follow up than I prefer.
We had a posting delete and no technical explanation as to why or how. It took someone several days to realize it was gone which lost traction and was alarming when we realized that the technical support team had no idea how it happened or what could prevent it from happening again. Needless to say that led to having to verify all postings were active daily for several weeks after which was time consuming when you have 30 open requisitions at a time.
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.
This is simply because as we expanded our business to include a staffing division, our technical needs of a tracking system greatly increased because now we needed to also track job orders, time sheets and billing. Had we simply stayed a software development company, we would have stayed with iApplicants as it fulfilled our needs at that time.
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)
iApplicants is rare -- they offer both a great company (service, innovation, and ongoing development) with a product that really focuses on the needs of its users. It provides the basis for HR/legal reporting. It's easy to use, just logging in for the first time, so even my not-so-tech-savvy managers love it.
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've used this product consistently for 8 years now. In that time, I've seen ONE time that they had a technical glitch -- and THEY were all over it. The only reason I even knew about it was an email alert they sent out to all clients, explaining the issue. They also had it fixed the same day.
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
It works. It's easy for everyone I've shared it with -- even my not-so-tech-savvy staff. When I hired a coordinator to handle routine HR duties, this was a simple transition to hand off to someone else without a lot of training. Sometimes it's a little slow downloading documents (resumes) from the site, but that could be a combination of issues that may not be related to their product. At one time, it wasn't able to accommodate newer Word documents (.doc vs. .docx), but they fixed that, as well.
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.
Responses are always within 24 hours. They don't nickel and dime for everything we request. I like that they understand the request and we're not caught in a flurry of emails or failed attempts. Customizations, when needed by the vendor, have been at no charge. Most modifications can be made from my administrative panel. Everyone I've dealt with at iApplicants has been positive -- there seems to be a great sense of ownership across all staff there.
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.
I thought the training was well structured and the demos well-paced. Topics are set up sequentially so one can watch each one and build on previous tutorials. However, they are broken down into segments so a user can hone in on just a specific area where help is needed and not waste time on other topics s/he may already know. I also like the fact that the tutorials are available on the home page of the admin login, so we don't have to hunt for topics in a huge "knowledgebase." It's easy to get a quick refresher when needed (or when ready to try out something a little more advanced) and apply it immediately.
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
I would say the overall capability with the iApplicant system is fairly similar to what other products can offer. Our recruitment goes in streaks where we can have several positions at once and then there are times when we have no recruitment at all. So we didn't want to spend a lot of money on an applicant tracking system. I would say the biggest selling point for us was that the iApplicants allowed for our applicants to apply online and would improve our processes. But also that it was reasonably priced compared to the other products.
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
At the very basic level, it provides a place to post jobs and cross-post to free job boards. It could just be used by HR staff. However, it's more than just another place to post if one opts to utilize the full functionality-- it's an applicant management system that allows a user to pre-screen, organize, and collaborate on candidates with other users. They've added built-in background checks, reporting tools, community boards, integrated with larger/broader paid marketing opportunities, and affirmative action programs.
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.
