Hire by Google (discontinued) vs. PDS Vista

Google Hire is very good at doing the basics well. I believe for most internal HR departments at small companies, this is all you need. It also works well for small to medium-sized staffing companies that just want something reliable and easy to use. What Google Hire doesn't do very well is be flexible. They don't have custom options, they don't have a ton of settings, and their development cycle is slow. As a result, it's pretty much what you see is what you get.

Incentivized

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As Vista HRMS is fully customizable to suit your needs, a company should determine if they have a current employee who can do the work themselves otherwise they will need to consider the additional cost of asking PDS to do the customizations for them. There are additional modules that we aren't currently making use of, but each company should learn about the functionality of each of them as some may be more beneficial than others. When gathering your questions, ask all potential users of the system what they would want to see in an HRMS. We did so before selecting Vista HRMS and we got pages and pages of questions and comments and made sure that each item was addressed beforehand and was something that we would be able to incorporate into the system. You have the option of taking the system in house or being a hosted client. Make sure you figure out what resources your IT department has available. If you have a dedicated administrator who will do all the upgrades and enhancements great, otherwise you may need PDS to help out and having PDS host may be a better option

• Google does search well so when I search through our database for candidates, I'm confident that I'm pulling up all the right people from what we have.
• They have a modern and nice user interface - this is one of the biggest reasons to use it over other systems, as most ATS' are pretty ancient looking and not very pleasant to use.
• Their support is very good at answering and addressing questions.
• Their pricing is incredible. I'm sure at some point it will change, but for small companies paying 100+ per user for other ATS' - it's incredible to pay 100/month for the whole company.

Incentivized

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• Vista HRMS is very flexible, it does everything we need for HR, benefits and payroll. It’s user-friendly and intuitive to use, when we roll out new self-service items our employees have no problems and require minimal training or documentation.
• PDS has excellent customer service and support. We get answers to the majority of our questions and problems quickly, within the day that we call. More complex issues that may require PDS’ technical support are usually addressed within a few days. We were upgrading our production servers to Windows 2012 over a weekend and a key person in our organization was on leave. When we checked with PDS to see what cost would be involved if we needed their help, they said it was included in our regular maintenance, no extra cost.
• The PDS User’s Conference is an excellent learning opportunity for training on everything Vista does, including using Crystal Reports for custom reporting. You also get to meet and talk to the executive and development staff and have direct input into the future product development.

• Despite many many months of requests, Google still hasn't implemented ANY custom fields. This makes it tough for an external recruiting firm to track what they want (most importantly: desired salary).
• The job board integration is not great for external recruiters, mostly at the fault of Indeed. Indeed flagged us as a recruiting firm and so none of our jobs actually go live. While I know this is an Indeed problem (we had the same problem when using Bullhorn), Breezy ATS never has that problem for us so I don't know what they're doing differently.
• Their development cycles are quite frankly very slow. I've requested some features, and while support is great about telling me it's coming or in the pipeline, I honestly don't really see a difference in the product since we started using it. It's still great to use, and we still love the software, but there haven't been too many visible improvements that make any difference to our work.
• Being Google, it can sometimes be frustrating that one arm doesn't talk to the other. For example, they announced a Gmail for Works App/Extension integration, but for some reason when they launched it, admins of a domain couldn't install it. Google Hire pointed to the Google for Works team, and it took literally months to fix. Not the end of the world, but just very silly considering they're the same company.

Incentivized

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• Typical of any system built for the unknown requirements of hundreds or thousands of customers with varying needs, PDS sometimes doesn't fit our processes precisely out of the box. However, this con is far outweighed by the ability to configure and customize the system.
• The most significant pet peeve of our users is the necessity for so many clicks to navigate between different areas or the system or to review applicants. These items are being addressed based on feedback from the user community in an upcoming release.

I feel so invested in Vista HRMS that I don't really want to try other options. I know we as an organization are not using this product to it's full potential and that is just due to us lacking the resources to be able to invest the time into breaking it apart and making it work to the best ability for us. The system works great as is, but there are a lot of implementations we can put into place to help us out even more. For example, we would love to start using Workflow to create more efficiencies. I personally have a very good relationship with our hosted vendor who supports Vista HRMS and can help me with any issues and concerns, this is a big part of the reason that I would renew with this product and continue to be an advocate for Vista HRMS.

In my line of work, PDS Vista doesn't fit. I recruit and manager talent pipelines, as well as all onboarding aspects of 11 companies. I spend more hours getting data configured and searching for information within this software than I spend with my candidates. Theres an abundance duplication, and there isn't a single stream of information shared across screens. I have to input the SAME details into several screens for them to match up. Nothing is intuitive, and its certainly not end user friendly

Incentivized

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PDS has excellent customer service and support. We get answers to the
majority of our questions and problems quickly, within the day that we
call. More complex issues that may require PDS’ technical support are
usually addressed within a few days

The resources and online tools that PDS provide are extremely thorough and helpful in our training and learning.

Ask lots of questions, ensure you fully understand the functionality (particularly history records) and train, train, train the users for correct and complete utilization of the system.

I picked Google Hire after spending about 3 months on Bullhorn. I found Bullhorn to be terrible. It's WAY more customizable and theoretically powerful, but it's also a pain to set up and maintain. Even just getting your job page set up on your own site required tech support. Getting it eventually to what you want could be a great benefit, but Google Hire does great right out of the box and is a lot cheaper. Breezy HR is a great system. It's a bit more expensive than Google Hire for multiple job postings, but their system is equally easy to use and straight forward. However, we are all in on Google Products, so it was just a no brainer to go with Hire for a better price and most likely a better search function.

Incentivized

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I've used Peoplesoft HCM in the past. The products have some similarities, but they are marketed to different sized companies, so it's a bit of apples to oranges. Peoplesoft was very complex and challenging to manage and support. Vista HRMS should require fewer technical resources and still provide robust features for HR and Payroll. We selected Vista HRMS because it met the majority of our requirements and was priced to enable us to purchase and implement it within our budget. Also, it's an integrated system (although not truly one system when you count Vista Time) which is an improvement over our current state.

Incentivized

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• Google Hire makes, unfortunately, a very little impact on our ROI, but I think in the ATS world that's a good thing. It simply acts as a record that we can put everything in and easily reference, and the fact that it works overall makes it a positive software product in the long run.
• While the search works great, I don't know that I've ever specifically found a candidate and placed them due to it. That could be a result of our job reqs though.
• The biggest most obvious impact is really just the price. We needed a tool that does what Google Hire does, reliably. Most other companies charge at least 150 or so for 2 people, whereas Google Hire is 100/month for many users. It gives us flexibility for the future and helps minimize what could be a big expense. That definitely helps our bottom line.

Incentivized

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• Positive impact would definitely be self-service for both employees and managers to view and update selected data.
• Through some analytics our managers are able to track turnover for their site/department by many criteria (length of service, reason, etc) and can view a number of other analytical reports such as headcount and demographics which help them to make informed decisions about their department.