PiiQ by Cornerstone (discontinued) vs. Halogen TalentSpace (discontinued)

Great for managing medium sized teams of people spread over geographically dispersed offices. Not so good for small teams (less than 15). Requires a degree of time and effort to set up correctly to provide useful data for management and a good experience for staff members, but once that effort has been made the results are great.

Incentivized

I think it's a good platform for tracking and monitoring goals, feedback, and development. We don't use the 1:1 meeting feature, however, I can see how that would be valuable for many organizations. I do like that it is very customizable, however, that also presents problems in that sometimes forms and/or processes can be a bit challenging to create easily and quickly.

• Excellent customer service - when all else is equal, customer service will win the day.
• Ease of use helps us get everyone on board with the goals and ratings.
• The analytics are helpful to senior managers - we can compare how managers rate as well as how employees perform.

• I think their Support Center is great! All of their Customer Service Representatives are knowledgeable, friendly, and able to troubleshoot any and all issues I've had in the past. I am very impressed with the breadth of knowledge that each representative has - every time I've called them, they were able to resolve my problem.
• Halogen's dashboard is very user-friendly. The dashboard allows the user to sort, filter, and manipulate data in order to create compelling reports.
• Version 18 of Halogen looks very sleek and is user-friendly. With simple instruction, employees are able to log in, enter their goals, and review their performance using the navigation menu on the left. Also from an administrator's perspective, it is very easy to navigate on the back-end.

Incentivized

• Being able to select more than one person when approving goals.
• Options to identify which people managers haven't approved goals, dine a review etc...rather then having to mimic each manager to see how they are going.
• 360 Feedback to stakeholders outside the business.
• Being able to remove a role that isn't being used in the organization anymore.

Incentivized

• When creating Evaluation Processes the limitations around the number of Goals that will push over to the form can be frustrating to some departments/positions. Only the first 10 will automatically come over.
• The ability to attach any Documents that you have saved within Halogen should have a way to link to any Feedback that is entered in through Feedback Central.
• The file size of and media that is attached to a Learning Activity or Path could be increased to accommodate more elaborate videos/presentations.

It's not that CSB isn't a decent performance management system, but we have decided to go with just one vendor (Workday) for an HRIS/performance management/payroll system so we can directly relate pay to performance. We are more interested in having just one system that "talks" to the other pieces instead of having to work with several vendors. It reduces the hassle of having to communicate with different support teams, having different contracts, and so on.

At this point, I would also love to see what other systems have to offer. But we have gotten to a place in which our employee population understands the system, our HR Managers can all use the back end, and for the most part it works for our staff. I am always very pleased with Halogen's customer support, constant upgrades, and think the system is continuously improving and have been pleased-to-date.

There are specific things within the goals and competencies that are user-friendly. For example, the rating slider isn't great in my opinion. You can slide in between ratings which can create some odd scoring (if you use scoring). It seems a better solution would be a drop down where you select your rating. There are also some glitches in the system and have been told Cornerstone is aware of them but are focused on delivering new features. There are workarounds, but that doesn't seem to be a great answer.

Incentivized

Halogen is very intuitive and provides very clean work-space ... lots of white space and modern layouts. There is more than one way to accomplish your action, too!

So far 100%.

The saving process slows it down. It doesn’t auto save. If you leave a page, it will sometimes warn you, but not always. When you hit the save button, a window pops up that says creating/saving packets. It feels very archaic.

My assistant could better address this issue. My perception is that there is not immediate assistance, and that there can be a wait for help. That is not a negative, just a perception. I have not used support in two years.

Incentivized

We only purchased the appraisal module and without the other modules offered, you are really limited in what you can do and the process becomes much more involved with needing to maintain information across multiple platforms. We found that they charge for everything and call it "consulting." We poured so much money and time into a system that was just overkill for what we really needed.

Incentivized

We bought training provided by 3rd party – it was fabulous.

It is very easy to use and I can do my own programming instead of paying a technician and waiting sometimes days for them to program the changes.

I think we could have done a better job of rolling out the tool to our managers. We were under a tight timeline. In the training, we showed them everything and said go do it by this date. Looking back, I would have done it in pieces: for example, 2 weeks to write goals, 2 weeks to get sign-off from direct reports. I just let them go at it. Since then we’ve moved to agile development environment and are applying the technique to everything. In future would only do through change sprint. It is a big change I didn’t take it seriously enough.

I had a team of 3 project managing. You need a champion from every department to make sure you’re getting it right and to make sure what’s happening is communicated. It’s not something you can do without input from department heads

Very easy to implement and Halogen has a well-trained implementation staff!

We did review other systems when we purchased PiiQ but I don't know what these were due to the member of staff no longer being with the company, however, I do not that we chose PiiQ as it was simple to use and that it also had the Performance option available in addition to the learning platform. we knew that this was something we wanted to have in the future which is why we purchased it.

Incentivized

I have used other systems in the past and I like that Halogen provides everything in one space. I would like to see a more developed way to report training, not in the LMS, but I think that for the most part that Halogen is a robust system that is superior to its competition.

Incentivized

• Reviews are generally taking managers less time to prepare because the essential infrastructure is in place. Past reviews are easily retrievable for review if needed.
• HR administration of the system takes less time than the previous version of Cornerstone (CSOD). HR is still responsible for training new users, but the built-in user guide is more thorough and easier to use.
• We're starting to see - slowly but surely - more (and hopefully better) interaction between manager and employee.

Incentivized

• Consistent goal setting and monthly 1:1 conversations across our entire company - especially as it relates to our sales teams. Consistent 1:1 dialogue and process has driven a more focused coaching conversation for a positive impact on our sales pipeline and close rate. This has been the biggest impact we have realized from the system.
• On-demand learning availability for all employees. We partnered with LinkedIn Learning for content that is easily searchable and viewable by all employees at any time through the Learning platform in Halogen. Employees engaging in learning activities has significantly increased.

Incentivized