Halogen TalentSpace (discontinued) vs. PeopleAdmin Higher Ed Platform, from Powerschool

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.

Organizations who have very few applications and/or very few positions posted are probably less likely to benefit as high from PeopleAdmin. Large organizations who have several positions and/or several applications/applicants can definitely benefit from this product. This product is not as well suited for performance management as I had hoped because there is not a lot of freedom to creating and designing different evaluations for different position types in the system when you have an organization that has thousands of different employees and types.

Incentivized

• 1:1 agendas are easy to create, add comments to and prompt excellent conversation flow on the topics that truly matter to the manager and the employee.
• The system can be easily customized to reflect your company's language and culture. We did this in several areas of the platform (goals, development, learning), and it made a world of difference in the understanding and adaptation of our users. One example is that in each learning module, we added 3 questions in the course description so that managers would be automatically prompted to ask to follow up / learning transfer questions when their employees enroll and take a learning course.
• Halogen support is outstanding. Any question I have had has been answered upon the first contact or within 24 hours.

Incentivized

• Applicant tracking was a good use of this tool for our department. I think it could use a few more customization features but overall it was a good tool to weed out applicants who were not qualified for the position.
• The system has some canned reporting tools that also worked well for our department and management needs.
• It was a great place to house our position descriptions and provided a readily accessible source for hiring managers to make requested updates and changes and for employees to see and have access to their position descriptions.

• My organization does not use all of the functions/modules that Halogen offers, but I find that those modules still appear on the Halogen main page. I think a great area for improvement is to hide these functions so as not to confuse employees.

Incentivized

• PeopleAdmin's internal report writer needs work. Currently, in version 7, reporting can only be done requisition number by requisition number. The report writer needs to be modified so it can create reports enterprise-wide.
• PeopleAdmin's Data Mart product needs substantial modification. In version 5.8, on a monthly basis, PeopleAdmin provided us with an Microsoft Access database containing our historical data up to that period end. In version 7, the "Data Mart" contains our historical data. The Data Mart consists of over 300 files. These files are not database table downloads nor is it parts of a database data dump. Rather, the files appear to be scrapes from html pages. They contain html codes and other character data that needs to be cleaned before they can be uploaded. The files are not in a table-by-table format. Any one file can contain data from two or more tables. The format of the Data Mart makes it difficult to load the data into a database and format it in a table structure that is comparable to the Access database provided with version 5.8.

Implementing a new system and process company wide is never an easy task. We moved so quickly in such a short period of time that we were able to learn quickly but also have the opportunity to improve the Halogen experience. We will more than likely will renew our use of Halogen as we already are seeing a small impact which hopefully in the long run will lead to a greater impact

Incentivized

We are evaluating our options as it relates to PeopleAdmin. We are likely to renew as we can not find another product that gives us the functionality we have with PeopleAdmin 5.8 in the area of Position Description. Outside of that, we would likely be close to finding another product solution.

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!

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

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.

Get to know your CAM - Customer Account Manager! They are a lifesaver! (Thanks Jorie Basque!)

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

I've used both Target Recruit and HR Smart. When working with Target Recruit it quickly became apparent it was not the right solution for us. Another solution we examined prior to selection PeopleAdmin was iCIMS. iCIMS is a very social system but was not as familiar with the Higher Education recruitment processes as was PeopleAdmin.

Incentivized

• We are able to get our reviews done in a quicker amount of time. Instead of 4-8 weeks we were able to get it done under a month.
• Halogen has gotten better at given us a heads up when the system will be down. Most patches are done overnight so we can at least verify it was done, but their success rate of a patch not breaking something is not at 99%. So we do lose productivity when the system is down.
• The tool is easier to do so there are fewer questions from users outside the core team.

Incentivized

• We are now able to track our recruitment sources to determine our ROI on university paid subscriptions.
• We have reduced our recruiting approval review times by 50%
• We have identified areas for improvement substancially by having robust reporting available at our fingertips.