Halogen TalentSpace (discontinued) vs. Spekit

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.

Spekit is extremely well-suited for customer-facing teams who truly have a business need for "just-in-time learning." While we all benefit from the concept of just-in-time learning, organizational representatives who must perform to a high standard in front of external-facing stakeholders particularly benefit from having quick access to processes, definitions, answers, contacts, and more in a tool that is easy to navigate. Spekit may not, however, be well suited for cash-strapped organizations that already have a content management tool like Confluence or SharePoint and can't afford to meet their customer-facing teams in the middle. While Confluence and SharePoint serve very important needs, they don't do a particularly good job of making content easy to find in a pinch. Spekit does.

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

• Looks great, the design of the plug-in looks very streamlined. It makes a difference if a plugin is ugly.
• Integration is great. It installs into Google Chrome in seconds. It's always accessible when you need it
• Usability is amazing. It automatically places itself near tabs that you might need help on.

Incentivized

• 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

• Honestly, there are a lot of tools that do the same thing - there are lots of search tools for orgs that use too many tools to host content.
• I truly despise all the little helpers when I download the extension. Its the worst, stop cluttering my chrome.

Incentivized

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

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!

As an administrator, it is very easy to navigate. I can easily see which content is performing well, which content has not been touched. It's simple to teach new team members how to create content. We have added new authors easily in multiple groups in the business.

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

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

Spekit may not be as robust as Confluence or organized as SharePoint, but its use of embedded tooltips (Speks) and browser extension put it in the S Tier for "just-in-time learning" platforms - particularly for customer-facing teams.

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

• The time saved from using Spekit is incredible. No more calls/emails asking "what's this field for?" or "How do I do ?" It's all right there, thanks to Spekit.
• Using Spekit has provided an unexpected morale boost because it's not only easy to use, but it's making work more enjoyable too.