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.
$800
per year
SAP SuccessFactors HCM
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
SAP SuccessFactors is a suite of HR/HCM products covering these capability areas: core HR and payroll, recruiting and onboarding, learning and development, performance and compensation management, workforce analytics and planning, and employee experience management.
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.
SAP SuccessFactors is well suited for small to medium business organisations, in my opinion. It solves the purpose of being a strong yet reliable HRMS tool as it comes from the house of SAP. It gives your organisation the edge to manage employee related activities in a more synchronised manner. Large scale organisations do have an option to look at other available options as well because SAP SuccessFactors is not the best product in the market.
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.
I think this product, once you have multiple modules, what we're learning is (and one of the reasons why we're expanding our use of SAP SuccessFactors) its connectivity in the way it speaks and shares information in itself in the system. That allows us to share information easily across our organization with our business partners, with our other HR professionals, and with our employees.
I think it's a very user-friendly product as well.
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.
I think just overall the configuration can be a little bit hard on the backend user, like myself, knowing which screens to go to. Better documentation on how we configure things would be a great resource for employees in the HR field that are making those backend changes.
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.
We have put a vast amount of time and effort into our installation- and there is more work to be done, but the system has a lot of benefits that we plan to maximize and optimize in order to generate the greatest value for everyone involved
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.
SAP SuccessFactors is very user friendly, starting with Single Sign-on integration, then right away showing various tiles, such as organizational chart, time-off management, notifications of any review tasks, such as time-approval for team members. It has good navigation functions and language is very intuitive, so easy to understand for business users, no need to be too tech savvy.
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.
Until now we have not had serious availability problems with SuccessFactors, we had Microsoft Active Directory and SSO with ADFS and we had availability problems but because of problems with ADFS, we migrated to Azure AD and with that the availability problems of SuccessFactors because of ADFS went away. The only windows of unavailability that we have had are those that we are communicated to do maintenance and upgrades.
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.
The performance is very good, the truth is that we have not had serious performance problems, some complex reports may take a little longer, but considering the complexity and the amount of records it is an acceptable time. We have never received a complaint from users regarding page loading speed.
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.
SuccessFactors Employee Central gets a middle of the road rating from me because of the things it does really well - Training. It falls short with the objectives cascade and visibility amongst my reports. That's what brings it down to a 5. Objectives need to be clear and concise in order to gain buy-in from your reports, and SuccessFactors muddies that by poor delineation between cascaded attributes and my report's objectives. The whole objectives cascade can be reworked.
The in-person training was with a consultancy, we have taken several courses, all very specific. They have been reports in ecp, general configuration of ec, reports and IAS
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.
We use SAP Learning, and we like it very much, the topics are updated along with the products, we have access to the SFX customer certifications and we have done them all, in general the SAP learning platform is very good and complete.
As we were new with all this, we would greatly appreciate if we had assitance directly from SAP so we can implement the modules with all of its features and best practices. Unfortunately, we notice that the partner left some thing incomplete.
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.
At City, we currently use SAP on-premise applications for all HCM functionalities, and we have already implemented SF Onboarding, Recruitment, and Employee Central. Since we are long-time customers using all on-premise HCM applications, it's easy for business users to choose SuccessFactors products. We are delighted with the SAP HCM products we are currently using.
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.
The scalability and flexibility of SuccessFactors is unbeatable. It is very easy to scale the product to new countries and areas, and with the help of CPI it can be easily integrated.
We did use this service to do analysis of the solution being implemented. It was a good check point during the project to see if everything is going as planned.
As far as ROI, I don't know what the investment is in the product, so I can't give you an exact number of profitability, but I can tell you for ease of use, it has been a lot easier to use the product. I think the only thing that I would prefer is instead of having the print screens, I'd prefer having video modules to explain how to use the different aspects of it.
