Brassring vs. Lever

Kenexa is is well suited for any organization that has more than 3000 employees globally. I would not recommend this to startups or a growing organization with less than 3000 employees. But once you cross this number, Kenexa becomes useful and is a brilliant tool for global operations - recruiting. I would recommend this tool to any organization that has offices in many countries/geographies as well.

Incentivized

I think Lever is great for any sized company, but especially strong for smaller, growing teams. It's a very simple system, but clean, sleek, and very useful in any scenario. They have great support whenever you need it so those with smaller HR or People teams could easily benefit from their help. Can't think of too many scenarios where Lever wouldn't be well-suited, but maybe once you grow to International growth and hiring, it may be better to have a more Enterprise style business, set up for larger scaling.

Incentivized

• Kenexa allows Boolean key word search within a particular requisition so it makes sifting through a high number of applicants manageable and effective
• Kenexa can be tailored to meet individual business needs. During the time we’ve had Kenexa here I’ve used it in support of a few different business segments and for each the way the system was used to “position” candidate statuses have varied based on the individual need of the business. One example is when interviewing a high volume of applicants internationally, we were able to send qualified applicants through to the “event manager” and it would enable the candidate to select his/her interview date/time based on previously submitted options inputted by our Kenexa users.
• Kenexa allows one to customize and score questions for each open requisition that applicants complete as they apply. The system then sorts applicants according to the score of candidate answers allowing for easy sorting of top qualified candidates.

• Great integration: Keeps a list of Outlook email communication along with LinkedIn and other data sources
• Is fairly lively, not too much lag between screens even though it is looking through a lot of data.
• Has excellent reporting on how well each email message is working.

Incentivized

• BrassRing's application system for candidates is prone to freezing and crashing in the middle of the application causing potential candidates to lose all progress. I filled out the application myself and witnessed these issues first hand, on top of several complaints I received via phone and email from candidates attempting to apply via the BrassRing service. Also, the Parsing system within the application is not capable of pulling any meaningful information out of text documents.
• Each user must be added to each job in order for that job, and the candidates in it, to show up in relevant searches. This becomes a problem when a new team member joins the account and needs access to all of the previous openings just so that they can find candidates already in the system. The account I was working on involved literally hundreds of new openings a month, meaning that any movement of personnel on or off the account would mean having to update potentially thousands of old positions just to allow them to be able to mine the ATS for candidates. I don't see any particular reason why someone with access to the system should have to be given access to each individual job. If a particular position needs to be kept confidential for whatever reason then that individual position should be able to be set to only show to authorized recruiters. The rest of the positions should automatically be searchable by anyone with appropriate access to the ATS to allow for basic level candidate mining and movement.

• [In my experience,] terrible customer support - pay more to get less...
• Integrations are spotty and can break without reason
• Lever has so much potential, but their Roadmap is lacking in ways that will really help customers succeed
• Focuses on the number of candidates and not the company's need to build talent in a cost effective, data driven and collaborative way
• Overpromised and underdelivered in [the] capability of the tool. [I believe that you should] not trust your sales team.

I am confident that the Kenexa product will continue to evolve to meet the needs of our business in an ever changing work environment. The affiliation with IBM also plays a factor as we have a long standing successful relationship with IBM products. We will be looking to integrate other Kenexa products in the near future to streamline our HR processes.

I feel like I am pretty decent with computers and systems. It was fairly easy to use it after about a week or two . But I have seen people struggle with it as well as some people not use it at all. It can be slow at times and not work at times. But Its a fine system.

It isn't difficult to use for the applicant processing, but [I feel] if you want to pull reports or use their tools, good luck!

Just slow for what we are doing here

It is a very basic system. It may be OK for entry level positions only. The practice of removing CVs while the recruitment process is ON is disturbing and there is no one to explain or to inform why it is being done. Even a routine mail is not sent to the client/consultant. I am surprised how this system is continuing without too many complaints.

What support? - Add a ticket and get links to [I believe] their unhelpful user guide. Add a charge if you want better support - afterward just got those links faster...

We purchased an out of the box solution and that worked well for us.

Incentivized

SF ATS was not available at the time and Taleo was thought to be too expensive. In retrospect, given the amount of customization and leveraging of other vendor technology for things like analytics I suspect any cost advantage we realized evaporated

Incentivized

Lever is comparable to Greenhouse in its basic recruiting functions. I have found it to be WAY better than Bullhorn (clunky and overly-complicated with a very dated and non-intuitive interface) and Jazz HR (slick and pretty, but limited in its functions). The best ATS I've used is the proprietary tool at Meta, but alas, that tool is for internal use only

Incentivized

• Kenexa has assisted us in identifying top talent within our target market of applicants.
• Kenexa may exclude potentially good associates that don't test well.
• Kenexa clearly defines specific categories and general notes for training, development, & coaching of associates on areas of opportunity.

Incentivized

• Lever provides an enormous ROI by getting us in front of the right candidates that are going to make us more money and more successful as an org.
• I think that both the quality and quantity of new hires has gone up ever since we started using lever and involving the entire org in the process.
• It also saves us a lot of time because we don't need to send referrals via email, while saving/attaching resumes and such.

Incentivized