Brassring, formerly from IBM and part of the Kenexa Talent Acquisition Suite, and now sold by Infinite Computer Solutions, is an enterprise grade ATS and onboarding solution. It allows companies to find the right talent, track and manage candidates, and use candidate data to spot trends within the applicant pool.
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JazzHR
Score 7.4 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
JazzHR is an ATS and recruiting software. JazzHR aims to replace antiquated hiring processes like email and spreadsheets with an intuitive applicant tracking system that helps recruiters and hiring managers build a scalable and effective recruiting process.
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.
Since it allows you to tag candidates based on their level of talent or potential utility to the company, it is best used to identify the best prospects in large operations, such as multi-franchise oriented businesses that cover all kinds of sales. It can be used to make periodic assessments of the level of employee growth in certain departments, and based on the results let us know if certain employees would do better working in another type of area, so that the overall work operations are more uniform. JazzHR could excel in departments that use a high level of reporting, as its administrative tools provide high content reports with statistics on the performance of each employee or candidate at different levels.
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.
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.
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.
It worked well for the majority of our needs and is still in use even though I've left the company. The Resumator was an interim solution until we found a system that integrated with all our other internal systems. However, we ended up staying with it because of ease of use
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's not a 10 due to the eTemplates. If those were less time-consuming to set up and if some common forms were available to select from already set up, then I would give it a 10.
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.
Each person I've spoken to have been helpful, positive and encouraging. Once you begin using JazzHR, they have intervals in which they reach out to you to see how you're doing or if you have any questions. When you're setting up, they review what you've done and offer praise as well as suggestions on how to make it work better for you. They offer webinars and online training videos to walk you through every process.
A solutions consultant walked me through each step. It was easy. As I progressed in setting things up, their support contacted me to set a time to walk through any possible issues and make suggestions on a better way to set it up. At any time, if I had a question, they were available and there are also training documents and videos available.
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
Both Greenhouse and Lever at least seemed to have great products and great teams; they simply weren't worth 2-5X the cost for us. Now, let's be clear - a platform that helps you hire the best people is a certainly worth 2-5X (or perhaps 10X) the cost. However, for most small and medium businesses, the three platforms are very similar. Once you have ~100s of different positions or ~100,000 applicants, then a more advanced ATS could be worth the cost. For us, Jazz is excellent. We have about 8 types of roles and 250 employees, and we see the Jazz system working very well for us even as we grow to 1,000+ employees.
