PayScale MarketPay vs. SumTotal (legacy)

If you have someone in your organization well-versed in compensation and compensation analysis, PS MP is a great fit and they will be able to onboard and leverage it very quickly. Moreover, if you have roles within your organization that are fairly standard and akin to similar roles in other organizations, you will get a lot out of the majority of matches that PS MP suggests. However, if you've made your roles a little bit more nuanced or "outside of the box" you may have difficulty finding a sufficient match and have to make concessions. If you are in a region where PS MP might not provide enough data, you may need to do a bit of extra leg-work and analysis on your own to settle on where your pay ranges and the like should be. Given the cost of PS MP, it's worth considering based on your workforce and your commitment to compensation analysis and the conversations around it whether it's truly going to provide adequate ROI.

Incentivized

Very good for learning and development and training of employees. For Applicant tracking, recuirement, onboarding, and enablement, I prefer SAP SuccessFactors or Skillate. I also found that the SumTotal app is not very friendly on android and crashes sometimes and it is not optimized for mobile. Hence I end up never using it.

Incentivized

• Detailed view of the market rates for roles within the organization provides the ability to pay our employees at our chosen rate with confidence.
• Updated data to ensure that we are keeping pace--you're not stuck with outdated data that some annual salary surveys provide.
• The market available for analysis are robust, and we're not simply looking at a single city, region, or country. You can usually get as grand or as granular as you like in reviewing available data.

Incentivized

• Assign complete learning plans to users so they don't have to spend time searching for courses.
• Export learner's transcripts so managers can easily see their employee's progress.
• Embed Social Media feeds that are relevant to their business.

Incentivized

• There is a bit of a learning curve--if you're looking to get others involved who are not fluent in compensation data and analysis, it can be complicated and involved. It could benefit from additional tips and walkthroughs for newer users outside of the support that PayScale provides through your designated PS employee/account manager.
• Being a Canadian company, the data isn't always as robust as it is for American companies. Larger cities are almost always represented and while you can often get data for the smaller areas, the data is not sufficient enough to always provide the best confidence (e.g. 5.0 reports vs. lower rated ones).
• It does not work for every job, and you may find that you need to stretch definitions a bit as you may have roles that don't fix the exact mold that they are closest to in PayScale. This is especially true in insurance, where the role of underwriter or claims adjuster may differ significantly based on the organization's business.

Incentivized

• Reporting
• Mass importing of manual checks to be issued in California
• Ability to fund pay cards immediately
• Perform gross-up calculations within the payroll system automatically

Incentivized

I have transitioned from a position who supported the product to a position where I use the product. I continue to be impressed with the robustness of the product and how efficient it is. It is a user friendly software that can be used to navigate and accomplish tasks to meet organizational requirements.

Incentivized

I do not find SumTotal to be intuitive. I feel we need to adjust our needs to meet the functionality available in the tool.

Incentivized

Support is great as PayScale provides you with a dedicated staff member similar to Account Manager that helps ensure you stay on track and you get what you need out of the product. Additionally, onboarding support is provided where needed, and you never feel as though you're not close to the support you need. PayScale support is great!

Incentivized

We have our own IT support to assist in SumTotal issues, however, we have had to log in cases directly. Support is mediocre at best.

Incentivized

We haven't used any similar products, as the organization previously relied on salary surveys completed within a group of similar companies and market surveys. The downside of such surveys was the limited or not relevant datasets and the timing of them as they did not keep pace with the market and were always essentially 6-12 months behind the curve.

Incentivized

When I came to my company, they had been using a "light" LMS called Articulate. It was cheap and bare bones; i.e. not a lot of features, really just a platform to launch eLearning from and not real interface for student to utilize. When I began to overhaul the training department, this was one of the first things I changed. Articulate would only run courses built in their software, and the software was not 508 compliant. In addition, we had no ability to create learning plans, house transcripts, customize the interface, or manage the students. I made the choice to select and LMS that was a true LMS with all of the features that were critical to our clients' needs. Thus far, SumTotal has been able to support all of our needs, except one; mobile learning that is media rich

Incentivized

• Positive: Ability to better understand where our pay is relative to the market and ensure that we are paying competitively and attracting the best possible talent.
• Positive: We can have more informed compensation conversations with staff about their pay and why we pay the way we do. We can define our compensation philosophy and build a plan to move forward and ensure we keep staff informed.
• Neutral Impact: While PS MP can be robust for certain jobs, using it as a unified platform within the organization is not without its challenges as some jobs just don't quite fit the data provided and we need to make some concessions. While there are benefits to the data, the additional work and less confidence makes those benefits a bit of a wash in the end.
• Negative: There has been no negative impact of using PS MP overall to this point.

Incentivized

• Clean front-end user interface for easier course catalog management.
• Reporting has been more difficult than previous LMS.
• Audience building has more variables making it more difficult to manage.
• Slower overall client turnaround due to admin side interface.

Incentivized