AkkenCloud vs. Symphony Talent, now with SmashFlyX

I don't know many other scenarios, as I have been with this company for 13 years and in this industry for roughly 25 years. It is a tool that is well suited for our company and this industry in general. As a staffing company, you can accomplish nearly everything imaginable with this tool. The only area I have seen that might not be ideal is if you wanted to run all kinds of metrics. You can run a variety of reports in Akken, the data fields are limited sometimes and one would think that wouldn't need to be the case. You should be able to put whatever data you want in any field to create the report you need.

Incentivized

I think all organizations both small and large could benefit from Symphony Talent. It is a must to have a recruitment marketing platform these days given it's a job-seekers market. It is more important today more than ever to capture and nurture leads for your organization and keep them updated on jobs and things happening related to the culture of your organization. Organizations with less than 100 people may be able to get away without it

Incentivized

• Automatically keeps a record of activities such as email conversations related to a candidate.
• Time and date stamp on events logged to a candidate and customer is a great resource.
• Completing full company profiles with all contacts is very helpful for later efficiency.

Incentivized

• Ability to track candidates engagements with requisitions
• Personalized email campaigns
• Ability to post requisitions in different job sites
• Easy to integrate other systems with SmashFly
• Talent Network Forms

Incentivized

• This is the worst ATS I've ever used. It's hard to find what you need. It's not set up in a coherent manner and things are all over the place.
• I have to download a resume just to view it.
• The parse function only works in Internet Explorer and it works poorly then. Makes it impossible to tell if its actually a duplicate because it flags everything.
• No section for meaningful notes. Notes are all just reports of action.
• No way to make it efficient for direct hires. All geared towards staffing so it makes you fill out non-sense information that will be inaccurate and irrelevant just to satisfy field requirements.

Incentivized

• Moving candidates through steps can seem very clunky. When I first started using the software, I was turned off because it seemed to be a little redundant.

Incentivized

There is no reason for us to make a switch. Everybody in the office is familiar with it and it allows us to get our work done faster. There are no pressing issues that would warrant a change at this point

Incentivized

Akken is quite easy to use however there are a few more complex functions or multi steps to go through to run reports and find historic information.

Incentivized

It's an average tool. The calendar function isn't great, email is slow, and there always seem to be day-to-day issues. The functionality is mostly there for a staffing firm, but there are plenty of areas of improvement still needed

Incentivized

The best support we have received has been from sales. Customer success is pretty much a joke. We have been yelled at by customer success reps; been told to take a screenshot of something we are not seeing; been told there are no issues on there in when Akken hadn't been working for hours, only to have it magically fixed shortly after we reported the problem; and been told engineering was working on a problem for weeks without resolution. If you are going to be working with IT Staffing companies, you have to understand that we have a modicum of knowledge in IT, and you can't BS us. Honesty will get you a lot farther than stringing us along with BS.

Incentivized

I believe SmashFly does a great job supporting their system and staying involved with their clients. Everything in the system is basically a workflow so you can create them or reachout to support for help

Incentivized

Encourage your team to watch the training videos available.

Incentivized

We preferred the ability to go with Mac computers. That was the number one selling point for us. Besides that we liked the ease of the product. The email interface looked exactly like Outlook. The calendar the same. The price was also a big selling point. It came in slightly cheaper than Bullhorn and other systems and in our opinion a better product.

Incentivized

It was like night and day. Success Factors had horrible customer service and we had very limited control over the platform. When we transitioned to SmashFly, their customer service was excellent and we had complete control over the system to make any changes we needed quickly. The technical support with SmashFly is also one of the best I've seen in the business. Their turnaround time is pretty quick when compared to others

Incentivized

• Sometimes the system is slow and the process of hiring someone is lengthy so it takes a long time to complete it so it takes away from other things I could be working on
• It’s easy and quick to manage candidates to show what process they’re in

Incentivized

• From what I've heard, recruiters have noticed a big upswing in candidate response rate, which of course, leads to increased rates of hire.
• Some recruiters are reluctant to use smashfly because they think they're doing double effort.

Incentivized