IBM Kenexa - Your platform for faster and better recruitment platform.
IBM Kenexa is used by the HR and Leadership team members. It enables the recruiter in terms of tracking a potential candidate from the …
IBM Kenexa
IBM Kenexa Talent Acquisition Suite
Overview
Reviews
Popular Features
View all 15 featuresJob Requisition Management (11)
7.3
73%
Job Search Site Posting (11)
7.3
73%
Company Website Posting (10)
7.0
70%
Customized Application Form (11)
6.7
67%
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What is IBM Kenexa?
IBM Kenexa Talent Acquisition Suite 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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- No setup fee
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- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting / Integration Services
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Features Scorecard
Recruiting / ATS
7.2
72%
Product Details
What is IBM Kenexa?
IBM Kenexa Talent Acquisition suite is an ATS and onboarding solution scaled for enterprises. It includes features for managing the candidate search, interview, selection, hiring, and onboarding lifecycle.
Kenexa offers candidate relationship management functionality for tracking candidate data and personalizing communication with each candidate. The suite also provides ATS capabilities via BrassRing, which enables automation for routine recruiting processes. It also includes cloud-based onboarding and candidate analytics intended to streamline candidate selection and hire-to-value timelines.
IBM Kenexa Competitors
IBM Kenexa Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
Alternatives
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is IBM Kenexa?
IBM Kenexa Talent Acquisition Suite 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.
What are IBM Kenexa's top competitors?
Cornerstone OnDemand, Infor Human Resources, and PeopleFluent are common alternatives for IBM Kenexa.
What is IBM Kenexa's best feature?
Reviewers rate Candidate Search and Applicant Tracking highest, with a score of 8.
Who uses IBM Kenexa?
The most common users of IBM Kenexa are from Enterprises and the Staffing & Recruiting industry.
Reviews and Ratings
(57)
Ratings
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IBM Kenexa is used by the HR and Leadership team members. It enables the recruiter in terms of tracking a potential candidate from the starting of the recruitment process. The most amazing feature is that we can customize the email to the candidates for every recruitment step. It is basically a user-friendly tool. It helps to source different candidate profiles from different sources.
- Applicant tracking
- Candidate profile sourcing
- Better communication Between recruiter and applicant
- I am really thankful to the team tor this amazing software.
This is one of the best tools for the employees in any company for their personal growth in terms of technology. This tool is used by the whole organization. When I joined this company my profile was technical support (L1-support) where I was just working on [a] few tools [that] don't [actually] require technical skills. But after some time I realized I should learn something technical and I moved into the Oracle DBA with the help of [the] IBM Kenexa Talent management tool.
- Best tool to move from one profile/technology to another within the organization
- Very user friendly
- Easily interact with the managers or higher profile people through this tool
- Tracker of the self growth
- We get the path to move into any new and trending technology
- We can find our interest in which we're suited well
- Sometimes, the process of hiring or moving from one team to another team takes too much time.
- Due to this huge time taking process sometimes rather [than] changing their role within the organization, [people] move to some other company.
September 20, 2021
Needs an overhaul - Would not recommend
We use IBM Kenexa BrassRing as our ATS. It is used across the entire organization
- Applicant tracking
- Provides a number of ways to source for candidates
- Some customizable features, but there could be more
- The reporting features (data insight tool) need a massive upgrade. It is not user friendly, very slow, and clunky.
- It would be great to have more options to customize & add different pages/views.
- Having an integrated scheduling feature would be great, syncing up with an Outlook calendar.
It was used as an ATS and CRM for staffing. We housed all candidate and client details; used it to search for top profiles and reporting. It solves the problem of candidate documentation and back-office administrative needs. It has solid search tools and easy to navigate tools and also UI.
- Candidate retrieval and documentation
- Client documentation
- Reporting
- We would love to see a more comprehensive dashboard and having to not use as many clicks to get to where I need sometimes.
- Perhaps more parsing options for even easier, more automated usage.
July 29, 2016
A steep learning curve post go live
We use Kenexa's 2x Brassring as ATS in a global organisation. It allows our Hiring Managers to provide the data required by them, and start/be part of the recruitment process without requiring access to the system.
- We can build/configure as required, to respond to both planned and ad-hoc business requirements.
- Global sparring and knowledge about global recruitment issues, which are not always ATS related.
- Customizable automations are fantastic
- A Client Services Consultant is pretty much required to navigate between bugs and the global support center. A Workbench trained administrator is invaluable.
- Once languages have been added to a requisition, it is not possible to remove them without rebuilding the req and sending it for approval again. Many defaults point to the system having been originally designed to for system users to only work within a single req language.
- Reported issues seem to too frequently end up in a loop between the 1st and 2nd level of support, or returned as being fixed, when it isn't.
- Too many bugs, especially following a release of a new functionality.
- The system is designed for all users to access the system, even though it may be sold as data can be accessed via emails. Out of system approvals and notifications are disappointing.
- Too many functionalities which would help usibility are only available to standard fields, which for the most part are unusable.
- Product releases are normally too far between and lacking functionalities which one would expect in 2014.
- The Internet Explorer version supported is always behind, by at least one version, if not two.
July 29, 2016
Honest and Straightfoward
- It allow you to track the progress of a potenital candidate from start to finish
- You can set up email templates that you can send and label for each part of the process
- You can pull resumes fron different sources by using keyword searches for the type of employees you are looking to hire
- You can track communications to each candidate to see when you email or last contact the candidate
- Send emails after using the search Function to find the candidate
- The number of clicks to move a candidate from start to finish
- Not having to reclick after changing Multiple status for candidates after reviewing
- If you search for a candidate and find them in the search, you can't send emails to them even if they are in your req. Must go in req to send emails for template.
July 22, 2016
Kenexa? You Betcha!
My company currently uses Kenexa as our applicant tracking system and new hire onboarding solution. We have multiple entities and Kenexa lets us customize the different apply and onboarding experiences based on entity, job, etc. As far as problems, we had a horrible go live experience. When we went alive a few functions did not work as tested and there was a lot of rework that had to be done. That being said, our experience post go live has been great. We are currently undergoing the Talent Suite upgrade and the service provided so far has been amazing.
- Customization of communications being sent to candidates
- Onboarding experience for candidates
- Implementation teams are very responsive
- A desire to listen to what clients want/need next
- The current mobile application process isn't very sleek or "pretty"
- They tend to over promise on system capabilities
- There has been past issues with resolving issues/help desk tickets. This has improved overall but the weekend support is lacking
July 18, 2016
The ins & outs of the Kenexa assessment
My company currently uses the behavioral MDP (Management Development Program) assessment to identify candidates for our training programs, which take place three times a year. This test is one of the determining factors as to whether or not a candidate gains entrance into our MDP cycle. Typically the candidate goes through three phases in the interview. First a phone screen or face-to-face meeting with the Human Resources Field Recruiter, then the invitation to take the Kenexa assessment. Based on the score, the panel interview is scheduled.
We also use the test for current Assistant Store Managers that are seeking a promotion in the near future. In between recruitment cycles, I test the top performers in each zone and give them feedback on areas of opportunity and highlight their strengths with the feedback from their testing.
The assessment breaks the scores down into three categories. 0-20= Fail; 21-49= Pass with Caution; 50-100= Pass. Currently, any candidate, whether internal or external, that fails cannot proceed in the interview process. Candidates are allowed to retest 6 months later.
The Kenexa assessment gives situational examples of real life scenarios and assessing whether or not a candidate can deal with the stresses of retail management.
- Identifies how a candidate will deal with stressful situations within Retail Management.
- Weeds out potential risk factors with overall performance through detailed, behavioral questions.
- Assesses key behavioral categories that a manager needs to be successful.
- Some of the questions under situational judgment are subjective and don't take into account different scenarios.
- The test is a little lengthy.
- Some people do not test well and I am not sure if there is a contingency built in for that margin of error.
July 29, 2016
Kenexa -A defective HR system
We are Human Resource Consultants. Managerial positions by are client are forwarded to us via Kenexa and candidates are uploaded by us on Kenexa.
- The system is good for sorting applications however any activity slightly more complex and it collapses.
- I have no idea where to start.
December 03, 2018
Hiring through Kenexa
Kenexa is used across the organization globally for recruiting and recruiting operations. Its used for candidates applying to various roles, scheduling interviews, acts as a single database for feedback for interviews, making offers to candidates and storing important data like Visa, work permits, passport soft copy, compliance and any work / country specific regulations. It also acts as a triggering tool for sending mass communications, emails and information about the role and organization.
- Applications on Kenexa - this I believe is the best strength of Kenexa. It is very easy to segregate candidates based on the skill set, role, country, level, etc., hence being the single source for all information.
- Feedback Forms - As soon as the interviews are done, the tool allows us to send feedback forms with a detailed feedback (up to 4000 words). This allows a detailed documentation of every interview, enabling the organization to make the best possible hires.
- CRM like features - like any CRM (customer relationship management) tool, Kenexa allows you to be very personalized with every person you are interacting with. The emails directly go to the inbox of the candidates and are personalized as well (with first names, role, and phone numbers).
- API's - I believe this is one area where Kenexa lags, the ability to talk to other systems. This tool is impossible to integrate with lots of other tools, requring human involvement and manual intervention.
- Search - Searching is not an easy task. It requires a lot of time and effort to search basic data. But due credit to IBM, they have improved on this a lot. But still the system requires more optimization.
- Openness - Kenexa is a user defined system. It functions only in one described way. There is no way to reduce time, or have an alternate way. This is sometime irritating.
February 19, 2016
Kenexa Rocks!
I use Kenexa as an applicant tracking system for both external and internal hires within the corporation.
- It's very user friendly, it's easy to use even if you have no experience with it.
- Information is easy to find and navigate which makes doing your job that much easier.
- Sending candidates invites to apply makes the applicant pool much more diverse.
- You should be able to add attachments to applicant files.
- A great enhancement would be to pre-populate fields that you use frequently so you don't have to type everything in multiple times. (ex. Store Managers & Store Numbers).
February 13, 2015
Kenexa Review
Kenexa was used at my past company in the centralized recruitment center. Kenexa forced us to move away from the printed paper (applications and resumes) and review these items online via the Kenexa portal. The portal was easy to use and navigate, I liked how organized the portal was. I could view applicants with ease and move them through different stages in the portal.
- Easy to use
- Easy to view applicants
- Organized portal
- Our on-site trainer from Kenexa was awful.
February 13, 2015
Kenexa review
Kenexa is used across the HR organization globally. BrassRing is used for applicant tracking and OrgMappers is used for engagement data.
- Kenexa BrassRing is a great tool for applicant tracking, posting roles, tracking EEO data, background check info, candidate profiles, templates, reporting,
- Kenexa technician support is valuable in providing what their customer needs are to run their business effectively
- Kenexa OrgMappers is a great tool to host engagement surveys, pull data easily, enter data easily
- Understanding the industry and where technology is going and offering services to customers to bring them up to speed. i.e. solutions for career conferences to easily have candidates apply on the fly
- Offering to send a rep to the conference free of charge to enhance the customer relationship
June 03, 2015
BrassRing Applicant Tracking Review
Our organization currently uses Kenexa BrassRing as an applicant tracking system and requisition approval tool. Both internal and external candidates apply through our open jobs this way. We track affirmative action reporting through the tool as well as various other reporting for our organization. We are looking at integrating background checking and onboarding through the tool as well.
- Uptime of application
- Ability to be used globally
- Technical Support - It is extremely difficult to get someone to respond to tickets quickly and understand what the problem is
- Lack of a dedicated account resource
February 06, 2015
Not so bad, yet no too good.
While using Kenexa, I encountered issues repeatedly. The ATS itself was extremely slow and was not compatible with many systems. I was not able to use it for a regular session without growing frustrated. It would constantly freeze during all my searches as well as giving me error notifications for status checks. This would happen ALL THE TIME.
All Recruiters and leads used it to search for candidates, but it was still awful.
Here is a basic overall look:
1) Lags 24/7
2) Outdated information
3) Constant Outages
4) NON user-friendly interface (needs to be updated)
All Recruiters and leads used it to search for candidates, but it was still awful.
Here is a basic overall look:
1) Lags 24/7
2) Outdated information
3) Constant Outages
4) NON user-friendly interface (needs to be updated)
- It's really good at stalling time.
- I liked that documents were easily sent with a single click.
- Easy to learn and use (at times)
- The interface needs to be more user-friendly and updated. it seems as though it hasn't been changed or updated in a decade.
- It needs to be compatible with Google Chrome. Internet Explorer is slower and crashes more often.
- There needs to be an automatic clean-up option to detain and get rid of outdated resumes to speed up recruitment processes.
- BrassRing did make it easy to create and post new jobs as well as unpost and close filled jobs.
- Kenexa 2x BrassRing is capable of running many useful reports for keeping track of candidate flow and overall recruitment progress.
- 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.
April 17, 2017
Decent ATS for smaller companies
Kenexa is used globally for salaried hiring. It provides a single, integrated hiring solution.
- Integration with HRIS and job boards
- Contact management
- Actual user interface is fairly intuitive
- Setting up integrations is extremely tedious. For instance, setting up an address feed would have required sending over 5 different spreadsheets on a daily basis (one each for every facility name, street address, zip code, state, country) and a 6th sheet to make the connection between the other 5 elements. We opted not to set up that integration as a result.
December 20, 2013
Optimize your Recruitment Performance with Kenexa
- Kenexa's "Data Insight Tool" allows for real time metrics to be collected and shared to make decisions that impact our company.
- Applicant flow data is easy to track as the HR Status options are customizable to adopt to specific work processes.
- Kenexa customer service allows for an expert technical liaison to help consult any and all implementation decisions that my company decides to pursue.
- RAM Trigger logic allows for optimal automation of the transactional recruiting processes.
- Talent Records can be located with Boolean search logic which aids in the recruitment process.
- Kenexa "Agency Manager" for Third Party Agencies is a primitive tool and could be enhanced to help manage agency usage.
- System outages are particularly troublesome for our international locations as the generally occur in the middle of their work day.
- Work Bench Training is only held several times a year and is instrumental to a company's ability to adopt BrassRing as their applicant tracking system.
December 14, 2013
Is Kenexa 2XB the Right ATS for Your Recruitment Team?
- 2XB is SaaS and it is up and running most of the time. Performance is usually good and there is only very minimal downtime.
- 2XB allows corporate recruiters to work the way they want to work. It provides a clear snapshot of everything on the recruiter's "desk": what there is to do now, what there is to do later, and what can be ignored.
- 2XB can handle companies/organizations of various sizes including the very largest and handles multi-site, multi-countries well.
- The GUI has undergone several major revisions since I first used it in '03. It is far from Windows compliant. As the market transitions away from pure Windows compliance, now is the time to redesign and bring the UI up-to-date.
- Reporting is very poor. A redesign of the reporting engine to use modern technologies is needed.
- There is little that the user can do to customize their experience other than moving columns around, adding and deleting columns, and rearranging the landing page. This should be addressed when architecting the new UI.
- The implementation of 2XB that I use has no social media integration that I'm aware of. However, Kenexa has announced Release 13: Social media integration and mobile functionality are at the top of the holiday wish list of recruiters this year. Just in time for the holidays, we’re excited to roll out Release 13 of Kenexa 2x BrassRing. Highlights of the release include expanded functionality for social, mobile, on-demand video interviewing, SMS/Text Messaging, user interface advances and candidate relationship management. No idea if that's vaporware or not but at least they are headed in the right direction.
December 11, 2013
Kenexa is worth considering.
- Candidate View includes the resume which allows for quick decision making on suitability of candidate.
- The reports generated from Kenexa worked well and easy enough to configure.
- The flow to the careers page was simple.
- Posting to external sites was easy to do.
- The version we had did not include social network sharing and that would have been nice.
- The version we used didn't support .docx or .pdf but I'm sure that has changed now.
- Some functionality, like template creation, needed engineering customization and would have been nice to do ourselves.
- Workflow jump to the next step would have been a nice feature.
December 11, 2013
OK, but there are better ATS Systems out there
- Has a good UI.
- Able to navigate through the tool easily.
- I'd like to see better searching capabilities.
- The search results are not 100% accurate. It requires more time to find the right candidate.
Currently Kenexa is being used enterprise wide by recruiters and hiring managers for recruiting and hiring.
- Kenexa has been trying to do a better job of understanding the client and candidate needs in the last 12 months but they still have room to improve in this area.
- With Kenexa's acquisition by IBM, the ticket and support process became more difficult.
- With resources like IBM behind Kenexa, I was hoping to see things move faster but updates to functionality have come at a slower pace than expected. When new features are added, they are not fully functional at launch e.g. mobile job search and mobile apply - they are communicating that both functionalities are ready however when working through the projects to turn on both, we have discovered a lot of limitations and functionality that have made us hesitant to go live with a less than great experience for our users.
- No one can clearly communicate the roadmaps for new features and enhancements - we often get conflicting information depending on who you talk to.
July 26, 2016
Good for some but not all!
We were using Kenexa as our applicant tracking system. HR and Hiring Managers was the user population that had involvement with using the system. The system is robust and had many good features from a recruiting perspective but did not integrate easily with out current HCM system so we ended up going away from it and using a different system. The mobile capabilities of the system were subpar at best which was another problem for us since we are a sales based organization.
- The system is intutive and easy for the recruiters to manager through reqs and candidates.
- The system has Gobal language capabilities.
- The sytem has integration posibilites with many different background vendors such as HireRight, and Talentwise.
- Kenexa does not integrate with other HCM's easily such as Workday.
- The support for Kenexa is not very good at all. It takes a long time to get tickets resolved and their tier one staff is not very knowledgeable.
- Their Social Source product was a waste of money. It is very time consuming for recruiters to manage.
July 12, 2016
Truly awful product, even worse support
Kenexa was used as the primary application tracking system for the entire company to handle over 10,000 hires a year. We had a few hundred recruiters using the system along with various support staff and hiring managers across the company.
- Data extraction - this is about the only area where Kenexa did fairly well. Although there weren't built-in tools to get very meaningful data within the system, you had many options to extract data in ways that would allow ingestion into other systems for processing and analysis.
- Almost everything - the system is clearly a legacy system that has been patched together over time and never really received the updates it needed to be competitive in a modern web environment. The recruiter experience is very poor, requiring tedious processes for even the most basic tasks. The job applicant experience is also very poor, unless you very heavily tweak the poor interfaces (and even then it's not possible to get it looking and working particularly well). The back-end administration is also quite painful and non-intuitive. The system is capable of doing some powerful things, but you really have to "trick" it into doing what you want. It doesn't appear to be designed with useful functionality in mind. Most of the solutions we implemented for were hacks that worked around silly limitations within the system.
- Support - really, really poor. We paid for a dedicated consultant, and would regularly go days without getting responses (much less resolutions) to our issues. We replaced the consultant after a few years of pain, and the new consultant wasn't much better. They are not responsive, not knowledgeable, and regularly dropped the ball. Even if the system was excellent, based on the quality of the support we paid to receive I could not recommend this company.
February 04, 2015
Review of Kenexa
Kenexa is being used as our primary ATS (applicant tracking system). It is currently being used by the department. We use Kenexa to track requisition assignments, candidate status and applicants.
- Interface is clean and concise - It is very easy to see the information needed in one screen. The usage is pretty intuitive.
- Information and fields displayed is very customizable to individual preference.
- Easy to see actions that are pending and needing to be addressed and real time status'
- A better training program may be helpful. A lot of key features I needed to figure out on my own.
- System can hang up or is slow at times
- More customization could be provided for default settings.