Truly awful product, even worse support
July 12, 2016

Truly awful product, even worse support

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Kenexa

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.
  • We were able to use the system to handle hundreds of thousands of applicants, over 10,000 hires, hundreds of recruiters, and thousands of managers. It will get the job done, but you won't like it along the way.
Kenexa fares very poorly in practice against almost anything else. It checks the boxes of raw functionality, and offers wide customization. However, in practice it is a nightmare to use for almost everything. I was not part of the initial implementation, so I am not aware of all the options that were considered at that time. However, we demoed and implemented several other systems in my time. The star of the pack was Avature CRM. This is a system that is sleek, useful, and facilitates massively enhanced productivity. It gets out of your way and just works. Avature now has a full ATS (they didn't when we started using them) that should be at the top of your ATS consideration list. Avature is the opposite of Kenexa, providing excellent customer support (which we didn't have to pay extra for unlike Kenexa), and a really well-designed product.
Stay away from Kenexa. I could not recommend using any of their products in any circumstance. Look at newer players in the ATS field, where you're likely to find a more innovative, well-designed system that will provide a better experience for recruiters, managers, applicants, and back-office support. It'll probably be a lot less expensive as well.

Brassring Feature Ratings

Job Requisition Management
2
Company Website Posting
2
Publish to Social Media
2
Job Search Site Posting
2
Customized Application Form
3
Resume Management
1
Duplicate Candidate Prevention
2
Candidate Search
1
Applicant Tracking
2
Collaboration
1
Task Creation and Delegation
Not Rated
Email Templates
3
User Permissions
4
Notifications and Alerts
2
Reporting
8