Cytiva – NOT Just Another Performance Management Software Vendor

By Ian Alexander

Talent management software dissatisfaction rates are high, clients are confused, vendors are spending huge sums on marketing and suing each other. It is upon this backdrop that Cytiva has just launched its new SonicPerform employee performance management system. SonicPerform was designed by a team of performance management industry veterans to be the easiest to use and most effective system available.

Though it was back in 1995, it seems like just yesterday that Michael Troy, Jerry Howard, Diane Pratt, Jim Sillars, Larry Weber, myself and many others developed and marketed the first employee performance evaluation software called Performance Now! by KnowledgePoint. That product morphed into a corporate employee performance management system by 1996 and blazed a trail that led to several firsts in the software industry: 1st performance management application (and the defacto prototype for just about every other successful system on the market today), 1st web based enterprise performance management system, 1st Software as a Service HR App (maybe first SaaS app period), first vendor to reach 1,000 company wide installations, and the list goes on.

That all started many years ago and is ancient, and mostly irrelevant, history now.

It is only relevant today because SonicPerform is brought to you by many of the people that brought you Performance Now, Performancereview.com and the Performance Impact Enterprise employee performance management systems.

Jason Moreau, the man that brought you SonicRecruit has assembled a who’s who of pioneering performance management software professionals to make his entrance into the market. Myself, Jim Sillars, Larry Weber, Pravin Mahadeshwar, Dena Childress and many others have over 50 years of combined experience building, implementing, using, selling and marketing performance management systems that have been implemented at thousands of sites.

I would venture to say that most all (not all, but most) of the EPM systems on the market today were influenced by the current SonicPerform team and the products they have developed and marketed over the years.

So when you evaluate performance management software vendors, keep in mind that Cytiva’s strength of experience and design stacks up with the most visible vendors in the market. And Cytiva's legendary service and client satisfaction rates back up this experience.

We have taken that strength of experience and released a valuable white paper designed to help organization navigate the somewhat overhyped and confused marketplace and provide guidance on how to successfully implement an employee performance management system. It’s called “Six Key Steps to Successfully Select and Implement a Performance Management System,” and it’s available for free download here (http://www.sonicrecruit.com/requestwhite.htm).

Does Anyone Like Their ATS?

By Ian Alexander
Vice President

I just got back from the ERE Conference this week. Though I have been attending HR related conferences since the mid nineties, I have only attended ERE twice. It is a nice cozy group of vendors and attendees. And, even though I have only attended twice, the surroundings seemed oddly familiar.

ERE is a conference where a corporate recruiting software vendor like Cytiva gets a chance to talk with a concentrated group of recruiting practitioners. It’s not watered down with compliance or training or compensation, or any of the other half dozen HR subspecialties that attend broader conferences.

After two days of smiling a lot and talking with a lot of ATS users I am blown away by the high percentage of ATS users who roll their eyes and tell me they hate their ATS. The typical answer (and I mean 90% plus) to the question “how’s your ATS working for you?” is “it’s not. I don’t like it, but we’re locked into it because (fill in the blank).”

It doesn’t seem to be limited to a few vendors, either, though there are consistent themes. One well known vendor is constantly singled out for their slow performance and crashes. But at renewal time, they’ll do anything to keep you. Another large vendor has large gaps in functionality. And of course, the ERP vendors’ clunky candidate interfaces and complicated implementations tend to stifle resume flow.

I get the fact that vendor/client relationships can have ups and downs and ebbs and flows, but I am also optimistic enough to believe that you should really “like” the software you use. By contrast, I talk with a lot of our SonicRecruit clients. I would bet that 100% of our client base has a short, or even a long list of changes they would like to see made to the product. That’s just the nature of the game.

In contrast to my far from scientific trade show survey results, SonicRecruit clients generally sing the same refrain: “We like the product.” More importantly they will tell you that they like and respect the people and the service. And despite whatever enhancements they would tell you they would like to see, the overwhelming majority says that the product more than meets their needs for the price.

Why? Based on what I am regularly told, it’s because SonicRecruit clients know that they will get an account manager or support representative on the phone when they call. They know that the service they receive is honest, caring and helpful, and those clients that have been with us for any length of time know that their feature wish lists tend to show up in the product.

Finally, and this is a quote from a soon to be released case study, “with other vendors I have worked with, I knew that when they upgraded the product, I would get crashes for weeks. SonicRecruit has never crashed on us, ever.”

It all boils down to trust and communication. I guess any good partnership does.

Attending ERE and hearing all the dissatisfaction shook me a little. I wondered what SonicRecruit clients would say walking down the exhibit hall aisles at ERE. Would they say something different to our competitors if asked the same question?

Then I remembered that one of our clients, Manpower, attended the event and one of our Manpower users came up to me at the conference. He told me that he was working in SonicRecruit on his laptop in the lobby of the hotel. The person sitting next to him asked him what he was doing. He proceeded to walk through the product with his lobby-mate and tell them just how much he “loved it.”

Is your ATS vendor a great partner? Or is it a dysfunctional relationship? Does the product let you down, and then when renewal time comes do they drop their price and promise to do better next time?

It doesn’t have to be that way. You can like, even love, your ATS.