Cornerstone Performance vs Appraisd

Cornerstone is the best and most comprehensive solution that I have seen for talent management. I have used the LMS, Performance, Succession, Connect and Extended Enterprise modules. CSOD continues to make enhancements to their product, especially with Learning, Connect and Performance, but where they are lacking is in enhancements to their mobile app and to their Succession module. While I do find great value in reaching out to their Global Product Support team, it will sometimes take days and even weeks before you get a response from them on a case. The communication to the customer is lacking there. Additionally, I find that some of the modules, such as Performance and Succession, can be really complex and require a lot of testing and trial and error to get things right. It does help that you are given two test environments (Stage and Pilot) to test things in. The quarterly releases have also gotten better over time, with many resources that can be used throughout User Acceptance Testing and the rest of the release cycle. Change is not always handled seamlessly for the customer, as we have experienced major delays when our Account Manager was on leave and also our Client Success Manager was out on leave. The people who filled in for them seemed overwhelmed and as a result there was a lack of communication. The 360 Degree performance review functionality can be great if you make the initial time investment to set it up. The one thing that Cornerstone does not provide with their 360 functionality is benchmarking with other companies, which our HR decided they wanted to do and therefore went with a different vendor for 360 reviews. Overall, Cornerstone is a great encompassing talent management system and I have not encountered another company that comes close to what they offer.

- Heather R.

Our experience with Cornerstone has been rough to say the least. From our initial sales meetings and implementation there have been things that have just not gone as promoted. As a regulated medical device manufacturing company we have very specific expectations out of our LMS and Cornerstone claimed to be able to support those expectations and has fallen short in some areas. That being said, they have improved over the years and are much better with being transparent with us then in the past. We struggle with using a cloud based LMS for two reasons. One because our requested enhancements are usually denied or go into the black hole of a system that uses votes from other clients to assess other clients interests. As I mentioned we have very specific needs which aren't likely to receive a large number of votes. And second, when changes are pushed to our portal automatically we then have to retrain our global admins and users. It sometimes feels like you have to ask the same questions over and over to receive help. On the pro side I'd say the user interface is a big pro. The users seem to like the look and feel of cornerstone much better than our previous LMS. If we had to do it all over again would we cornerstone in the first place, maybe not, but as I mentioned previously there has been some improvement over the years and we will continue to voice our requests until it exceeds our requirements.

- Casey C.

I have configured Cornerstone for 2 years in my organisation and in these 2 years, our Performance Management strategy has continued to change every 6 months. The system has been sufficiently flexible to support the majority of these changes. Furthermore, the last few releases have seen a brilliant user interface redesign which our end-users have responded well to. You can have an amazing product that delivers from a functional standpoint, but if end users experience terrible UI and UX design in the system, then you are better off going back to pen and paper performance reviews. Thankfully, Cornerstone woke up and the last few releases saw a welcome improvement to UI and UX. Simple, clean and modern. Something to be wary of is the quarterly releases. I have seen great functionality released but have also experienced issues with the new functionality and existing functionality during regression testing, that seems to be the result of bad QA prior to deployment. This has previously caused great frustration for us. That being said, whenever the issue is escalated to our Client Success Manager, it would receive the appropriate attention by the engineers until its resolution.

- Nelson K.

Our appraisal rate has increased and employees are finding the experience a vast improvement to our old system. Employees have stated that they have enjoyed their appraisal using Appraisd.

- Bethan H.

I was charged with the responsibility of designing a new appraisal and performance management system for over 300 employees, in three sites, with a range of roles from manual low-skilled to professional. The three sites function as completely different organizations, but there is also an overall management structure across all three. We needed a system which would be flexible enough to enable us to design exactly what we wanted and give us the information we wanted. We did not want to struggle with software which could not cope with the structure of the organization. This meant we needed some common elements for all employees, but different appraisal forms for different types of employees. As some people had more than one role in the organization, this was an additional complication and we needed to be able to solve this in the software. I did not want 'the tail to wag the dog'. Sometimes, software only does certain things and therefore you end up having to build your system around the capabilities of the software rather than modify the software's offering to fit with the system you have designed. I was delighted to work with the team at Appraisd. They were massively supportive in helping us use and modify their system to do what we wanted. This is the great strength of Appraisd. It is EXTREMELY flexible. But not only that - the support team is fantastic. So - In the end, this is as close to 'bespoke' as you can get. We are using the system to great effect in our Foundation of schools and nurseries and we can already see how this is going to improve the way we performance manage our staff and particularly how we can improve based on the data we can now extract and use. I would highly recommend.

- Paul D.

Great communication, they always listen and make you feel valued as a customer and a user

- Sarah H.