Trakstar Perform Reviews

We originally selected Trakstar because it was affordable and the demo given to us was good overall. Though this product does the basics, it is still extremely outdated and lacks a lot of intuition. The reports are all saved as PDF's or you can export excel documents. The excel docs are a major mess for the most part and will leave you with hours more work editing them. Once you get everyone's assessment, you have to load the PDF into the employee's folder so that they can see their grade. Though the rating dashboard is decent, viewing your individualized grading metrics afterwards is nowhere near as user-friendly.

The product lacks many simple features that we're just forgotten during its build. You cannot update your grading scale without going into EVERY SINGLE COMPETENCY manually and changing your grading scale (ie. going from a 5-point grading scale to a 4-point grading scale, etc.). Basically, there is no way to mass-edit a lot of things in the system. I hope you have someone on your team that has days worth of time to manage this system.

The 360-review capabilities are even more difficult. As an admin of your organization system, you can't send out 360 reviews unless you log in as that specific manager's manager. Yes, you will have to continuously click links to log in as another user in order to edit (or even view) that person's appraisal.

We've also had a lot of issues with grading schemes not working properly and various bugs popping up frequently, impacting our entire review cycle. The support team is VERY small and leads to long response times which gets crazy in the middle of your review cycle.

The new UI is pretty, but the UX still lacks a lot of intuition. Unfortunately, Trakstar is a lot of form over function at this point. They need to hire a good UI/UX guy and a senior engineer to fix some things and then I would maybe suggest using it.

See my review - it focused on competencies, so as an organization looking to be more progressive, we were ready to use it.

Personally, I love Trakstar considering my several involvement as the lead HR Manager responsible for PMS. It was an easy sell to the Senior Management Team because it ticked all need boxes we had identified. The customization and integration process was a breeze, the account officer took a lot of the burden off us.

Then transitioning the employees went smoothly, including the training. Our account officer worked so well with us and was willing to conduct trainings as early as 5am Eastern, considering the time difference between the US and our country offices in West Africa and Europe. She really appreciated her flexibility.

As an administrator, I can tell you how effortless it is to assist employees, resolves issues, monitor the process, review reports and all required responsibilities. As a employee and a user, my appraisal was effortless.

The reviews we have received from employees have been great, my manager is soo pleased with the system and feedback from the [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] "I have never enjoyed appraisals as much as I am right now with Trakstar".

I manage a team with some shared goals as well as individual goals. Trakstar allows me to work with my employee to track their progress throughout the year. This allows for more shared accountability among the employees and me as their manager. It has helped me to keep not only my staff on track with their goals, but it keeps me on track with my own performance goals. Trakstar is unique and a valuable tool to any company wanting to provide meaningful performance goals while seeing positive results.

I've really enjoyed having Trakstar as our performance review tool. With each UI update it gets better and better. It's not overly complicated so my employees aren't confused by how to go in take notes, track goals, and score reviews. All I have to do is remind them about due dates and they're on their way!

We implemented Trakstar a little over a year ago now and as our organization has now completed the annual appraisal cycle, I am ready to review the software. What I want to say first and foremost is, I can very highly recommend Trakstar. It is a very user friendly tool that has made our performance management process much easier on all users.

The Trakstar team were excellent at advising and supporting us throughout the configuration and implementation. Nothing was impossible. They came back on all our questions in a very clear and timely manner and provided the employee and manager trainings for our team. We received many compliments from manager and employees on the quality of the training and trainer (Lauren Fish in our case).

Thanks to this tool, our performance management process is more dynamic and streamlined. It is a big relief to no longer have paper forms going around, different versions, etc. Our employees find it much easier with Trakstar and so far all I've heard is positive from accross our organization.

It makes life much easier for the HR Department too. As a Trakstar administrator you can easily see where everyone is in the process and can send automatic reminders if needed. Trakstar also produces awesome reports that have proved very valuable during calibration. You can see at a glance whether there may be any rater bias, etc, and can signal accordingly.

All in all, really fantastic tool that has met and even exceeded our expectations. We look forward to continue working with Trakstar!

We recently implemented Trakstar and this is the first time that we're using it for our annual review cycle. Every team member went through PA training, which included learning about Trakstar. The feedback so far has been great - it's easy to use, intuitive, and will make the process so much easier than what we've done in the past (a form we created in Excel!).

As an administrator I've reached out lots of times to Trakstar's support group with questions about reports, functionality, etc. They are super responsive, great to work with, and have helped me find some work-arounds for things that we needed for our company.

This tool is a GREAT VALUE. The implementation was very easy, went quickly, and we were able to deliver an online tool that we had not originally planned to do this year.

We're looking forward to learning more and make the most out of Trakstar.

Trakstar is so user friendly and meets all of the needs of our employees and managers in our jurisdictions across the globe.
The service team are so knowledgeable and so responsive, no matter what they are asked and the support page is full of great information!
The webinars on offer also provide valuable training on how to make our administrator tasks easier! Love that!!!
Recommendations for consideration in any future changes:
1) I would ask that the "carry forward goals, measurements etc" when a manager is archiving, be defaulted to yes, rather than having to choose every time.
2) Have a link to access the support page after you sign in to the system so that you don't have to open a new page or log out.
3) Increase the size of the Appraisal's window for admins.....we have so many employees that the scroll bar doesn't go down far enough and we can't see all of the employees...we have to print the list in order to see the entire list.

With the company size @ about 250 employees, Trakstar is a great tool to help in the performance management process. The versatility allows for the set up of multiple processes and variations in the various job roles in our organization.

Excellent! The ability to customize goals, factors and ratings is designed well.

Implemented Trakstar as a Consultant across 2 companies with very different use-cases - interesting experience in getting 2 work with 2 firms where I play very different roles (Firm 1: acting as Administrator and Manager - latter of which necessitates a lot of changes as I cannot be the de facto Manager; Firm 2: there will be Managers taking over the actual role, Goals and Notes will be used, etc.)

I have been utilizing Trakstar for the past 5 years and as an organization we have grown that this tool just seems to get better & better. I can't imagine having to do paper performance appraisals ever again. I love the notes taking feature (which we use year round) and the flexibility to design your own form, rating scale and approval paths.

Some of the pros include more efficiency in the overall assessment process, greater control and oversight from HR, enhanced reporting features, ease of use, and electronic storage of historical data.
A con would be the need for enhancements to some of the administrator's functions. It would be a great enhancement for the administrator to be able to select an employee's name from the Appraisal icon and then see the appraisal currently being scored. Also, when running a rater bias report you can see the scores for all direct reports to a supervisor, but when you select 'View Appraisal' it only provides a blank copy of the appraisal without notes or scores. Another con is when an approver declines an assessment the programs requests a note and then the note is then placed in the 'Send for Approval' section. The note would be more easily found if it was viewable when entering the Workshop screen.
Overall, we have been very pleased with the Trakstar program, but additional enhancements are always welcomed.

Great customer service through live demo to implementation and going live in Trakstar. Deadlines given were met and when a last minute change after going live was needed, customer service was able to get the mass edit uploaded before the time we were originally told so we were able to get back on track quicker than expected. That was greatly appreciated!