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Employees at Kenexa make up the heart of our organization. They embody our culture and best express what it’s like to work here. We hope you take time to hear what our employees have to say...
Tony Coe
Lincoln, NE USA
I had spent 12 years as an employment lawyer and only knew I didn’t want to go back to that. After floundering about for a while, I heard about Kenexa and thought their growth and product offerings could revolutionize the HR industry. Without a clear idea of how I would fit in, I joined the Help Desk in November 2006. I worked on the Help Desk for seven months gaining experience and knowledge in various products. More importantly I was able to begin to see how my strange set of talents might fit in to the organization.
I was promoted first to the Assessment division as a Research Analyst where I helped companies measure how their HR initiatives impacted their bottom lines. After seeing that I had a knack for turning complex concepts into an understandable story, I was asked to help do research in our Employment Branding division. I went into companies and interviewed their executives and high performers and conducted quantitative surveys on culture. Soon my new boss was telling me I was a natural at defining an organization’s culture and developing a brand based on research and data. He asked me to be the team lead for all the cultural branding work going forward.
I will also be heading up the development of a new cultural indicator instrument which will further enrich the story we can tell about a company’s employment brand. It is very gratifying helping senior managers of huge corporations make decisions that really resonate with what motivates their employees. Kenexa is a place where a little talent, in almost anything, and a lot of initiative will pay huge dividends.
Duke Daehling
New York, USA
When asked to summarize my career at Kenexa, I couldn’t come up with something short and sweet to tell the story. Shortly after the Y2K false alarm I started hearing great things around Lincoln about this up-and-coming HR company called TalentPoint (now Kenexa). There were a couple employees I knew and within their network of friends there was a very distinctive work-buzz, so I started inquiring about sales jobs. After two months of forcing interviews with the proper executives in Lincoln, I was asked to join in September of 2000.
Before life at Kenexa, I was working as a district manager for a wine distribution company and had several years experience in business development and sales leadership. So you could say I was taking a cautious step backwards in my career path going from successfully leading a team of sales people to sitting in a cube in hopes of the long term up-side. At the time of joining, Kenexa-Lincoln was using newly acquired venture capital to ramp up the sales force and hired nearly 80 people for inside and outside account executives to cover major geographies in the United States. Starting out as an inside sales person, I began dialing the phone from 7am to 7pm for what was known as all ‘portfolio products’ (included silos of survey, ATS, assessment, performance management, etc).
A few months later, my supervisor noticed that there was always a phone in my hand when he passed my cube and asked me to join his sales team to focus solely on finding leads for survey products and services. For development purposes, the survey leadership started sending me to client project meetings, trade shows, and on sales presentations to learn from several individuals like Troy Kanter and Bill Erickson. With a lot of luck and collaboration I had my first new survey client in four months! You can tell titles and org charts don’t mean much at Kenexa when the senior executive leaders would take time with a new sales person and invest in development, growth, and learning the ropes of our business.
At Kenexa it is a great feeling to know someone always has your back and that we are all in this mess together, no matter what job you are in. I say mess because with all the growth, change, and speed of our business it feels like architected chaos and a bit wild-west at times. It is difficult to thrive at Kenexa if you are not comfortable with ambiguity, crave structure, or have underpinning entitlement issues. On the flip side of that, there is real support for employees that take initiative, help others, and just dive into something that can benefit employees, customers, or the business. This really defines living the Kenexa Values.
In that manner the leadership of Kenexa has supported my development by putting me in the 2002 leadership academy, adding management responsibility, and making me one of forty-five partners in the firm. At the end of 2005 I was asked me to move to Toronto to run our Canadian division, help client services, serve the employees, grow the business, and lead the transition for a newly acquired business. Leaving my previous supervisor wasn’t easy after more than four years in the trenches we created a great friendship. The experience in Toronto was great and two years went by very fast. In January of 2008, I was asked to move to New York to take a new role with oversight on the western hemisphere regional managers of our survey practice and to help our east coast general manager build on our east coast presence. In the last year I have been very fortunate to spend a great deal of time with various thought leaders at Kenexa such as Jack W. Wiley, Jeff Saltzman, Mike Dolen, and Scott Brooks who have enriched my thinking and fostered more learning moments to bolster this stage in my career with Kenexa.
The HR space in which Kenexa lives in is thought to be a multi-trillion dollar industry that is heavily segmented without any true leader in the space that is both a strategic partner and service provider. When the Chief HR Officer of a large company is focused on creating their industries best workforce, you cannot find one service provider whose name surfaces to the top with any degree of consistency. With the convergence of our current position in the market, our track record of success, global footprint, organic growth, thought leadership on the employee life-cycle, investment in IT, and ability to connect the importance of people to our clients business metrics, it is our mission to be the place that executives turn to for help with workforce transformation. Fulfilling the vision of our top executives, we are in the process of changing the HR industry as it is known today. We feel fortunate that so many great things are working in our favor and a lot of growth and change has occurred, but it still feels like we are just getting started and we need great people that will help us write the next chapter in the Kenexa saga. I am looking forward to turning the next page and seeing what the next five years will bring and what new people will join us today that will lead with us tomorrow.
Julianna Ehlers
Lincoln, NE USA
I came to Kenexa looking for an exciting career that I could own. I wanted to have more than just a job; I wanted something I could really sink my teeth into and make a huge impact in a short period of time. I started at Kenexa as a Product Training Consultant in 2000. I was responsible for ensuring that the end users of our software were able to use our technology to its maximum capacity, with little effort, and have fun while they were learning. I was given the opportunity to help build this team from the ground up. In a very short period of time we had documentation created, processes rolling, and happy client trainees. Goal accomplished. What’s next?
Based on my three years as a Product Training Consultant, I knew how our clients were using our technologies in different capacities and wanted to share that knowledge with our new clients. In 2003 I transitioned into an Implementation Consultant role implementing applicant tracking and performance management. As an Implementation Consultant, my responsibility was to listen to clients, understand their processes, and suggest how they could make process enhancements and efficiencies by leveraging our technology. This position also provided me with wonderful opportunities to work more closely with our software development and quality assurance teams.
In early 2005 I was approached about moving to our Hyderabad, India office to work with our software engineers, configuration engineers, and quality assurance teams on end user applicability of our software as well as to bridge a gap between our client facing teams and development teams. It didn’t take long to convince me that this was yet another opportunity for which to take advantage. Just a few short months later my family and I were on our way to India. What an amazing ride and fantastic opportunity. Before I knew it, it was one year later and my whirlwind ride in India came to a close as I headed back to the United States to start a new chapter in my life at Kenexa.
Before I left India I had started conversations about what my role would be as I came back stateside, but the role we decided on ended up being reorganized out of our service structure very soon after my arrival. That was quite alright, because there were more opportunities waiting in the wings. The next thing I know, my business unit leader was asking me, “If you could create your dream job, what would it be?” Wow, that’s a huge question. I had some time, and I landed on “I want to help other Kenexans be successful.” Starting in 2006 I assumed the role of coaching and developing some of our current employees, but shortly after that I was approached about managing what ended up being our largest acquisition to date. This became a full time job for 3-4 months, and after my portion of the integration was complete, and our business unit had almost doubled in size, it became apparent that my training/coaching/developing role was not scalable. My current position is one that has been molded over the last year and a half. I now work on communications, operations, and special projects. Through these focuses I am still able to help others be successful, which means that I still have my dream job. I look forward to another eight years of opportunity and excitement at Kenexa. There is truly never a dull moment.
Michael Gegg
London, UK
I’ve never been asked to tell ‘my story’ before. I thought it was only famous people who wrote autobiographies when they were nearing the end of their successful careers. But, as I write this I can honestly say that this organisation gives its employees more opportunities in a year than the average organisation would in a decade, so with that in mind maybe it is the appropriate time to share ‘my story’. Although, unlike a lot of authors I’ll keep this short as I’m sure you’re keen to explore many other areas of this career portal.
My life as member of the ‘Kenexa family’ started in November 2006, following the organisation’s acquisition of UK-based PSL. Since that time I have risen from someone who rolled out marketing initiatives throughout the confines of the UK to my present role of leading our marketing communications globally.
This current role has opened up so many exciting opportunities and challenges. I’m now leading a fantastic team of people and together we are spreading the Kenexa name throughout North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. As someone who enjoys exploring cultural differences (but not the food) it’s been a wonderful opportunity.
And this is what Kenexa is all about: opportunity. The company genuinely prides itself on the opportunities they provide to their employees. There is a certain uniqueness about working here that, if I’m honest, it is difficult to put into words why (and I work in marketing!), but if you choose to join us, believe me you’ll quickly discover your own answer as to why.
As for me, I’m already looking forward to being asked to write my career portal ‘sequel’ – after all, who knows what new opportunities and experiences the next 12 months will bring forth!”
Rakesh “Rob” Nath
Hyderabad, India
Firstly, thank you for giving me this opportunity.
My name is Rakesh Nath, popular by the name Rob Nath at Kenexa. I started with the Kenexa product support (Helpdesk) team in May 2003 and perhaps was amongst the first few employees in India. It’s almost four years and 10 months since I got started with Kenexa but the excitement getting into work each day seems just like my first day. Kenexa is an amazing place to work, it’s coupled with great leadership and a value based approach. One of the exciting aspects of work at Kenexa is the collaboration of teams across the locations. We are truly global not just with our project deliverable but also with our initiatives.
I consider Kenexa to be a land of opportunities with extreme customer focus, and a employee friendly and fun filled environment. The rewards and recognition programs at Kenexa are very gratifying. I personally have had a wonderful career at Kenexa. I had a promotion almost each year and had numerous challenges/exposure by virtue of the additional responsibilities.
- In 2003 I joined as a Helpdesk Engineer.
- In 2004 I was trained as an Internal Auditor for the ISO process and was involved in process definition & implementation for the team. I was also involved in conducting internal product trainings and cross functional audits complying with the ISO standards.
- In 2005 I was promoted as a Level 2 Helpdesk Engineer focused on escalation support. This was when I got exposure to ISO external audits and was involved in client demos for sales purposes.
- In 2006 I was promoted as a Helpdesk Supervisor focused on Helpdesk process/operational management.
- In 2007 I was promoted to an Assistant Project Manager responsible for entire Helpdesk operations in India. This was a fantastic year where I had opportunities to travel on site to our US office for training on one of our recently acquired products, ramp-up of the team to almost double by the end of year and working on the transition of the team to a new location.
- Today, in addition to Helpdesk management, I have been given an opportunity to work as a Technical Consultant to one of our first clients in the Middle East and be onsite with them.
Kenexa believes that talent has no limits and we live by that belief. The opportunities are not just limited to any individuals but are there for any aspiring employee. Kenexa develops leaders and encourages learning and innovation. I would refer my family/friends to Kenexa in a heart beat and truly believe it is an Employer of Choice.
Regards,
Rakesh Nath B.
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