Customers at the Heart: Cornerstone Wins 4 Gold BHG Excellence in Tech Awards

At Cornerstone, we’re on a mission to help organizations and their people rise to become extraordinary. And we don’t take this mission lightly.

As a SaaS company, one of the primary ways we realize this mission is by delivering tools and strategies that can help people grow and succeed. Our lens is not just focused on addressing a business challenge or need but also on providing a great experience for our customers and the millions of users who interface with our solutions every day.

It’s why on behalf of the Cornerstone team, I’m pleased to share that Cornerstone has won Gold in four categories of the Brandon Hall Group (BHG) 2020 Excellence in Tech awards!

As BHG explained in its announcement, "Winners of Excellence in Technology Awards are critical drivers of their organizations’ success, especially in these disruptive times. Their solutions resulted in substantial benefit to their business and the human capital management function. That is the ultimate differentiator: the positive business impact of technology these awards recognize."

You can learn a lot from others' experiences, especially when the experiences are those of your peers. With this thought in mind, here are a few customer success stories that demonstrate how the above award-winning solutions are taking their organizations to the next level.

BHG Award: Best Advance in Technology Innovation for the Remote Workforce

To help our customers shift to remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Cornerstone launched Remote Work Essentials, a Cornerstone Content Anytime (CCA) subscription. This curated subscription helps organizations adapt and transition to a virtual working environment. It provides modern learning content on all of the skills needed to stay productive, connected, and mentally fit while working remotely.

Take the County of San Mateo, California, as an example. CCA became a solution to help thousands of County employees adapt and transition to a new virtual working environment. Gabe Aponte, the L&D program manager at the County shares, "We’re so glad the timing [of our CCA launch] worked out because a lot of employees had to upskill at the start of shelter in place...we were getting a lot of questions, and we would send employees deep links to recommended courses, and they were taking them."

Read more about the County’s story and how CCA courses became an integral part of how they support employees in the time of COVID-19, providing their people new tools and methodologies to effectively continue to perform their jobs and provide critical services to County residents.

BHG Award: Best Advance in Talent Acquisition Technology

One of the most effective ways to find and onboard better global talent faster is to build strong relationships between your organization and your candidates.

TalentLink helps organizations like Fagron, a global pharmaceutical multiple brand organization with over 2,000 employees worldwide, identify great candidates, engage them across multiple channels, and build deeper candidate connections at every touchpoint.

Auralie Blauwbloeme, global HR project manager at Fagron, put it best when she said this about TalentLink, "Our reporting not only shows us what’s going on at a hiring level but our costs and savings by not having to outsource recruitment."

Learn more about how Fagron transformed its recruitment experience and improved hiring cost savings with TalentLink.

BHG Award: Best Advance in Performance Management Technology

How do you empower your employees to do their best work? At RSM US LLP (RSM), the leading provider of audit, tax and consulting services to the middle market, good work starts with putting employees first—embracing all of the passions and talents that make them who they are.

Chief talent officer for RSM Katie Lamkin and her team phased out annual performance reviews at the organization in favor of more regular performance conversations using Cornerstone’s Performance Suite. The RSM talent management team also worked with business leaders to develop a new career development framework to identify the knowledge, skills and attributes that describe success at various levels of the company.

This framework became the backbone of ongoing performance discussions at RSM. Managers are encouraged to share feedback with employees regularly through the Cornerstone Performance Suite—an effort known as "Project Feedback" internally—and research shows employees feel more engaged when they have regular feedback conversations with their manager.

"We know—whether it’s with our clients or our teams—the power in a relationship comes from being understood," said Lamkin. "When you feel truly understood, you feel supported and confident in achieving both your personal and professional goals."

Read the full case study for more on how RSM has shifted toward agile performance management, improving the way everyone works.

BHG Award: Best Advance in Talent Management Technology for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses

It can be challenging for small and medium businesses (SMB) to find the right learning and talent solutions to advance their talent game. They need the flexibility to support their people as they grow while also boosting individual employee engagement.

The story of how insurance provider Assurance used Cornerstone’s end-to-end talent management solution for SMB to coordinate and execute a comprehensive people strategy is best when they tell it.

"For us, Cornerstone was an investment which allowed us to provide every person at Assurance an experience that’s as unique as them," said Michele McDermott, senior vice president of human resources at Assurance. "As we expand our business and add new members to our team, we know that Cornerstone can grow with us and help us maintain and continue to refine this amazing employee culture we’ve built."

With their new unified approach to performance and learning, Assurance streamlined compliance reporting, created a centralized place for all learning content, and improved the feedback process.

Now, managers say they feel more empowered to have honest conversations, and employees look forward to receiving feedback to improve their day-to-day performance. Furthermore, the HR team and leaders are using performance review data to close skill gaps and to set the stage for succession planning.

Read the full Assurance case study here.

"It’s clear Cornerstone has increasingly demonstrated its position as an innovator that supports the entire employee lifecycle from talent acquisition to learning management and career development, in addition to its longstanding position as a leader in learning," says Michael Rochelle, chief strategy officer at the Brandon Hall Group.

Our team at Cornerstone takes great pride in this distinction. It’s an honor to help our customers bring their talent strategies to life. An unbreaking conviction drives us to ensure our clients successfully guide their people through their careers and advance their skill sets.

Wherever you are on your talent journey, if you’re looking to explore how to take the right next step, talk to us. We’re here to help.