CATS is a phenomenal tool for Corporate & Agency Recruiters!

Let me start by saying that I have been with CATS for the past few years. My experience has been nothing short of excellent. CATS has far more robust features than the other recruitment systems I've explored and/or used. It can be used to manage candidate flow for existing requisitions or to build strategic candidate pipelines for the needs of the future. CATS is easy to customize the system internally to work within your existing recruitment processes. Most of the other tools I've used has required us to create multiple work around processes forcing and even change our internal processes to meet the requirements of the system. This isn't the case with CATS and it only took us an hour or two to set it up. CATS has made various plug-ins available free of charge to its subscribers. These plug-ins allow you to do everything from edit resumes within the system using a Microsoft Word Plug-in, leverage WordPress, and even send LinkedIn profiles and resumes from job boards directly into the CATS system. You can easily move data from other recruiting systems to CATS. You can either upload large batches of resumes or even upload a CSV document from Excel directly into the system. One of the best features behind CATS is that it is a tool that continues to grow and is always improving. They continue to grow in excellence through the value they place on the feedback from their subscribers. Many of the suggestions recommended by subscribers have been implemented very successfully and relatively quickly. I strongly recommend any organization looking for an extremely robust and customizable recruitment solution to consider CATS. You can even avoid lengthy contracts.

Pros

Robust Features Customizable Saves time by posting to various boards through CATS Very user-friendly Cost effective

Without CATs I'm not sure how we would manage

Excellent, the sales and support staff are always on point. I hate calling tech support in general, but really don't mind with CATs. Always affable and helpful. We have yet to have an issue that wasn't promptly resolved by the CATs tech support.

Pros

Ease of in-house communication and interoperability. Each user can easily see the work of their colleagues which cuts down on a huge amount of unnecessary communication. We can seamlessly take over each other's work when colleagues are on leave or otherwise busy. The application portals are very easy to use and the workflow is intuitive and useful. Honestly, I'm not sure how we could manage with such a lean HQ staff without having CATs.

Cons

The only con I can identify with CATs is their search algorithm. The Boolean search functions can be improved. For example, if I'm looking for an "Education in Emergencies Specialist" within my database and search for this phrase using the Boolean quotation marks I will occasionally get results that identify anyone who has the word "in" somewhere in their resume. Yes, I also get "Education in Emergencies Specialists" but also a lot of people with completely irrelevant CVs. Some of this is mitigated by using the tags, lists, and custom fields but sometimes weird results are populated. Again, this is really the only issue I have with CATs and I'm really nit picking here. I don't find this to be a significant impediment to my work, and the pros heavily outweigh this one con.

CATS was a Godsend

We appreciate being able to unify our process, helping streamline our process, provide our applicants with a consistent experience, identifying where our good candidates are coming from and unifying our recruiting team and efforts.

Pros

I appreciated the support through the set up process and the responsiveness of the team to our beginning processes. There is so much customization for your workflow and we have appreciated all of the improvements to the system over the time we have used it. (over 6 years)

Cons

Honestly - it's really hard find things we don't like about the software. Support has been great about helping us to work around things we thought we wanted.

We've had decent experience with CATS but are currently looking at other options.

Pros

It is less complex than other solutions that are bloated with unnecessary features. The LinkedIn plugins and resume searching is good. Customized workflows is a good idea although they lack flexibility to get at incorporate important data in triggers (like Activity notes associated with a status change).

Cons

It seems like the underlying data model of CATS limits what they can do with their product. Contacts and Candidates are tedious to work with and behavior seems to change randomly (i.e. duplicate logging of emails to a single person, merged profiles overwrite information). The email integration has been unstable and recently realized that it logs emails for users that are cc'd (not the sender) on emails which throws off metrics for our staff. The Slack integration is really limited and almost pointless (i.e. all messages go to same channel, no way to send activity information like notes for a status change). There is no way to associated an active assignment with a candidate (this is all done through candidate pipeline and status changes). There is no way to log activities for multiple contacts/candidates (like a group lunch). Calendar / Event Scheduling is clunky and behavior changes constantly. We used to make events visible to all so it showed up on the Upcoming Events on the dashboard but now they are only visible to the user that created it. There are many other nuances with private vs. public events.

Excellent ATS Option

Pros

We went from using the same ATS for over 17 years when we decided to make the change to CATS. Its modern, sleek, easy to use and customer support is very easy to understand and knowledgeable.

Cons

I do wish there was a platform versus it being web based.