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Will CATS Spell Catastrophe For ATS Companies? follow this blog post

posted by on Oct. 15, 2006
This maybe a little old but I recently found out about CATS. CATS is an open source applicant tracking system that is built on a Lamp platform that consists of Linux, PHP, and MySql. The product is also licensed through the open source license by Mozilla.
 
As far as I can tell the company launched in February 2006 and to date 4900 people have downloaded the product. The product has modules to it that currently consist of a calender, activities, job orders, candidates, clients, contacts, reports, settings and feedback.


What Does This Mean To A Vendor Like CareerMetaSearch.com?
 
We have recommend the product to one potential customer. As the product is open source we will work with our client receive job openings and to also export or drive candidates to their openings with the CATS system.


What Does This Mean For Clients

For years companies have complained and still continue to complain about their ATS vendors, system implementations go wrong, getting a basic system and having to pay for upgrades, systems not working correctly to what was sold to them. ATS seem to not have done the job correctly even to the extent of getting jobs to our site, and thus we offer clients our Boomerang product which gets implemented within a week to avoid the hassle of working through the ATS vendor.


The CATS system will now allow employers the flexibility to have it their way. All companies have to do is hire a php/mysql developer and create their ultimate applicant tracking system. They can add modules make changes and the only one to complain to would be your own developer.


Now with the upsides comes some downsides. Some of the downsides include: limited documentation, no customer support, no hosting option (yet), product doesn't support doesn't support any databases except mysql, and there is no resume import function available (yet).


In conclusion, (as I type on OpenOffice.org another open source product for free) I think it's a great product and a great platform. It allows the flexibility to be able to make changes on the fly with it's open source platform and best of all it's free. I'm interested to see where the product will play, impact other companies and see what new and exciting modules will be added.

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4 comments

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  • 1 point 3 years ago

    Great. I was hoping you would get a chance to see it. We are just in our infancy, if you will. Its good to get feedback from an ATS veteran such as yourself..:-) You are right, we do have a long way to go. In not so distant past, I used to work for *large* companies building software. Now I do recruiting for a living, and build CATS on the side.

    I have never used any other ATS system since I started my recruiting company. In the beginning I was using my email client and 3M sticky notes (lots of them). I demo'ed a whole bunch of systems and could't quite find a simple solution, so I put together CATS for internal use really. Over the past year or so, I have been adding features to it, as I see fit, and as my employees request. I am glad to know that we happened to have implemented features that exist in other commercial ATS products. I should check out PCRecruiter. I have heard of it before, I think.

    Thanks again for your "mini" review.

  • 1 point 3 years ago

    Asim-

    There are some pearls (so to speak) in CATS - I like the top tab navigation and it's nicely intuitive to use (a function of it's simplicity IMO). The pipeline graphic on the home page is cool.

    That said, CATS is a long way from leading commercial ATS products in all kinds of ways. A comparison would simply be apples and oranges, although I do recognize some DNA from various solutions that have established the fashion over the years. The activity entry form, for example, could have come right out of PCRecruiter.

    For a tech savvy organization with the most basic needs in this area, CATS could be a viable choice, inter alia.

    I appreciate the work you are doing- anything done to drive the ATS business toward a less costly model helps other (like us) low-cost producers move forward.

  • 1 point 3 years ago

    Martin,

    I am wondering if you had a chance to look at CATS demo before your response above.

    Asim

  • 1 point 3 years ago

    But its really not. Its about services, communications, change management, and iteration of code and procedures to meet unique goals.

    The rub with open source is that coders only work on the glam- nobody wants to pound out utilities and smaller, less visible features that are still very much needed.

    And since so much of the ATS business today is ongoing work with multiple vendors and data sources, it will be even more true in the future.

    "All companies have to do is hire a php/mysql developer" ?

    Today at least, they would be better served buying a nice commerical ATS and hiring a recruitment data analyst to really make hay with it.