- 13 Jun 2008, 05:43
#290
Hi all,
Regards to everbody who started these forums and made available all the data regd CATS here for benefit os us all.
Pals, this will be along post so please devote sometime to this, all the concerns are genuine and are raised by me and my team while we used cats in our daily work days...
I have been using Opensource software for some time now and I personally think this is the way to go if we ever want to make and use quality software that gets the work done. Regarding CATS, now I have a very few doubts left regd it's usability, but, I think CATS ,lacks severly in many areas if it ever wants to become a real useful ATS software.
#1. Resume Imports
CATS can not import doc/docx resumes, which most recruiters have in plenty, I personally have 10K+ CVs with me, but everytime I decide to bulkimport/.import them in CATS I end up manually entering every individual candidate. This is a real kneejerk time sucker process and I hate it, can there be a workaround for this, can this process be automated.
#2. Zipcode/postcodes support
CATS has got limited support for Zipcodes/post codes search for candidates, filters are not that useful;cats has got no support for pincodes for Asian countires which start like 110001 and do not have any alphabets in them. So matching candidates w/ jobs within the periphry of their residence becomes nearly impossible. Can anybody please solve this.
#3.Timezones
Timezones in CATS are still in Pak era,dunno why, they still have not got any India centric Timezone, which to my humble opinion amounts to deliberate mistake...best known to developers of CATS.This absence of TZ leads to either before or after half hour gaps in reminders etc.
#4.Outlook/thunderbird interaction and emailing
No matter how many tweaks we put inplace and reinstallations we have had done, CATS still can not email from our Desktop hosted Wampserver that has a live net connection. Completey pathetic for a Software that claims to be world's best free ATS and can't email.
#5. Rigid forms
As a recruiter I require to fill in certain key fields for company and quickly move on to joborder form and repeat the same process therein and in the end put up an attachment with the joborder form, whereas this never gets done with CATS, I need to fill in many not so useful fields before hitting the submit button...to add insult to injury, CATS forms have a very pasty look and I cant even chage them or placement of fields....dunno why.
See pals, these are just the tip of the iceberg, an ATS is like a tech backbone for any recruitment firm and the 5 abovelisted concerns are from a team of recruiters who were actually using the CATS but have now gone back to using GDS+outlook+excel combo for doing effective recruitments.
I welcome everybody to comment on my first post, and truly appreciate genuine and honest critcism.
If you can offer suggestions, comments, solutions, rants etc please email me at
Opsuser at gmail dot com
Regards to everbody who started these forums and made available all the data regd CATS here for benefit os us all.
Pals, this will be along post so please devote sometime to this, all the concerns are genuine and are raised by me and my team while we used cats in our daily work days...
I have been using Opensource software for some time now and I personally think this is the way to go if we ever want to make and use quality software that gets the work done. Regarding CATS, now I have a very few doubts left regd it's usability, but, I think CATS ,lacks severly in many areas if it ever wants to become a real useful ATS software.
#1. Resume Imports
CATS can not import doc/docx resumes, which most recruiters have in plenty, I personally have 10K+ CVs with me, but everytime I decide to bulkimport/.import them in CATS I end up manually entering every individual candidate. This is a real kneejerk time sucker process and I hate it, can there be a workaround for this, can this process be automated.
#2. Zipcode/postcodes support
CATS has got limited support for Zipcodes/post codes search for candidates, filters are not that useful;cats has got no support for pincodes for Asian countires which start like 110001 and do not have any alphabets in them. So matching candidates w/ jobs within the periphry of their residence becomes nearly impossible. Can anybody please solve this.
#3.Timezones
Timezones in CATS are still in Pak era,dunno why, they still have not got any India centric Timezone, which to my humble opinion amounts to deliberate mistake...best known to developers of CATS.This absence of TZ leads to either before or after half hour gaps in reminders etc.
#4.Outlook/thunderbird interaction and emailing
No matter how many tweaks we put inplace and reinstallations we have had done, CATS still can not email from our Desktop hosted Wampserver that has a live net connection. Completey pathetic for a Software that claims to be world's best free ATS and can't email.
#5. Rigid forms
As a recruiter I require to fill in certain key fields for company and quickly move on to joborder form and repeat the same process therein and in the end put up an attachment with the joborder form, whereas this never gets done with CATS, I need to fill in many not so useful fields before hitting the submit button...to add insult to injury, CATS forms have a very pasty look and I cant even chage them or placement of fields....dunno why.
See pals, these are just the tip of the iceberg, an ATS is like a tech backbone for any recruitment firm and the 5 abovelisted concerns are from a team of recruiters who were actually using the CATS but have now gone back to using GDS+outlook+excel combo for doing effective recruitments.
I welcome everybody to comment on my first post, and truly appreciate genuine and honest critcism.
If you can offer suggestions, comments, solutions, rants etc please email me at
Opsuser at gmail dot com