[opsuser]

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

[RussH]

Wow - what a post! Let me try and put some quick comments to them..

#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.

CATS can indeed import doc CV's - it's a feature of antiword (an opensource project). If antiword doesn't yet support docx.. you'll have to look to that project to update itself.. They're over at http://www.winfield.demon.nl/

#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.

Unfortunately (as is the case for here in the UK) sometimes postcodes/zipcodes etc are commercial and aren't distributed freely. If you can get hold of the zipcode database, it should be feasible to enter it into cats - after all, it's simply a reference number that relates to a LAT/LONG set of co-ords. I knwo that there was some work happening previously to include Indian postcodes - but that was one user amending CATS for their own uses.

#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.

Without looking, I'd expect that timezones could be amended relatively easily... (RussH shoots himself in the foot!)

#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.

sorry - works fine in a Linux environment... that's the only experience I have! As with some other issues folks have reported here - I'd be happy to help if it's within my field of experience - and running CATS on WAMP just isn't part of that. Not sure how you run CATS under windows - but if you use cygwin, I'd expect you can still run sendmail etc?

#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 change them or placement of fields....dunno why.

You should be able to reorder the fields through the admin interface / add in additional fields, and (with a little code tweaking) take out superflous fields that you never use.


Basically - this is code released as-is - so it's there for anyone to add/remove/change as they need... If there are features that you need changed, then PLEASE change them, flag them up, and ideally release the changes back into the code for everyone to benefit from.

[cptr13]

I have used CATS plenty in Windows. You can use the email functionality by entering the SMTP (outgoing) server information when you install CATS. It should work fine that way.

[opsuser]

I have used CATS plenty in Windows. You can use the email functionality by entering the SMTP (outgoing) server information when you install CATS. It should work fine that way.

Actually, really CPTR13 thanks for initiative here, but man, it has never worked with us that way we tried install and reinstall just for this thing and it has never worked till date, not even with thunderbird. We have Winxpsp2 box with zonealarm and avg8.

Wow - what a post! Let me try and put some quick comments to them..

#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.

CATS can indeed import doc CV's - it's a feature of antiword (an opensource project). If antiword doesn't yet support docx.. you'll have to look to that project to update itself.. They're over at http://www.winfield.demon.nl/

Well Actually, dunno how u r saying that, .doc CV cant be made candidates in one go and it takes a lot of time to do it by hand...So...CATS falls here...

The thing or key we need here is automation in CV addition to CATS, most workable format CVs are in .doc and CATS just does not addresses the issues posted previously.

Zipcode/postcodes are a techie game and we are sales recruiters, we dunno anything about ref numbers in php etc. hiring a programmer for this is just out of Question.

[RussH]

#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.

CATS can indeed import doc CV's - it's a feature of antiword (an opensource project). If antiword doesn't yet support docx.. you'll have to look to that project to update itself.. They're over at http://www.winfield.demon.nl/

ahh yes of course - the normal bulk import will import the CV but doesnt parse it into a candidate for you - it only makes the content of the CV searchable for when you do a key skills search. You might want to stay in touch with the resume parsing work that's happening right now (http://www.opencats.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=55) - could be exactly what you're after!

[vijayabhaskar]

i want to have explanation for opencats code
can

[RussH]

i want to have explanation for opencats code
can

Hey,

did you want to ask something?

[oneupweb]

I am fairly new to the whole CATS project here, but I'd like to throw this out there. As far as the e-mailing goes, I have had both my Windows XP test setup and Windows Server 2003 working just fine with e-mail using the WAMP installation. I would check my Antivirus and ZoneAlarm settings and make sure they do not prevent mass mailing applications. I know in my McAfee setup, I had to allow the httpd.exe process to send the mail.

[RussH]

I am fairly new to the whole CATS project here, but I'd like to throw this out there. As far as the e-mailing goes, I have had both my Windows XP test setup and Windows Server 2003 working just fine with e-mail using the WAMP installation. I would check my Antivirus and ZoneAlarm settings and make sure they do not prevent mass mailing applications. I know in my McAfee setup, I had to allow the httpd.exe process to send the mail.

Thanks! Probably a good tip for the wiki - "getting it working on Windows..." hint, hint