General

CATS is the most affordable web-based candidate tracking software around. Visit CATS website for plans details and features explanation.

A user is anyone who needs to log into your CATS account and perform actions. There are five user Access Levels.

1. Site Administrator: can make site-wide modifications, modify users, modify the careers site, modify email templates, make backups of the database, and create additional custom fields.
2. Add/Edit/Delete: Users can add, edit, and delete information.
3. Add/Edit: cannot perform deletions.
4. Sourcer: can see all candidates and work on jobs they are assigned to; cannot see calendar, clients or reports.
5. Read-Only: can only log in and view data.

In order to familiarize yourself with CATS, we have the following options:

1. We offer a demo that anyone can try out.
2. We offer Help & Training Documents and Webinars.

There are no contracts to sign. CATS is a monthly subscription so pay as you go and pay for only what you need. Users are free to cancel at any time.

No, the "Powered By CATS" icon cannot be removed. This icon enables us to keep our costs down by using the online network effect. For further reading, visit our Notices.

We understand how important your personal information and resumes are and want to ensure you that we take great precautions to protect it and keep it confidential. Only you and the users which you add to your account will ever have access to your private data. Aside from job orders which you may mark as public and post on your website, no information is ever made available to a third party.Occasionally, you may contact support and want us to review your site or how it's behaving. The CATS administrators can remotely login and view your data in order to assist you; but only with your permission.

All of your information is stored on our servers in a locked 24 hour facility located in downtown Minneapolis. This facility requires an elevator access card, RFID pass-card and two pin numbers in order to gain access to our servers. The cards and pins are kept only by CATS administrators. This facility is cooled, uses multiple internet connections for fail-over support and redundant power backup in case of power loss.

All of your data is routinely backed up at scheduled intervals in addition to live replication (meaning when you enter new information it is stored in more than one physical location). The combination of these two backup measures ensures that neither physical damage nor data corruption/intrusion will cause the loss of any information.The data and information you enter in CATS is owned by whoever signs up and pays for the CATS account. You are able to create a live backup at any time that you deem necessary. This is an open format backup using MySQL batch files and is easily importable into other Applicant Tracking Systems.

For more information, visit our Privacy Policy and Backup Strategy.

We do not offer the names of our customers, but you can watch our customer testimonials on our home page.

You can get started with a no obligation, 30 day professional trial. And, if you put some effort into the system and decide that you don't like it, we offer open format backups that are easily imported into any of our competitors. First we suggest Googling our name or posting on our public forms as there are a large number of private blogs and reviews written by actual users spread across the Internet already if you would still like to find more information about us.

When a candidate applies through your career portal, he/she is given green stars.

Conversely, if a candidate is added by you manually (Resume Inbox, CATS Toolbar, etc...), that candidate is given orange stars.

CATS comes with a feature to automatically import resumes via email. We call this your Resume Inbox. Each site has a unique siteID (http://siteID.catsone.com/) and we use this to create your Resume Inbox email address.

Your Resume Inbox email address is in the format resumes@siteID.catsone.com (replacing 'siteID' with your unique ID).

To email resumes to this inbox, and automatically add them to CATS, simply forward any resume attachment (.txt, .doc, .pdf, .docx) with a blank subject to your Resume Inbox email address. If you know that you want the candidate you forward to be added to a particular job order, you can enter the job order ID# (found by opening the job order itself within CATS), or typing the EXACT name of the job order in the subject line.

As long as the .pdf is imported as text and not an image, yes, the keyword search will still find and highlight the text being searched.

CATS comes with a feature that we call Submit to Client. Here is how to take advantage of this feature:

1. Create a new Job Order, and link that job order to a company with a primary contact associated.*
2. Now, add any candidate to that job order pipeline. Navigate back to the job order page, and find the candidate's name in the pipeline. Next to that candidate's status you will see a clipboard icon. When you highlight over this icon you will see the text Submit Candidate to Client. Click this icon.
3. You will be brought to a page that will automatically add your company image to the header, allow you to make changes to the candidate's resume (the latest attachment marked Resume will be brought up), and email that resume as a .txt, .pdf, or .html attachment. Click the Send Email/Submit Candidate button to submit the candidate to your client.

*You will not be able to use this feature if there is no company contact associated with the job order. If you want to do this to an existing job order, go to the job order page, click the Edit button, and associate a company contact with the job order from there.

One reason one of your users might not be able to see any jobs would be if they are set as a sourcer. You can change them back to a normal user by following these instructions:

1. Click on the Settings tab.
2. Click on the User Management link in the top blue bar.
3. Click on the user's name to get into their profile.
4. Click on the edit button.
5. Uncheck the checkbox next to Sourcer in the "Categories" section.
6. Click on the save button.

The official definition of the sourcer is:
Sourcer: No access to companies/contacts. Limited to viewing only job orders to which they've been assigned. Unlimited visibility into the candidates tab.

To automatically create a contact in a company after you place a candidate and vice versa, log into CATS as an administrator and navigate to the Settings tab » Administration link in the blue bar » General Configuration link from the list below. Make sure the Merge View option is checked.

CATS was heavily based on the paper process of recruiting in its design. The idea is that anyone familiar with the paper process could quickly pick up CATS and become efficient right away. If you need to add a job order, you would pick up a company's manila folder, fill out a job order document and put it in the folder. For candidates, you'd have a stack of resumes. For contacts, a rolodex.

Because the fundamental purpose of a candidate is so exclusively related to hiring, and the purpose of a contact is for development of business, our goal from day one was to separate the records.

If you would prefer to "merge" together the candidate and contact records, and instead view a "person" record which consolidates the information from both profiles, that is possible:

1. Click on the Settings tab.
2. Click on Administration (blue bar).
3. Click on General Configuration.
4. Enable the Merge feature (about 4 down).

Now, when viewing a candidate or contact record, you'll have the option to merge that record into it's pair. It will try to find a duplicate first – if it cannot, it will add a new record. Once there's a merge, you can view and edit a "Merged" record which includes all the fields, extra fields, attachments, activities, jobs, etc. from both records merged into one.

A workflow is a series of steps that can be taken through-out the life-cycle of a record (such as a candidate). Each step is represented by a "status", and represents a milestone in the work cycle. For example, a recruiter might setup a basic candidate workflow with the following statuses:

1. Sourced / No Contact
2. Contacted
3. Candidate Replied
4. Submitted / Review
5. Interviewing
6. Declined
7. Hired

Statuses

Each status represents the state of the candidate at any point in time. As you work with candidates, you update their statuses. If a candidate or hiring manager calls and you need information about all candidates in a particular status, CATS makes it easy to run reports or generate lists using these statuses as filters.

Furthermore, CATS keeps an audit trail of statuses. As an example, you could run an interviews report showing candidates who've been marked to the Interviewing status. You could have it include candidates currently in that status, or candidates who have at one point in time been marked Interviewing even if they have since been hired or declined.

Even though I've mostly mentioned candidates, workflow is not limited to the hiring process. Workflow can be used for business development, employee management, sales and much more. For example, recruiters can track job orders using statuses like Lead, Active, and Terminated. When used for internal hiring, alternate statuses for requisitions could be setup such as Request, Approved and Filled.

Triggers

CATS adds one more powerful tool to the workflow arsenal, we call it triggers. Triggers can be created to send out emails, start review processes... even to post a job to Twitter. Once you create a trigger, you can assign it to one or more statuses. Once assigned, whenever a status is set for a record, any associated triggers will fire off (though, there are some configuration settings to make this optional).

How is this helpful? Let's say that you want to be notified anytime one of your recruiters adds a job order. You could add a trigger to the first status for your job orders to send you an email. Let's say anytime you mark a job order in a published status, you want to post that job to Twitter -- just add a trigger for it. Triggers add immense utility to workflow and allow you automate all sorts of mundane tasks.

To add, edit or remove status and to create triggers in CATS:

1. Click on the Settings tab.
2. Click on Customize Workflow (in the blue bar).

Status Mappings

Because we give you great flexibility and the option to create your own names for statuses, CATS loses a lot of knowledge in how to use the statuses that you've created. For example, if you prefer to call the "Placed" status "Hired", how would CATS know this and be able to generate accurate placement reports? We fix this with status mappings.

A status mapping is simply a code that can be applied to your statuses. When editing a status, you'll have an option to select a status mapping. Some examples of status mappings are "Interview", "Placed/Hired", "Declined", etc.. Remember to define these whenever applicable, the more CATS knows about your workflow the more it can do for you.

If you're using the new workflow features of CATS, you'll find that you have the ability to create and edit Email Templates. If you're not using our new workflow, or you're not sure, click on the "Settings" tab and then "Customize Workflow" in the blue bar.

An Email Template is a pre-written formatted email that is automatically generated when certain events occur. Templates can include tags, which are special values like %NAME% which are then replaced with their actual values when the template is generated.

Our goal is to use our Email Templates feature anywhere a pre-formatted template would be helpful. Templates are currently available or planned to be available for the following:

1) Workflow Triggers: When you change the status of a record, you can associate a trigger. Certain triggers like Review and Email both use Email Templates to generate their messages.

2) Send Email: When sending email through CATS, you can use Email Templates to choose from a list of canned messages and reduce typing.

3) Website Applicants: When candidates apply to positions on your website, they are automatically sent pre-defined Email Templates to serve as confirmations, password retrieval and "Send to Friend".

To manage your Email Triggers:

1) Click on the Settings tab.
2) Click on Administration (in the blue bar).
3) Click on Email Templates.

While we do not post every webinar that is done on Thursday, we do have a link to 5 webinars that are available on our website at http://www.catsone.com/intro/help-and-training/

Currently we have System Demo, Plugins, Job Applications, Searching and Reporting, and Administration Functionality webinars available.

No. To see a preview of a candidates specific job application you need to click in to the candidates profile.