Will CATS Spell Catastrophe For ATS Companies?
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.