CATS ATS Review—A Brief Walkthrough

CATS ATS is an applicant tracking system made for companies that want to hire internally, as well as recruiting agencies hiring on behalf of clients. CATS ATS allows you to create your workflows and automate the job posting process. In the words of its creators, it’s an ATS that “contains all you need and nothing you don’t.” 

Source: CATS ATS

In this review, we delve deep to check whether that is indeed so—we’ll go over CATS ATS’s main features, downsides, and pricing model. We’ll also introduce alternative ATS solutions for you to consider, such as the pre-hire skill assessment platform, Workello.

CATS ATS—Key Features

When you start using CATS ATS, the first order of business is setting up your hiring funnel, although there is a default one you can use. You can create several workflows depending on how many vacancies you’re looking to fill. Making a funnel consists of choosing what candidate statuses you want to include and in which order they show up. For example, you can attach some of the following statuses to the candidates under consideration:

• Interviewing
• Offered
• Declined
• Placed
• Submitted

You can add prerequisites to each status, as well as triggers that would signal the platform to perform certain actions, such as send an email, schedule an interview, or remove a profile from the applicant database.

After creating a funnel, it’s time to compose your job ad. You can do so within the platform by adding your job description and simple prescreening questions (regarding the years of experience and education level). CATS ATS will use those to sort candidates automatically. CATS ATS helps you distribute ads on major job boards—both paid and free ones.

Once applications start coming your way, CATS ATS uses resume parsing and creates a database of candidates. You can add hiring managers as additional users, and they can rate each candidate based on a variety of factors, including job-related skills, people skills, and general knowledge. You can also change the status of candidates with passing grades and invite them for an interview through CATS ATS directly. Note that you need to send emails manually.

CATS ATS—Downsides

CATS ATS is a simple ATS that’s great for smaller companies and employers with limited or zero experience with similar platforms and who need a basic solution to cover their hiring needs. While this may sound great, it comes with a price—the platform lacks some functionalities that would make your life easier. For example, while you can send emails from within the platform using CATS ATS email templates, you still need to manually send each email instead of having automated correspondence.

The platform also lacks other methods of assessment apart from interviews and prescreening questions. Interviews can be misleading, and prescreening questions (such as a candidate’s education level or years of experience) are most often not an assessment method but a way for software to automate the rejection of unqualified candidates. 

Other features are also location-based—integrated SMS texting is available only to users in the United States and Canada.

CATS ATS would benefit from some UI enhancement, such as having a drag-and-drop feature for candidates within various stages of the funnel or documents tied to a specific applicant profile (resumes, portfolios). The reporting functionalities are also limited and don’t allow you to make custom reports.

CATS ATS also lacks an external page for candidates. With a page that candidates could visit to learn about their application status, you would minimize the need for manual correspondence between applicants and your recruiting officers. Since applicants don’t get automated messages, you may forget to notify a candidate about their status change, leaving them uninformed. This way, you may lose the best candidate due to poor applicant experience.

CATS ATS—Pricing

CATS ATS offers a one-week trial, after which you need to opt for a paid plan if you want to continue using the software. The platform has only one pricing plan with two available billing options:

1. Annually—$69 per user per month
2. Monthly—$99 per user per month

Source: CATS ATS

Aside from the regular pricing model, there’s a fee for data migration if you want to import a database from your previous ATS. With a monthly plan, data migration costs $1,000, while it drops down to $500 if you choose to pay for the whole year.

CATS ATS—Integrations

While CATS ATS doesn’t support any job board integrations, you can use the platform to automatically distribute your ad on various job boards. Still, since they don’t have an official integration, the platform sends “a master job feed,” and it can’t guarantee that the job board will publish your post. In other words, the platform sends all job posts in a bundle, and job boards scrape the “master job feed,” allowing them to pick and choose which posts get published.

You can use the platform to post on the following job boards:

• Careerjet
• Glassdoor
• Indeed
• Jobcase
• JobInventory
• Juju
• LiveCareer
• Neuvoo
• SimplyHired
• Trovit
• ZipRecruiter
• WowJobs
• CareerBuilder
• Monster
• JobNews
• LogicMelon
• The Muse
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Note that the last three are social media features—selecting LinkedIn means sharing the job post on your company profile and not creating a job ad on the network. If you want to post on the paid job board, the platform will ask you to log in to your job board account.

Apart from the mentioned job boards, CATS ATS integrates with the following tools and platforms:

• LinkMatch
• EmployeeReferrals
• Webhooks
• Google Drive
• MailChimp
• Precise Hire
• Portal analytics and tracking
• Constant Contact
• WordPress (widget plugin)
• Zapier
• Checkr
• Slack
• Pocket Recruiter
• Daxtra
• Berke
• G Suite
• BambooHR

CATS ATS—Customers

Although CATS ATS is used in over 70 countries, the majority of them are based in North America, which is why the only supported language is English. 

Around 6,000 companies use the platform, including:

• Oprah Winfrey Network
• Manpower
• Hanover Research
• JBA International
• JPC Partners
• Avantrip
• emergiTEL
• Farber
• UX Hires
• Chartpak
• Master Technology Group
• Momentum Scientific Staffing
• PSR Associates

Alternatives to CATS ATS

If you’re looking for an ATS with additional features and options for candidate assessment, you should turn your attention to CATS ATS alternatives. We’ve reviewed dozens of ATS solutions—check them out:

Workello vs. CATS ATS

With Workello, you get a two-in-one ATS and pre-hire assessment software. It’s made for SMBs looking for a high-volume recruiting solution that’s easy to use but doesn’t lack important features like CATS ATS does.

The major difference between the two platforms is in the way you can assess candidates. While CATS focuses on interviews, Workello (alongside interviewing) allows you to test candidates with a written sample so that you can get a first-hand insight into the quality of their work. This way, you don’t have to rely on often misleading portfolios and confident interview answers.

Another difference is in the amount of eliminated manual work. Workello excels at this by completely automating email correspondence. It also comes with a library of job description templates and allows you to test, assess, and hire candidates without leaving your dashboard.

Similar to CATS, Workello also unlocks all of its features in the introductory plan. The only difference between Workello’s plans is how you get billed and how many candidates you assess:

1. Growth—$299, billed quarterly (up to 30 assessments)
2. Scale—$597, billed annually (up to 300 assessments)

CATS ATS vs. Workello: Pricing and Features Comparison

Check out how the two solutions compare:

Final Thoughts

CATS ATS is a great solution for SMBs that don’t hire regularly and want to use a platform to help them fill occasional vacancies on their teams. It’s easy to use, but it lacks some key features and could work on its user-friendliness. 

If you want a simple ATS that automates your entire hiring process and allows you to test your candidates before hiring them, you can try out Workello for free. Use the trial period to set up your funnel in under 3 minutes, build an applicant database, and test your first candidate.