CATS Applicant Tracking System vs. Lever

I don't know how appropriate it'd be for large organizations with very large recruiting teams - cost per license might not make sense after a certain point. For small/medium sized businesses, it's absolutely worth a look. It's very affordable, super-easy to use, highly configurable, and set up is an breeze. Knowledge base is decent, and support is generally OK, though it's not necessarily a strength. The product team is engaged with the user community to crowdsource suggestions for updates/improvements and allows users to vote on others ideas that are appealing. Search functionality is solid and documents are instantly indexed as far as I can tell - I've never noticed any delay. It'll push postings out to various free job boards and you can customize to push out to pay boards as well. It will integrate to certain HRIS packages, so if that's of interest, making sure yours is on the supported list would be important. Data backup is super easy and would likely make changing to another ATS down the road pretty simple if the need arises.

Managing pipeline and candidate communication is easy through lever. Keeping it all in one place allows the hiring teams to be in the loop real-time. The reporting is clunky and basic, however, and without a 3rd party tool, sourcing from the lever database is difficult. Also, it is very easy to have duplicate candidates since the alerts Lever gives are often incorrect

Incentivized

• Custom fields for all entities of any data type let's you track what you care about. Also customizable workflow with triggers can save a ton of time in automating processes and also ensuring steps aren't missed/established processes and protocols are adhered to.
• Support is extremely responsive, knowledgeable and committed to resolving any issue.
• Integrations with LinkedIn, job boards etc. is a big time saver and helps bring it all to one place.

• Great integration: Keeps a list of Outlook email communication along with LinkedIn and other data sources
• Is fairly lively, not too much lag between screens even though it is looking through a lot of data.
• Has excellent reporting on how well each email message is working.

Incentivized

• The safeguard to protect your database from duplicates is absolute trash. It catches duplicates less than half of the time.
• CATS could definitely do a better job at being able to be sorted by multiple features rather than just one column at a time

Incentivized

• It would be nice if we were provided a more detailed summary of why our referrals were not selected for a position.
• The feedback feature that interviewers can give on candidates is great, but it is sometimes hard to find again after completion.
• If there is a mobile version, better marketing/awareness on this would be helpful.

Incentivized

Our company has been using it and enjoying the benefits for a few years now. Its a perfect system for our end goal of finding the best candidate effectively and being able to track and write reports on our progress.

not recruiter friendly. workflow is not good

It isn't difficult to use for the applicant processing, but [I feel] if you want to pull reports or use their tools, good luck!

I've had mixed results with asking for support. Sometimes they gave a quick answer and sometimes my emails were never responded to. Some responses were a single word.

What support? - Add a ticket and get links to [I believe] their unhelpful user guide. Add a charge if you want better support - afterward just got those links faster...

This is an incredibly easy system to implement. There is no hardware or software required, it's entirely SaaS based. Compared to other systems I've implemented, it's breathtaking. Customization can all be done directly in the tool, there is no need for any involvement of consultants and most of the information you cannot figure out intuitively is covered in the knowledge base

TargetRecruit - CATS is way more user friendly than TargetRecruit. You have to have a degree in Computer Programming to use TargetRecruit. CATS is very streamlined, clean and easy to implement. Zoho Recruit - with the exception of the resume parser, CATS is an infant learning to crawl and Zoho Recruit competes in triathlons. For $70 per month per user, you can build a recruiting universe. Top Echelon - turns out they purchased CATS. We tested them, but it was not as user friendly. JobAdder - loved this product. Customizable like CATS, but the API for JobAdder gives many, many option. However, JobAdder only uses Zapier and all the addons will nickel and dime you to death. A $100 license with JobAdder becomes a $250 per month per user really quick.

Incentivized

I think Lever stacks up fairly well and is right above the midpoint. iCIMS and Greenhouse provide a larger, more Enterprise style product for huge scale, so I'd put the two of them above Lever at this time, but we chose Lever over Greenhouse for a reason. I just don't know if we'd be able to scale to the size we'd want to long-term with their product suite. Compared to the others listed here, and many others, I would take Lever every time.

Incentivized

• We went from Excel spreadsheets to using CATS so honestly anything would be an improvement. But CATS has saved tremendous time on an on-going basis in terms of managing the career portal automatically.
• Being able to log email conversations with the click of a button from Outlook right into CATS has been a time-saver and also has helped numerous times in providing better follow-through to candidates and providing better tracking of candidate interactions and what they have previously said (or not).

• We have an ATS now and did not have one before
• LinkedIn integration is better than others I've seen
• Spend too much time researching unhelpful user guides since their support is terrible
• Lots of frustration with post implementation support
• Integrations break, tools don't work and settings fail which could lead to other issues