CATS Applicant Tracking System vs. PCRecruiter

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.

For presenting candidates to clients, PCRecruiter has had rave reviews from clients. It's easy to look through a candidate's profile and provide feedback. Like I said earlier, if it could retain real-time information on a candidate, it would be more effective, not having me have to resend a candidate to a client every time there is something new added to a candidate profile. It would be great to have templates for candidate letters so we wouldn't have to write our own. It would be nice if the parsing feature was more effective in pulling over all the information - as often I have to add in information or make adjustments on parsing.

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.

• All client and candidate activities are tracked and documented in one place. This makes it very easy for our team to work collaboratively. For example all email correspondence is written to client or candidate record, sales calls, follow-up, etc. are all contained in one place.
• We like the ability to customize fields and the work flow. We have created specific data field that are relevant to some of the niche markets we work. This has allowed us to quickly slice and dice our data for marketing and recruiting campaigns.
• The Bulk email feature is very easy to use and we incorporate it into most of our marketing and recruiting campaigns and since it is fully integrated we see all of the activity associated with the client or candidate.
• The RSS feed of jobs has allowed us to easily integrate with social media. when a position is posted into PCR it is automatically fed to multiple social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and twitter.
• We use the calendar and Rollup list function to organize all of our recruiting and marketing campaigns. Rollups simplify the planning part of our business.
• The metrics reporting is great. We are in a metrics driven business and with PCR we have automated most of the reporting such as interviews/hires, attempts/presentations, presentations/ interviews, etc.

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

• I think setup is cumbersome
• I think it should be easier to build call lists and move calls to the following day as needed
• I wish PC Recruiter had a function so I can see if and when an actual email is opened by the recipient

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.

I am very hesitant to renew my subscription to PCRecruiter because it feels outdated. Competing applicant tracking systems are making huge strides in compatibility and mobile accessibility while PCRecruiter has remained stagnant in its progression. The system is functional, and serves as an excellent database, but severely lacks in advancement opportunities

not recruiter friendly. workflow is not good

As the past VP of Recruiting for a boutique search firm. I trained many recruiters on the PCR system. All were using the system like a pro in a week to 10 days tops. PCR does everything a recruiting team will need without being overly complicated to learn or navigate.

Incentivized

I have had little to no downtime with PC Recruiter (except for planned maintenance). Whether I am using it on my laptop or the mobile versions (iPad and Android based phone), I am able to get to my information quickly and easily

Except for an occassional "bug" in the software the system works very well and has for many years and thru sevewral upgrades.

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.

I gave it this rating because I find that even though they are great support, they don't help to improve the situation because often it is out of their hands. It is that the website is down or some other issue that they can not readily fix. While helpful, I think some changes need to be made for this software to work better.

Incentivized

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 still keep using some of these, but PCR is my main place for profiles, since I can find someone on Linkedin, enrich it with another tool and keep it all in one place, PCR Recruiter. Its versatility when it comes to adding information and documents, organizing and visualizing content is incomparable.

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).

• Time savings: PCRecruiter saves our company countless hours of time by allowing us to search company & candidate info from our desktop.
• Cost savings: PCRecruiter saves our recruiters time by allowing them to search for qualified candidates by keywords. This has eliminated the need to search through resumes and applications to find candidates. This has also made our recruiters more productive. PCR allows us to work smarter not harder.
• PCRecruiter pays for its self by giving your company an advantage over your competitors. Your team will be filling open job orders while your competition is looking through file cabinets.

Incentivized