Likelihood to Recommend I don't know many other scenarios, as I have been with this company for 13 years and in this industry for roughly 25 years. It is a tool that is well suited for our company and this industry in general. As a staffing company, you can accomplish nearly everything imaginable with this tool. The only area I have seen that might not be ideal is if you wanted to run all kinds of metrics. You can run a variety of reports in Akken, the data fields are limited sometimes and one would think that wouldn't need to be the case. You should be able to put whatever data you want in any field to create the report you need.
Read full review It has a great parsing feature and the extension is very helpful. Many ATS systems do not support parsing within LinkedIn...this one does. I was sad to see this option go when we finally transitioned. I would almost keep CATS just for the LinkedIn parsing if I knew I could easily get the information OUT of the system once it was there. A good API/webhook would be great, but sadly the API connections don't work well. Our firm also works with companies with multiple sites all across the US. There was never a way to "nest" a location with a parent company. Because of this, being able to research or report on a true client relationship was not possible. It was a very manual process.
Read full review Pros Automatically keeps a record of activities such as email conversations related to a candidate. Time and date stamp on events logged to a candidate and customer is a great resource. Completing full company profiles with all contacts is very helpful for later efficiency. Read full review Simple to implement, SaaS based tool that needs no in-house IT support or resources Customizable reports, labels, fields, applications Affordable No long term contract, month-to-month with ability to cancel anytime Data backups are simple Email directly from the candidate record with response coming into Outlook is easy to configure and creates record and updates status automatically Read full review Cons This is the worst ATS I've ever used. It's hard to find what you need. It's not set up in a coherent manner and things are all over the place. I have to download a resume just to view it. The parse function only works in Internet Explorer and it works poorly then. Makes it impossible to tell if its actually a duplicate because it flags everything. No section for meaningful notes. Notes are all just reports of action. No way to make it efficient for direct hires. All geared towards staffing so it makes you fill out non-sense information that will be inaccurate and irrelevant just to satisfy field requirements. Read full review I would like to see either an integration with a robust reporting tool that would allow me to design my own custom reports with a data export or more built-in reporting options. Mobile app is currently mostly just a look-up tool. I would like it to have the ability to do more - add tasks, update pipelines, etc. Read full review Likelihood to Renew There is no reason for us to make a switch. Everybody in the office is familiar with it and it allows us to get our work done faster. There are no pressing issues that would warrant a change at this point
Read full review 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.
Read full review Usability Akken is quite easy to use however there are a few more complex functions or multi steps to go through to run reports and find historic information.
Read full review not recruiter friendly. workflow is not good
Read full review Performance It's an average tool. The calendar function isn't great, email is slow, and there always seem to be day-to-day issues. The functionality is mostly there for a staffing firm, but there are plenty of areas of improvement still needed
Read full review Support Rating The best support we have received has been from sales. Customer success is pretty much a joke. We have been yelled at by customer success reps; been told to take a screenshot of something we are not seeing; been told there are no issues on there in when Akken hadn't been working for hours, only to have it magically fixed shortly after we reported the problem; and been told engineering was working on a problem for weeks without resolution. If you are going to be working with IT Staffing companies, you have to understand that we have a modicum of knowledge in IT, and you can't BS us. Honesty will get you a lot farther than stringing us along with BS.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating Encourage your team to watch the training videos available.
Read full review 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
Read full review Alternatives Considered We preferred the ability to go with Mac computers. That was the number one selling point for us. Besides that we liked the ease of the product. The email interface looked exactly like Outlook. The calendar the same. The price was also a big selling point. It came in slightly cheaper than Bullhorn and other systems and in our opinion a better product.
Read full review We used to use Sendouts (prior to it being acquired by Bullhorn) - and it wasn't browser based like CATS so instead of being able to access it from a home computer, laptop, mobile phone, etc. you could only use it on the computer with the software uploaded - which is a hindrance. It also wasn't as customizable as CATS. We picked CATS because it the price was right, it was browser-based, had email-integration, and integrates with social media and job posting services to share your jobs with the public.
Read full review Return on Investment Sometimes the system is slow and the process of hiring someone is lengthy so it takes a long time to complete it so it takes away from other things I could be working on It’s easy and quick to manage candidates to show what process they’re in Read full review 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). Read full review ScreenShots