Avature ATS vs. CATS Applicant Tracking System

As it is a very complete tool, with many features and that sometimes ends up being a little complex, I would recommend it only for medium-sized companies. Perhaps in a large company, it could complicate the processes a little instead of making it easier. But it's a great tool!

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Search capabilities - ability to pipeline top talent.
• Communication with hiring managers in the hiring manager portal - resumes/notes don't get lost in email and are always accessible to anyone involved in the hiring process.
• Ability to customize - we've been able to change work flows for different needs, and different business groups as well.

Incentivized

• 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

• Easily over-engineered. While it's great to be able to customize, there are times where there are too many choices.
• Would like to see it integrate better with our HRIS system.
• Still a lot of manual steps in the workflow.

Incentivized

• 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.

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

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.

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

Avature is much better than OpenHire! OpenHire didn't give us the ability to share resumes or notes through the system and was very complicated to keep track of candidates that applied to multiple jobs or duplicate candidates. Was also very archaic in the interfacing and usability. Avature gave us many more options to customize our system.

Incentivized

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.

• Ability to be more efficient in hiring, leading to faster hire times
• Easier to keep clean data for OFCCP or AAP audits
• Spend a lot of time altering or changing workflows/process/manually moving things along

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).