Announcements

Thursday, Oct 29

By popular demand, we're happy to announce the immediate availability of our Microsoft Outlook plug-in, which allows CATS users to quickly log communications with candidates and contacts directly from this popular email client.

We would like to give our thanks to the 80 or so CATS users that graciously accepted our invitation to test the plug-in during its BETA stage. Your feedback was invaluable and is directly responsible for us getting to this point. With such success, we'll certainly be implementing similar programs in the future.

While there is certainly no shortage of ideas for this tool, our primary focus in our first release is to automate the recording of conversation exchanges through email. This previously mundane task of copying and pasting messages has now been reduced to just a few clicks.

After installing our plug-in, a new toolbar will appear in Outlook titled "CATS" with our familiar product logo. Clicking on this button will bring up a list of features, which include logging of the selected message and an option to create a new candidate or contact to the system if they don't already exist. Options exist to import resumes and to edit the information being recorded. Time and dates of the original activities are preserved.

Development of this tool is far from complete. While we're confident in the stability of this particular feature-set, many plans such as calendar integration have been planned for the future; however, not to worry, the plug-in will keep itself up-to-date automatically by prompting you to update whenever a new version is available.

The plug-in is available to all of our professional subscribers at no additional charge and is compatible with Outlook 2000 or later on Windows. If you're not a professional subscriber and you're no longer on our professional trial, we'd be happy to issue a new trial period for you to try out the tool before upgrading – just contact our support team.

We invite you to visit our support forums at www.catsone.com/forum. We'll be monitoring these forums regularly to help answer any questions that you may have. Even if you have nothing to post, it may be beneficial to hear what other people are talking about in regards to their feedback and ideas for the new tool.

For download instructions, click on the Settings tab, then "Downloads" (in the blue bar) and finally click "Download and Installation Instructions" under the Outlook section.

Wednesday, Sep 23

Public testing for our new Outlook Plug-in is now available. We are looking for customers willing to help us with testing this new feature. For more information, or to enlist in our Beta program, visit our forums by clicking on "Support Forums" on the upper right hand corner of the screen and browse to the "General" category.

Wednesday, Sep 16

Effective on your first billing date after October 17th, 2009, CATS per-user pricing will be increased to $39/month.

We're constantly developing new features and improving our system. We're developing tools and integrating with third party services and websites to keep up with the latest in recruiting - all to improve your business process, save you time and increase your bottom line; however, this all comes at a cost. Our previous pricing was established in 2005 and does not reflect the costs of today's enhancements and features, the most major of which are listed below:

1) Commercially-licensed document and resume parsing services used by major websites like CareerBuilder for fast and accurate processing and searching of resumes (new search features launching in October).

2) The development and additional manpower costs to introduce integration with third party products like Microsoft Outlook (plug-in available in October), Apple's iPhone and other applications and services to come.

3) Increased energy, cooling and utility costs for our Minneapolis and backup data centers.

4) Additional bandwidth to increase connection speeds and to handle new bandwidth-intensive Ajax and email features (new Time Warner line introduced this week to supplement our existing 12 providers).

5) Hardware upgrades to boost performance, increase storage space and improve redundancy to keep your data quick-to-access and safe.

We have always been and will continue to be an open and transparent company. We understand if you wish to explore other options and will continue to offer an on-demand backup of your data in open formats. We will gladly aid you through our support channels if you have any questions regarding moving to a competing system.

In four years, this is our first price increase. Our future goal is to keep such increases infrequent. While we cannot speak for what may come down the road, we promise to always act with fairness, honesty and transparency for the many years to come.

As always, our forums are available for updates and ongoing discussions. Log into your account and click on "Forums" on the upper-right corner of the page.

Friday, Aug 28

We've implemented a new "mouse-over" feature that will allow you to quickly preview a candidate, contact, company or job order simply by holding your mouse over the link for a few seconds. This preview is basically a summary of the record, including: address and contact information, other handy information and any extra fields that you've added.
 
Secondly, we've redesigned the data import feature. We can now import data directly from Excel spreadsheets without having to convert the spreadsheets to CSV first. We can also do "Update-only" imports, meaning you could use a spreadsheet to update information in the system rather than just to import new data. There's also some significant improvements in regards to auditting. Recent imports can now be viewed at a record level, and all imports will be added to the "Lists" tab for a quick review of "Who Imported What?".
 
Lastly, we've improved contacts a bit. If no contact address or contact information is present, we'll present the data from the company record instead.
 
All of these improvements are just an ongoing project of ours to add valuable minutes to your day by simplifying mundane tasks, putting necessary information in more convenient places, and making the system easier-to-use.
 
On a side note, we'll soon be adding a number of new instructional videos describing various features in CATS. If you have any video requests, please post your suggestions on our forums by clicking on the "Support Forums" button on the upper-right hand corner of your screen. A post asking for your ideas can be found in the "General" category.