Friday is our favorite day to release new features and improvements to the CATS Applicant Tracking System. Today we've got quite a few to cover, including some we haven't talked about much yet (so I'll cover them in the case that you haven't found them yet).

Quick Preview / Snapshot

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.

Headshots, Pictures and Logos

One of the things that we try to keep in perspective whenever we're working on new tools is to keep them as generic and as instustry-inspecific as possible. We like to keep the default layouts and settings to what 90% of our users find useful; but, letting you run with it if you're looking for something different. It's this sort of drag & drop customizability that I really believe sets us apart from our competitors. Because of this, there's one notable side effect -- the incredible variety of businesses that use our system never ceases to amaze me. It's this variety that lead to a recent feature update with images.

Most US resumes probably don't include a headshot; however, in certain industries like modeling, acting, hairstyling, or in some other countries where customs are different, you probably wouldn't find a resume that didn't include a headshot. For such situations, CATS can now serve as your complete applicant w/headshot tracking system.

Start by attaching any standard image file to a candidate record. Now, hover the candidate's name somewhere in CATS (for example, when viewing the "Candidates" tab) and after about 2 seconds a small popup will fire up a window with summary and contact information including a thumbnail of the headshot for quick visibility. Click the candidate's name and a larger preview will appear when viewing their profile. Finally, click on that preview image to view or download the full color original image.

I should also note that similar functionality was added to companies. Just add the company logo to the company record and when hovering the company's name anwhere in the system, a summary popup will show with a thumbnail of the logo. The logo will also be shown when viewing a company page. We hope that this adds some "association" that perhaps the name of the company alone may not offer.

Importing your Candidates or Contacts using Excel

You can now import data directly from Excel spreadsheets or CSV files. Your import can be setup to add new records (w/duplicate prevention), to update existing records, or to do both. As always, if your file contains multiple types of data (such as both contacts AND companies), our system will create all applicable records and link everything together. It's never been easier to get your data into CATS from other contact management tools, email clients, or applicant tracking systems.

For auditing purposes, all previous imports will kept in a handy list. You can revert all new data created from an import within 7 days. You can review what data was imported on a record-by-record level. Newly imported data will also be conveniently added to a new list for quick reference (very handy when importing mailing lists!).

Workflow

While we've always allowed you some flexibility in how you manage the workflow of your candidates, our new update makes this extremely simple. It gives you complete control over the statuses that we use as milestones through-out the system. It also allows you to create triggers which perform actions when those statuses are selected -- such as firing off an email, starting a review process, or posting to Twitter. You can assign a color so that it's easier to determine a candidate's progress from a quick glance. And this is not just for candidates, workflows apply to CMS portion and jobs as well.

Summary

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.