A workflow is a series of steps that can be taken through-out the life-cycle of a record (such as a candidate). Each step is represented by a "status", and represents a milestone in the work cycle. For example, a recruiter might setup a basic candidate workflow with the following statuses:

1) Sourced / No Contact
2) Contacted
3) Candidate Replied
4) Submitted / Review
5) Interviewing
6) Declined
7) Hired

Statuses

Each status represents the state of the candidate at any point in time. As you work with candidates, you update their statuses. If a candidate or hiring manager calls and you need information about all candidates in a particular status, CATS makes it easy to run reports or generate lists using these statuses as filters.

Furthermore, CATS keeps an audit trail of statuses. As an example, you could run an interviews report showing candidates who've been marked to the Interviewing status. You could have it include candidates currently in that status, or candidates who have at one point in time been marked Interviewing even if they have since been hired or declined.

Even though I've mostly mentioned candidates, workflow is not limited to the hiring process. Workflow can be used for business development, employee management, sales and much more. For example, recruiters can track job orders using statuses like Lead, Active, and Terminated. When used for internal hiring, alternate statuses for requisitions could be setup such as Request, Approved and Filled.

Triggers

CATS adds one more powerful tool to the workflow arsenal, we call it triggers. Triggers can be created to send out emails, start review processes... even to post a job to Twitter. Once you create a trigger, you can assign it to one or more statuses. Once assigned, whenever a status is set for a record, any associated triggers will fire off (though, there are some configuration settings to make this optional).

How is this helpful? Let's say that you want to be notified anytime one of your recruiters adds a job order. You could add a trigger to the first status for your job orders to send you an email. Let's say anytime you mark a job order in a published status, you want to post that job to Twitter -- just add a trigger for it. Triggers add immense utility to workflow and allow you automate all sorts of mundane tasks.

To add, edit or remove status and to create triggers in CATS:

1) Click on the Settings tab.
2) Click on Customize Workflow (in the blue bar).

Status Mappings

Because we give you great flexibility and the option to create your own names for statuses, CATS loses a lot of knowledge in how to use the statuses that you've created. For example, if you prefer to call the "Placed" status "Hired", how would CATS know this and be able to generate accurate placement reports? We fix this with status mappings.

A status mapping is simply a code that can be applied to your statuses. When editing a status, you'll have an option to select a status mapping. Some examples of status mappings are "Interview", "Placed/Hired", "Declined", etc.. Remember to define these whenever applicable, the more CATS knows about your workflow the more it can do for you.