Candidate Screening and Tracking

by Will
(Los Angeles, CA US)

Can you recommend some good free services for streamlined candidate management?

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Will, Thanks for the question. I believe you are talking about an applicant tracking system. There are a few free ones available but first you'd have to tell me a bit about what you need.


For instance there is a free one called CATS. If you have a good understanding of how to build a linux server you can install CATS freeware on your server and have a pretty robust Applicant tracking system.

Look up CATS open source on sourceforge.net. The program is there for download and it is a pretty decent program. Anyone familiar with servers could get it up and running quickly then you can configure it to your liking.

On the other hand, if you just want an ATS where the data lives elsewhere and you just log in, there are a number of them and they all monetize differently.

It is going to be up to you to figure out which one you like. For example there is smartrecruiters.com Where you can get a fully functional ATS with some pretty good features. They monetize the job posting opportunities.

That means they want you to buy posting subscriptions to some of the premium niche sites to source candidates. This is a reasonable tradeoff. They also limit you on the number of resumes parsed or read into the system.

A side note here a resume that has been parsed into the system can be found using keywords later on. Resumes not parsed are just stored as files and are not indexed in the search database. This means if you want to parse all your resumes and you do more than the allotted number it may cost you some money.

Finally, before making your decision about free vs. cheap, think about your data. Do you want to own your candidates? If you do, you may want to look at a small fee based service where you own all your data or if you are not a computer person, pay someone to install the CATS system on your server.

When someone else is in control of your candidates, you have no idea how often or if they back up the data. Server down times and loads can prevent you from accessing your candidates. There are an infinite number of benefits to paying for a service and having access and control of your data...and I'm not talking a lot of money. You can buy an ATS for as low as $350 or pay as little as $20/mo. It is up to you.

Hope that helps and good luck on your searching.