Cheezhead

CATS, an applicant tracking solution, hit the market to much fanfare in 2006. Although throwing its hat into an already-crowded ring, the company cut through the clutter with an open source model that was free and gave users the ability to take the code and tweak it how they wished. Sort of like popular open source blog software Wordpress.

Two years in and the company has abandoned its open source platform - possibly the very thing that made it famous in the first place - to become a more traditional applicant tracking system best associated with sites like Taleo, PC Recruiter or My Staffing Pro.

The move inspired us to check-in and see what was going on.

“We were hoping we’d build momentum and have people contribute to the code,” said Asim Baig, President and Founder. “That didn’t happen. After getting only 29 new lines of code added to the hundreds of thousands we had, we reached the conclusion that we had to generate revenue to keep the project going.”

All is not lost, however. Although the phrase “open source” cannot even be found on their homepage, the code is still out there and legally usable under specific terms. OpenCATS.org, for example, is a group still offering the code to users a la open source.

For now though, the company is hoping to lure paying customers and to take on the traditional players with what Baig says is better simplicity and speed. “We don’t come with a training manual” he proudly comments. And he may be onto something. At a cost of $29/month/user (or free for small shops), the company claims between new 400-500 users each month. Seventy percent are recruiting firms versus direct employers.

To date the company has done little to no marketing and claims much of its success to word of mouth and search engine optimization. “If you were to type in ‘applicant tracking system’ in Google, the first thing to pop up is CATS,” said Sameer Sitaram, the company’s marketing head.

Search engine traffic plays an important role in how CATS helps its clients as well. This is a significant difference when compared to many other ATS’s where jobs might as well be invisible as far as Google goes.

Each site CATS powers is complete with a search engine-friendly link to browse job content. A search for client Kiesling reveals a good number of job postings indexed. It’s not a perfect system (title tags could be customized, for example), but they’re in Google for a pretty inexpensive pricetag.

The future looks pretty interesting for the company as well. Baig promises to rollout a job board in the next 12 mos., possibly taking on companies like JobTarget. Additionally, look for an affiliate program to help spur low-cost promotion. For more on the future, listen to the clip below:

CATS’ Future Plans

The company is self-funded and employs 6 people. For more, checkout www.catsone.com. There’s an online demo and a blog too. To listen to the entire interview, uncut, subscribe to our feed on iTunes.