There hasn’t been a lot of generally interesting stuff to report with work lately. Recently I have been put in charge of shopping for CATS. OK, I am not actually shopping for CATS, I am shopping for an ATS (applicant tracking system), and CATS is the name of one of the products that is on the market. But it sounds funnier to say that I am shopping for CATS. But you could call it a Candidate and Applicant Tracking System. So, yes, this is what is taking up a large fraction of my time these days: shopping for enterprise software.

Everything that I want to know about the world is impossible to know because Google is getting more and more useless as the internet fills with garbage. There are a lot of easy-to-find articles that tell job applicants how to “outsmart” one particular use case that companies have for their Applicant Tracking Systems. These pieces of software include resume parsing tools, and some companies will use the automated tools to do their initial screening. Since we don’t do that – and we have no particular interest in doing that – these articles are especially useless for me. Several months ago I was at a meeting with some sort of marketing rep from LinkedIn, and he proudly told me that if I were looking to hire curriculum developers that their software could find people currently (or formerly) working as curriculum developers and bring them to my attention. I told him that sounded like a terrible idea because most commercial curricula out there are terrible, and I would never want to hire any of the people who worked on those. (Pearson, I am talking about your K-12 products in particular.) Cover letters tell me far more than resumes do. If I had a choice between a cover letter and a resume, I would pick the cover letter every time.

As you know, everything is databases. Sadly, the marketing people don’t know a lot about databases, so I have to phrase all of my questions in terms of practical hypothetical situations instead of asking them about their database schema and the way that their server-side architecture interacts with the database. Perhaps it is not entirely a coincidence that the two products that are currently at the top of my list both publish APIs. The one that I like best also has great documentation of its API.

Many of the products on the market assume that the hiring process is centrally managed. They assume that there is an HR/recruiting office that manages the pipeline of candidates and that the few candidates that make it through HR (and the parser) are temporarily granted to domain experts for the interview stage and then are returned to HR for the rest of the process. The default permissions level for the software has it so that HR can see everything about everyone, and that the future-colleagues doing the interview have approximately zero access to the ATS. Only HR can be trusted with anything having to do with hiring, and the process should be out of HR’s hands as little as possible. We didn’t even have an HR department for the first several years that I worked here, so this is not at all the model that we are using. But this means that most of the software that is meant for most companies isn’t a good fit for us.

In some ways this is like all the terrible curricula out there. Just like all of the major publishers strive to have their textbooks be approximately the same as the textbooks from their competitors, the ATS software developers also strive to have their products have similar features to all the other products on the market.

As part of my due diligence, I did briefly install OpenCATS (free and open source) to see what it does. It doesn’t do much that we need, sadly. Also, I checked in its database, and the password column is just the md5 hash of the password; they don’t salt the hashes. Even I know that is bad, so I don’t really trust them on anything else in terms of security. I really do feel bad saying negative things about free and open source software because I feel like I should be supporting the open source community. But this software just does not do what I need. Also, I am a little bit resentful because their installer script doesn’t work on Amazon Lightsail instances, so installation did not go as smoothly as it could have.

So next week I will be testing software! I’ve set up tests with two different vendors. One vendor has a product that is simple and streamlined. The other vendor has a product that is sophisticated and highly customizable. We’ll see which end of the spectrum we prefer and then iterate from there.

And then when this is all done, I get to shop for conference call software. Major unanswered question: Approximately everyone uses either GoToMeeting or WebEx; why can’t we just use one of those?