profile updated Aug 25, 2008, 5:12 PM
If you're curious to see how much of an inroad social collaboration has made in recruiting, Catch The Best would be a good place to look.
This is a minimalist ATS coupled to a social network (or the other way around, if you prefer). The network can be the team with which a new hire will work, or just those who do the hiring or those who interview the candidate or any combination. Or it can be a social network of one; just the hiring manager.
The process is simple: The hiring team sees the candidate's vitals, offers their own comments and then votes by clicking a thumbs up or down icon.
Catch The Best has too many perils for our taste, though its got the right idea with its collaboration tool. However, having co-workers vote a candidate up or down - and be aware how each person voted (only after casting their own vote) - is guaranteed to create awkward situations, particularly when there's a split
After reading what we said, the company posted this:
"As the collaboration process actually begins, users can view others comments and participate in discussions about particular candidates. As the reviewer points out, this knowledge of others what opinions and thoughts are might cause some rifts. The point of collaboration is to not mask or hide but actually to bring forth these thoughts with team mates so people can address head on."
For a small company that doesn't do a lot of hiring, Catch The Best might have some potential. However, companies with any significant applicant volume will find the ATS nearly uselesss. Instead of parsing a resume and making it searchable by keywords, every application has to be manually reviewed and tagged for future retrieval.
Even so, for a small company already involved in collaborative hiring, Catch The Best might be worth a look. If you post only one job a month, you can try the basic tool set for free. In fact, all service levels are free to try. Pay only if you cancel before the month is out
News & Updates 
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Catch The Best Now Offers Automatic Job Posting to Indeed (PR.com)
On demand ATS and resume management company Catch the Best now offers automatic posting to job search engine site Indeed.com. Jul 28, 2008, 12:35 AM
Products & Services
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Catch the Best
Limited function ATS combined with a hiring collaboration component that is SaaS provisioned. Month-to-month service; no contract required; free trial; multiple service levels.