The Vacancy Requisition Form

Vacancy Requisition goes by many different names - some of our customers call it Authority to Recruit or ATR, the VRF or the RAF; while others simply call it the Requisition or Req Form. 

Whatever you end up calling this part of the process, this is ultimately the form your Hiring Managers complete when raising a new Vacancy within the Hiring Manager Portal.

The Vacancy Requisition Form is one of the first fully customisable parts of the system that you need to think about.  It will also be, generally, the first step in your Recruitment process.

The key thing to know about customising this form is that it's not something you can do yourself - this has to be done by your Implementation Manager.

The obvious question then is, how does your Implementation Manager know what to put on the Requisition Form?  The answer is simple, we ask you to fill in a Specification form - which is what we'll be looking at in this article.

To jump to a specific part of this article, please use the links below:

• How many forms do I need?
• Ok, so I'm having one Requisition Form, how do I ask specific parts of the business different questions?
• What is in a "standard" Requisition Form?
• How do I fill in the Vacancy Requisition Spec form?

How many forms do I need?

As with many things inside Eploy, such as the Recruitment and Authorisation workflows, Application and Onboarding Forms; you can have multiple Vacancy Requisition Forms.

As part of your initial scoping conversations, you'll have already decided whether your Hiring Managers can raise a requisition from scratch (i.e. a blank document), copy an existing Vacancy or use Vacancy Templates (the most common option); and as part of that conversation you'll have decided whether the same Requisition Form can be used all the time or whether you need a different form for specific circumstances.  

You'll also have decided whether the different areas of the business need different Requisition Forms, or whether it's ok for everyone to use the same form.

None of this is set in stone, however.  As projects move forward, requirements change and we have a Change Control process in place to deal with these changes as and when they arise.

The key thing to think about is that just because you can have multiple requisition forms, doesn't mean you need multiple requisition forms.  The main drawback of having several requisition forms is that when something needs to be amended/added/removed, the change will have to be made across several forms, whereas if you have just the one form, the change only needs to be made once...plus changes to the layout of each form can only currently be done by Eploy - it's not something you can change yourself.

Ok, so I'm having one Requisition Form, how do I ask specific parts of the business different questions?

This is a question that comes up frequently - you're only going to have the one, largely standardised form, but there are occasions where you'll need to ask different questions to different people.

Generally, we'd handle this by using, what we call, Show/Hide fields.

These are fields which appear and disappear (show and hide...see what we did there?) depending on how pre-defined conditions are met.

So, you could have a drop-down question on the page with several options available, and depending on which option is selected, subsequent fields can appear or disappear as required.

This behaviour cannot be added to the system by yourselves - again, this has to be done by your Implementation Manager, and they'll do this when pulling together your Requisition Form.  So it's really important that you discuss your requirements with them, in detail, so they know how to configure this behaviour properly.

What is in a "standard" Requisition Form?

Every business is different, and their requirements for Vacancy Requisition is different...so there's really no such thing as a standard requisition form.

What you'll find in your Eploy demo system is an example requisition form - something we have added in to help you get used to the system and have a play with as you're pulling together the specifications for your actual requisition form.

How do I fill in the Vacancy Requisition Spec form?

The Vacancy Requisition specification form can be found within the Files section of your project in Teamwork; however, it may also have been emailed directly to you by the Sales team or your Implementation Manager.

Tip even if this document has been emailed to you directly, we would always recommend using the version within Teamwork, as you can be assured that this is the latest version of the document.

In this document, you'll need to add a new Row for each Field you want included on the form, and in each column, tell us how you'd like it to behave:

• Field Name - this is the name of the field in Eploy.  As a default, the field name in the HM Portal will be the same as in the Core System, but if you'd like it to be called something else in the HM Portal, note this in column G (would you like to rename the field name in Column A?)

• Would you like this field on the form? - this is a simply YES/NO question.  If you want the field on the form, select YES.  If you don't, select NO.  In some of the existing fields on the form you'll see Y (Cannot Change).  These options must always be included on the Vacancy Requisition form (though they don't have to be displayed....more on this later).

• Field Type - here you can tell us what type of field this should be.  The options here allow you to control the format of the data being captured e.g. Text, Number, Drop Down list, etc.  For a full list of the available field types, and a description for each, please see this article (it'll open in a new tab).

• Should this field show to Hiring Managers? - another YES/NO question.  Just because a field is included on the form, doesn't mean it has to be displayed to the Hiring Manager.  A great example is where you want a field to show or hide depending on the value of a field from the Company record (such as Function)...for the show/hide functionality to work, we'd need to include the field on the form, but it doesn't have to be displayed.

• Should this field be Read Only to Hiring Managers? - you guessed it...another YES/NO question.  If you set this to YES, the Hiring Manager will be able to see the content of the field, but won't be able to change it.  This can be useful if you have a defined salary structure allocated to the Vacancy which you want the manager to see, but not change.

• Should this field be Mandatory to Hiring Managers? - this is the last of the YES/NO questions.  If this is set to YES, the Hiring Manager will not be able to send the vacancy for authorisation, nor save it as a draft, until they have answered the question.  If you're going to set this question to YES, make sure you set the previous Read Only question to NO - we've seen examples in the past where a vacancy has been caught in a loop with no way out because the manager needed to answer a question which was read-only.

• Would you like to rename the field name in Column A? - although it feels like a YES/NO question, it isn't.  If you don't want to rename the field, leave it blank.  If you do want to rename the field, simply type the new name for it here.  Note changing the field name on this form will only change it in the Hiring Manager Portal - if you want the new name to be used throughout the system, you could add that as a comment, but we'd always recommend letting your Implementation Manager know separately.

• If this is a drop down list field, what would you like the drop down options to be? - this one is fairly self-explanatory.  If you have set the Field Type (Column C) to Drop Down, let us know here what each option in the list should be, separated by a comma.

As a default, the Vacancy Requisition form is broken down in to several sections: Template Selection, Requisition Details, Salary & Requirements, Job Description Upload, Advertising Details and Hiring Team.  Within each section you'll see the default questions included as-standard.  If you tell us that you don't want any of the questions in a particular section included on the form, we'll remove the whole section.

If you want to add a new section, insert a row in the appropriate place and add a Title field to correspond with the section heading.  There's no need to shade it in grey to match the formatting of the default sections

In the video below we have filled in the Vacancy Requisition specification to match with the example Vacancy Requisition you'll see in your demo system.

Having completed your Vacancy Requisition Form, go to the task within Teamwork and upload the completed spreadsheet within the task. During the Discovery Session at the end of this phase, your Implementation Manager will review the information you have provided. If we have any queries with your completed document we can discuss these during the meeting. The finalised document will then be used for your Eploy Build. If you have any questions about completing the document, please raise these with your Implementation Manager on your weekly call.