Recruitment Workflows are the tools we use within Eploy to capture your recruitment processes.

Eploy gives you the facility to have as many Recruitment Workflows in your system as you need.  Typically we'd see a company configure only 1 or 2 Recruitment Workflows, but we do have some customers with 30+ recruitment workflows, the reasons for which I'll explain later on in this article.

In this article we're going to talk about what a Recruitment Workflow is, what you can do with a Recruitment Workflow, why you might need more than one, and how to fill in the Recruitment Workflow specification document.

To jump to a specific topic in this article, please use the links below:

• What is a Recruitment Workflow?
• Recruitment Workflow Stage Types and Statuses
• Hiring Manager Settings
  • Name Blind Settings
• Automated Notification Settings and the Daily Digest Email
• Automatic Transitions
• Completing the Specification Document

What is a Recruitment Workflow?

As stated above, the Recruitment Workflow is what we use within Eploy to replicate your recruitment processes.

Depending on how many different processes you have, you might only need the one workflow, or you may need several.  There are no restrictions within Eploy for the number of Recruitment Workflows you can have, but you should always ask yourself the question: just because you can have loads of workflows, do you really need them?

There are many legitimate reasons as to why you might need several recruitment workflows, here are some of the most common examples:

• You genuinely have different processes for different vacancies.  For example, a basic Vacancy might need to go through a Review and Interview before being offered; whereas a Graduate Vacancy might need 2 reviews, 2 interviews and an Assessment Centre before being offered.  Yes, you could have all these stages in the single workflow, but that might complicate things for managers who don't recruit very often, so it makes sense to have 2 workflows here.

• You want your Hiring Managers to be self-sufficient for some Vacancies, but for others the Recruitment Team needs to take the lead.  Each Recruitment Workflow has it's own set of unique Hiring Manager settings, so in this example you'd have 2 workflows: one where the Hiring Manager can see and do everything, and another where their visibility of applications is restricted, and what they can do with the application is restricted also.

• You only have the one process, but as your organisation has several brands, you'd like the emails sent to Candidates to be branded appropriately.  As with Hiring Manager settings, each workflow has it's own set of unique notification settings, so if you wanted to send out different branded emails, this can be achieved by having multiple recruitment workflows, even if the only thing that's different is the email templates used

Recruitment Workflow Stage Types and Statuses

Each Recruitment Workflow is broken down in to several Stages, and you have three Stage Types to pick from:

• Application - these are your review stages.  Typically we see 2 application stages in most workflows: an Initial Review stage for the Recruitment Team, and a shortlist stage for Hiring Managers.  Depending on your process, you might only need the one, or you might need loads - it's entirely up to you how many you have.

• Action - typically, these are your Interview stages.  How many action stages you have within your workflow is entirely up to you.  We frequently see three Action Stages being included within a Recruitment Workflow: Telephone Interview, First Interview and Second Interview, with the occasional Assessment Centre thrown in as well.  That being said, very often the Telephone Interview stage doesn't get used that much as the Recruitment Team would typically just pick up the phone and call the Candidate, rather than formally book the interview in - so in these cases, although they do carry out a telephone interview, there really isn't much value in having a dedicated stage for it (just because you can include this stage formally, doesn't mean you necessarily have to).

• Placement - these stages are where you carry out all Offer and Onboarding activities.  Typically we'd only see the one of these.  If you want multiple, that's fine, but we'll probably want to have a good chat with you to fully understand why you want multiple placement stages, as there might be another way of achieving what you want.  For example, if you want to have two stages of Onboarding (to do a background check half way through), we'd achieve this using our Onboarding Form Flow, which we'll look at in another article.

Each Stage Type you use will need its own name (there will be some defaults in your system already), and as part of this phase of implementation you can let us know what these Stage Names should be, so we can either rename existing stage names or create new ones for you (when you reach Phase 3 - Customer Configuration, you'll be able to amend or add to these stage names further if you need to).

Each stage is sub-divided into a series of Statuses.  These statuses serve three main purposes:

1. They allow you to track, in detail, where the Candidate is within the workflow
2. Each one can be assigned its own unique Hiring Manager and Notification setting, controlling when emails are issued to Candidates and what your Hiring Managers can see and do at each step in the process
3. They can be used as reminders or to signpost things that you need to do (such as needing to contact a Candidate or carry out a DBS check).  They can also help with reporting, for example, having multiple rejection statuses (each one being a specific reason) can provide for more meaningful reports than simply Rejected by Recruitment Team.

As there are three types of stages, we also have three types of Statuses: Application Statuses, Action Outcomes and Placement Statuses. 

As the names suggest, Application Statuses are used while the Application is at one of your review stages; Action Outcomes allow you to provide the formal outcome of any Interview, and the Placement Statuses are used while at the Offer stage.

Tip if you've been looking at your Authorisation Workflows, we'll have mentioned Placement Statuses there as well - the placement statuses you use as part of your Authorisation Workflows are the same as the ones you use in a Recruitment Workflow.  Even though you've added them to your Placement Authorisation Workflow, you'll also need to make sure they're in your Recruitment Workflow and visible to your Hiring Managers as well (see below).

Hiring Manager Settings

Each stage and status within your workflow will have its own set of Hiring Manager settings.

These settings control whether your Hiring Managers can:

• See the application at that status
• Contact the Candidate
• Update the current Application Status
• Move the Application to another stage in the workflow
• Add Notes against the Application

The settings also allow you to dictate which Stages the Hiring Manager can move the application to, whether they can schedule interviews and create Interview Slots, and whether they can create Placements.

This level of detail is what makes having multiple recruitment workflows beneficial, as you can assign different settings to each status, and those settings can be different within each workflow.  For example, when an application is received, in one Workflow the Hiring Manager cannot see it, in a second they can see it but do nothing, and in a third workflow they can see and update the application.

Name Blind Settings

One thing that cannot be configured within the workflow are Name Blind settings.

These settings control how much of the Candidate's personal information is displayed to the Hiring Manager and are frequently used to help reduce Unconscious Bias at the review stages.

Name Blind settings can only be configured by your Implementation Manager and are aligned to specific Application Statuses.  As Name Blind settings apply only within the Hiring Manager Portal (it isn't possible to apply Name Blind settings to the Core System), we would typically only add Name Blind settings to those Application Statuses which are actively being used at review stages which are visible to Hiring Managers.

If you would like to know more about Name Blind settings, please discuss it with your Implementation Manager.

Automated Notification Settings and the Daily Digest Email

Automatic Notifications

In addition to controlling what your Hiring Managers can see and do for each status, you can also assign an Automated Notification to each status.  These dictate which emails are sent to your candidates, who the email has come from, after what delay will the email be sent and whether any reminders need to be sent.

Each status can have a maximum of three notifications: one for Internal Candidates, one for External Candidates and another for Vendor (Recruitment Agency) Candidates.

Having the freedom to send a different notification to each of the three Candidate Types allows you to configure the language and tone of your emails to best match that of the audience.

For example, if your company has a specific tone used for internal communications and a different one for external communications, you could apply these to your email templates and use the appropriate one depending on the candidate type.  For Vendor candidates, typically these emails will be sent to the Recruitment Agency user who "owns" that Candidate, rather than to the Candidate directly, so you could use different merge fields within your templates, addressing the agent directly rather than the Candidate.

Daily Digest

The Daily Digest is an email that is sent to any Hiring Manager directly associated with a Vacancy, every day at 7am, giving them a breakdown of applications to be reviewed and interviews scheduled for their Vacancies, along with the status of candidates going through onboarding and any Vacancies and Placements currently awaiting authorisation. 

If you'd like to learn more about the Daily Digest email, please discuss it with your Implementation Manager.

Automatic Transitions

Automatic Transitions are a great way of reducing the amount of "clicks" involved in progressing Candidates from one stage to another.

For example, an Automatic Transition can be used to automatically move a Candidate from a specific Application Status within the initial review stage of a workflow on to the Hiring Manager review stage; or from a specific Action Outcome to the next stage in the workflow.

If you like to learn more about how Automatic Transitions can be used within your workflows, please discuss it with your Implementation Manager.

Completing the Specification Document

Unless agreed otherwise, your Implementation Manager will build one Recruitment Workflow for you; but you'll be able to build additional workflows when you move in to the Customer Configuration phases of your Implementation.

As we have seen throughout this article, there are a lot of settings available to you, meaning the Recruitment Workflow can be configured to match your requirements quite easily - but before your Implementation Manager can build the workflow, we need you to tell us how you'd like it configured.  This is achieved by filling in the Recruitment Workflow Specification Document.

Within this specification document you'll find the most commonly used stages, discussed earlier, and for each we'd like you to tell us if you want it included within your workflow and if you'd like your Hiring Managers to be able to:

• See Candidates (Applications) at this stage
• Book Interviews at this stage (this only applies to Interview stages)
• Contact Candidates at this stage i.e. send the Candidate an email from within the HM Portal itself
• If the Hiring Manager can contact Candidates, should they be able to amend the template being used and upload attachments

You'll also find space beneath these stages to add the detail for any extra stages you'd like adding to the Workflow.

At the bottom you'll find three questions:

• When a Hiring Manager rejects a candidate, should the candidate be notified?  In other words, do you want Eploy to send an automated email notification to candidates rejected by Hiring Managers, or would you rather send these emails manually?
• Should Hiring Managers have visibility of the Onboarding process? This option allows you to specify whether your Hiring Managers should be able to keep track of their candidates as they complete their Onboarding activities.
• Should Hiring Managers be able to see Reference Collection?  This gives the Hiring Manager the ability to see returned references for their candidates.
• Should Hiring Managers be able to manage Reference Collection?  This gives the Hiring Manager not only the ability to see returned references, but to also indicate whether they are suitable or not.

TIP - if you're stuck for inspiration, you can have a look at the way the Recruitment Workflows are configured within your Demo System.  To look at the settings, log in to the demo system and navigate to Admin > Recruitment Workflows, then click on the name of the workflow.  Once in here, you can look at each setting by clicking on it.