Email Templates - What are they?

Email Templates are, as the name implies, a series of templates you can use to contact your Candidates, Hiring Managers, Vendors, Users and other Contacts at the various stages throughout your recruitment lifecycle.

Bearing this in mind, a better question would be What types of email templates are available with Eploy?

This is a much meatier question.

Within Eploy there are 9 classifications of Email Templates:

• Email & SMS Merge templates are the most frequently used email templates within the system.  These are the templates you'll use within your Recruitment Workflows to stay in touch with your Candidates and these templates are also available to be used on an ad-hoc basis.

• Candidate Notification email templates are used automatically by Eploy whenever a Candidate completes a task within the website and that task isn't directly associated with some activity within your Recruitment Workflow.  These email templates are sent to confirm that the candidate has registered or applied successfully.  Password Reset and Timesheet related emails would also fall in to this category.

• e-Signature Notification email templates are typically only used by customers who don't use the Onboarding module.  These can be used to send a signable document, such as a Contract, to a Candidate, Contact or Contractor.

• Authorisation email templates are utilised within the Vacancy and Placement Authorisation Workflows.  These email templates can be used to let an approver know they have something to approve, or to let a manager know that their Vacancy or Offer has been approved or rejected.  They can also be sent to Core System users or to non-system users.  For example, you could have an authorisation email automatically sent to the IT Team to let them know to get a new joiner set up on your internal systems (don't get hung-up on the use of the word Authorisation here - it purely indicates that these templates can only be used within the Authorisation workflow).

• Two Factor Authentication templates are used only where you have activated Two-Factor Authentication.  These are the templates that will be used when a user is trying to access the system and needs an authentication code sent to them.

• Consent Emails are used exclusively within our GDPR compliance suite, known as the Consent Module.  These templates are used to let a Candidate or Contact know that their data will be removed from the system soon unless they confirm that they wish to stay on the system longer.

• iCal Templates can be associated with specific Action Types within the system.  An Action is an event, typically used to represent Interviews, but they can be used to schedule any kind of event through Eploy.  Rather than using the same email template for all Actions in the system, you can use iCal templates to include different information within the email depending on the Action Type being used.  For example, a Teams Interview Action Type could have an iCal Template which includes a basic Teams User Guide, whereas the iCal Template associated with an Assessment Centre Action Type could include useful information about how your Assessment Centres operate.

• Job Alert email templates are used within the Job Alert module.  You're able to specify how much information about highlighted Vacancies you'd like to include with your Job Alerts using these templates

• Reference Collection templates are used within our Reference Collection module.  Within this part of the system you can dictate the type of email sent to a Referee, the Candidate, Hiring Managers and Core System Users whenever a reference is requested or reminder issued, when the reference is completed and if the reference request expires.

What do I need to think about when planning?

There really are only two things you need to think about where email templates are concerned:

• Which email templates do you want to use within the system, and
• What the content of each template should be

First, look at the different types of email templates available above.  You can add your own templates to any of these template types, but be logical about it - for example, if you're not going to be using two-factor authentication or all of your contracts will be signed as part of onboarding, you don't need to spend any time looking at those template types.

Another way to do this is to take a step back and look at your whole end-to-end recruitment process - every touch-point within the system will likely need an email template: Vacancy Authorisation, Candidate Registration and Application, Job Alerts, Application Rejection and Withdrawal, Interviews, Offer Authorisation, Onboarding, Reference Collection and Consent Expiry.

Once you've decided which templates you'll be using, you'll want to decide what the content of each email template should look like both in terms of your own internal language (your Marketing Team can help with that), but also any imagery and merge fields you'd like to include within the templates.  Merge fields are used to copy information from within the system in to each email, for example, the recipient name, vacancy and offer details.

I'm still not sure what I need to do - are there any examples I can see?

Indeed there are!

Within your Demo system you'll be able to see both the templates themselves and how they're being used within the system.

To view the basic templates, log in to the Core System and navigate to Admin > Contact Templates.  Here you'll find the list of template types I described at the top of this article (except for Job Alerts and Reference Collection - those templates are within the relevant module itself).  To look at the templates, click on one of the types.  You'll now be able to see the full email template and its associated settings.

To see the templates in action, I'd recommend looking at either a Recruitment or Authorisation Workflow.

Again, from the Core System navigate to Amin > Recruitment or Authorisation Workflows, then click on a workflow name.

Once inside the workflow, click on the Notifications option at any of the states to see the settings being used.

One thing to bear in mind here is that in you Demo system we've created some fully-formatted HTML email templates.  These won't be included as part of your live system.  If you want to use full HTML email templates, please source the HTML required internally - your IT or Marketing/Comms teams should be able to help you.

Tip email templates are covered in both of the Customer Configuration webinars.