Recruitment Workflows - What are they?

The Recruitment Workflow governs the recruitment process your Candidates will be taken through, from the point at which they submit their Application, all the way through to the end of their Onboarding.

Within the Recruitment Workflow you can:

• Control the number of Review and Interview stages an Application goes through 

• At each stage, you can configure automated email notifications to the Candidate, either having them sent automatically when the Candidate reaches a given stage and status, or after a delay.  You can also set the notification to be sent manually, if you wish

• Again, for each stage and Status, you can dictate whether your Hiring Managers can see the application, and you can control what they can do with the Application while at that stage in the process

Within your Eploy system, you're not restricted to a single Recruitment Workflow - you can have as many as you need.  Whilst we have many, many systems with only 1 or 2 recruitment workflows, I've seen some systems with 30+ recruitment workflows.

What do I need to think about when planning?

As part of a standard Implementation, and unless agreed otherwise during your Scope or by your Implementation Manager directly, Eploy will build a single Recruitment Workflow for you.

This leads us to the first thing you'll need to consider as part of this Phase of your Implementation: how many Recruitment Workflows do you need?  When thinking about this, bear in mind that very often less is more: just because you can have multiple recruitment workflows, doesn't necessarily mean you need multiple workflows.  You don't want to unnecessarily complicate the system - it'll result in more admin for you when your managers get confused, and it'll also mean you have more testing to do during phase 4.

There are several reasons why you'd want to have multiple Recruitment Workflows, here are the main ones:

• Not all Vacancies need to follow the same process - some might only need 1 review and interview stage, whereas others might need several.  You could accomplish both with a single workflow, but that can sometimes confuse managers who don't recruit very often, so it's easier to have multiple workflows

• You'd like to use different email templates for different Vacancies e.g. you might want to use one style of template for senior roles, another for more junior roles, and perhaps a third for Apprentice and/or Graduate roles.  By having multiple Recruitment Workflows, you can control the email template being used by each Vacancy

• Your organisation has several brands and you'd like to match the branding of the email template to the brand.  Again, we'd use multiple recruitment workflows to accomplish this

• You want your Hiring Managers to have different permissions and abilities in different circumstances.  For example, you might have some jobs where the Hiring Manager carries out all recruitment related tasks (which would likely be the case for site-based retail roles), but for other roles (typically more senior or Head Office roles), you'd want the Recruitment Team to have more control over the process.

So, if having read this you've decided that you do need multiple recruitment workflows, you'll need to make the following decisions:

• How many additional Recruitment Workflows you'll need and what circumstance each should cover

• How many Application and Interview (Action) stages you'll need within each workflow

• For each stage, do you want to simply replicate the Application Statuses and Action Outcomes used in the original workflow, or have different options.  If you do want different options, you'll need to decide on the list of options you want to use and in which Recruitment Workflow the options should be utilised

• Are you going to use the same email templates for all recruitment workflows, or will each workflow have different emails?  If you're going to have different email templates, you'll need to design each template and decide what content should go in to each

• What permissions do your Hiring Managers need?  Remember, your Hiring Managers have permissions both at the Stage Level (controlling which stages they can move an application to and whether they can create Interviews and Slots) and at the individual Status and Outcome level - so you'll need to plan for literally each step of the process

• Do you want to use any Automated Transitions?  This allows Eploy to automatically move an application from one stage and status to another - this can be really useful to reduce the number of clicks you and your managers will need to complete

Once you've pulled all this information together, you'll be in a great position to configure your additional Recruitment Workflows in Phase 3 of your Implementation.

Even if you've decided that you don't want to have multiple Recruitment Workflows, there's still some things you might want to change within the workflow we have built for you:

• Unless you tell us otherwise, we will add a default set of statuses in to each stage e.g. Application to Review, Rejected by Recruitment Team.  If you're happy with this wording, great - but you're more than welcome to change this if you'd like

• Additionally, you can add extra statuses in to the workflow - you might want to include the most frequently appearing rejection reasons as statuses in to the workflow, meaning that instead of picking Rejected by Recruitment Team/Hiring Manager and then adding a note explaining the reason for rejection, you can just click on the relevant status instead.  Not only is that a much more efficient way of working, but it also means you'll automatically have much greater scope for reporting of rejected Candidates in the system.

• You'll also find that we will have added a default set of email templates in to the system - you'll want to take the time to review these email templates and decide whether you want to make changes to them, and if so, what changes you'd like to make.  You might also want to add extra Email Templates in to the system for your new statuses, in which case you'll need to design them.

• Finally, you'll want to think about your Hiring Manager permissions for each Stage and Status

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

You better believe it!

To access the Recruitment Workflows in your demo system, navigate to Admin > Recruitment Workflows, then click on the workflow name.

Tip as you can see from this article, there's a lot to think about where Recruitment Workflows are concerned.  We'll be spending a good amount of time going through Recruitment Workflows - it's the first topic we look at in the second of our Customer Configuration webinars.