Drop Down Lists - What are they?

Drop Down Lists appear in pretty much every piece of software across the world these days.

They're a quick and easy way to give someone multiple options to pick from.

Within Eploy, they appear all over the place, including:

• Vacancy, Application and Placement Statuses
• Workflow Stages
• Action Types
• Locations, Functions, Industries and Departments
• Candidate/Application Source Tracking options

This isn't an exhaustive list, but hopefully it gives you a good idea.

What do I need to think about when planning?

The first thing you'll need to decide is which dropdown lists you'll need to amend.  Your Implementation Manager will be able to help you work this out, but typically you'll want to amend the following as a minimum:

• Location
• Function
• Department
• Industry
• Equal Opportunities questions (there's a different dropdown list for each item)
• Source Tracking (How did you hear about us? and How did you hear about us - details?)

Optionally, you might want to look at dropdown lists which your Implementation Manager will have populated for you, including:

• Application Stage Names
• Application Status
• Placement Status
• Position Type

You'll also need to get ready to populate any custom dropdown lists your Implementation Manager has created for you - typically you'll have asked for these within the Specification Documents completed during Phase 1.

Ultimately, if you're in any doubt as to which dropdown lists you need to look at, please ask your Implementation Manager.

The second thing you'll need to do, once you've identified which dropdown lists to make changes to, is you gather together the options you want to include within each dropdown list.  This would include things like:

• Your Equal Ops options i.e. the lists of Nationalities, Sexualities, Genders, etc. that you want to report on
• The locations your vacancies will be located in
• Any new statuses you'd like to include.  For example, very often customers would like to include rejection reasons as buttons within their workflows - if you want to do this, you'll need to gather together all the rejection reasons you want to use

Finally, and most importantly, you need to remember that whilst you can change the content of a dropdown list, you can't create new ones - only your Implementation Manager or Implementation Engineer can do this.

This is an especially important point to be aware of when you're looking at questions within your Application and Onboarding forms - although you can create dropdown list questions here, these will not be reportable - only those created by Eploy can be included within Dashboards, Reports and Exports.  So, when you're looking at the content of your dropdown lists, if you identify a new question you'd like to include, please let your Implementation Manager know so they can build it in to your system as a reportable field.  We don't want you to find yourself in a situation where you have several thousands of responses to a question that isn't reportable, but which you would actually like to include in a report.

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

You betcha!

To see examples of dropdown lists in use, simply log in to your demo system and click around - you'll be able to see the dropdown lists in use everywhere.

If you'd like to see how they are administered, log in to the Core System and navigate to Admin > Dropdown Lists.

Select an option from the Show Values For dropdown list at the top of the page and the screen will refresh to display the options available within that list.

Tip Making changes to the content of your dropdown lists is covered several times throughout both of the Customer Configuration webinars.