Automations
Send emails and text messages, notify people, move candidates or tag them when someone applies, enters a stage, goes quiet, books an interview or has had one, with a wait that stops if the candidate moves.
How-to guide3 min read
Automations do routine work for you. Admins set them up under Hiring process › Automations; each reads as one sentence, such as When someone enters Interview for any job, email Invitation to an interview, after 2 hours.
Two to start with
Every organisation starts with:
- Confirm every application: the Application received email, straight after someone applies.
- Tell candidates who are not taken forward: the Not taken forward email, 2 days after someone is rejected. If you bring them back before then, the email doesn't go.
Change them, turn them off with the switch, or move them to the bin. An automation restored from the bin comes back turned off.
Make one
Choose New automation, give it a Name and set:
- When: Someone applies, Someone enters a stage, An application goes quiet (after a number of quiet days, in any open stage or one), An interview is booked, An interview has taken place or Someone completes an assessment. The interview and assessment triggers run once each; see Interview scheduling and Assessments.
- For: Every job, or one.
- Do:
- Send an email: one of your email templates.
- Send a text message: a text template by SMS or WhatsApp. For WhatsApp, only templates linked to an approved WhatsApp template are listed. Texts only go to candidates who agreed to that channel and have a phone number with a country code; the others are skipped and the run says why.
- Send an assessment: one of your assessments.
- Notify people: the Hiring team, the Job owner or Chosen people (up to 20), with a message of up to 200 characters.
- Move to a stage: any stage except rejected and hired, and not the stage that starts it.
- Add a tag.
- Wait: minutes, hours or days, or nothing to do it straight away.
Automations started by Someone completes an assessment can't move the candidate, because a result is never a decision. To send a text, connect SMS or WhatsApp under Settings › Messages first.
Waiting and stopping
An automation with a wait runs later. If the candidate moves to another stage before then, it doesn't run. You see what is waiting on the candidate's profile, and anyone who may email candidates can stop it there.
An automation that goes quiet runs once for each quiet spell: after something happens and the candidate goes quiet again, it can run again.
What automations don't do
They never reject or hire anyone. Those are decisions about a person, which the law expects a person to make. People you added by hand get no automated email until they confirm their consent.
Everything an automation does is on the candidate's timeline and in the audit trail, under the automation's name. An automation that came due while Careers Orbit was paused runs once, straight after a plan is chosen, and its timeline entry says Sent after the plan was restored (or Moved or Tagged). See Plans and the trial.
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