This guide details the role of offices and departments in Greenhouse Recruiting and outlines the options for assigning these values to jobs imported from your HRIS.

If you still have questions about the appropriate office and department structure for your organization after reviewing this guide, please contact your Greenhouse Customer Success Manager.

How are offices and departments used in Greenhouse Recruiting?

Offices and departments impact the following areas within Greenhouse Recruiting:

  • User permissions
  • Job and offer approvals
  • Job board configuration
  • Dashboard and reporting filters
  • Custom field configurations
  • Email template and offer template configurations

Check out the following article for more details: Office and department-dependent workflows

Can I import my office and department structure from my HRIS?

Yes, you can import your office and department structure from your HRIS. If you're using HRIS Link, it will create or update your Greenhouse Recruiting offices and departments based on any changes made to the corresponding fields in your HRIS.

Check out the following article to learn more: FAQ: Import offices and departments with HRIS Link.

If you are building an API-driven integration, it is possible to create and update offices and departments through the Harvest API.
Check out the following article to learn more: Sync offices and departments from an external system.

If you prefer to maintain your Greenhouse Recruiting office and department structure manually, you can do so in Greenhouse Recruiting on the Organization page.

As a general rule, we strongly recommend creating an office and department structure in Greenhouse Recruiting that you do not expect to change frequently. Frequent changes to your Greenhouse Recruiting offices and departments could mean frequent manual re-assigning of jobs and permissions and restructuring of default approvals.

Assigning jobs to offices and departments through an HRIS integration

There are two options we recommend when importing organizational values from an HRIS.

Option 1: Map HRIS values directly to your Greenhouse Recruiting office and departments structure

If there are HRIS fields and option values that align with the needs and structure of your Greenhouse offices and departments, we recommend mapping these field values to your Greenhouse Recruiting office and department structure, as long as the field values are relatively static.

When you import a job from an HRIS, the office or department that you want to assign the job to must already exist in Greenhouse Recruiting. Assigning a job to a Greenhouse Recruiting office and department at the time of job creation ensures any office- and department-dependent approval flows and user permissions are configured in Greenhouse Recruiting are applied.

Option 2: Use job custom fields to represent HRIS organizational values, and create a separate office and department structure for Greenhouse Recruiting

If there are no HRIS fields whose values align with the office and/or department values needed for Greenhouse Recruiting, you can maintain a separate office and department structure in Greenhouse Recruiting. Any HRIS organizational values you want to import with jobs, such as Cost Center and Supervisory Organization, can be added as custom job fields.

Note: If you’re building an API-based job import or using HRIS Link with these options, you'll still need additional logic in the integration layer to determine the correct Greenhouse Recruiting office and department to assign to the job through the API. This can be implemented via an evaluate expression calc field, a custom object in your HRIS, or integration logic. If using a RaaS-based job import, users can assign the office and department manually when they create the job in Greenhouse Recruiting.

Additional resources