Job approvals enable your organization to exercise greater control when opening a job or generating an offer for candidates. When you set up a new job approval flow in Greenhouse Recruiting, you can choose between one-stage and two-stage approval processes, which give different levels of control and oversight.
In a one-stage approval process, you'll configure a single stage to request approval before a job can be opened for recruiting.
Add a new job approval workflow
To configure one-stage job approvals, click the Configure icon in the upper-right corner and select Approvals from the left panel.
From this page, you can configure a one-stage job approval for your entire organization or per office/department.
* Number of approvers is dependent on how approvals are configured
If you'd like to also require approval for offers, you can use two-stage job approvals. Click here for more information.
Add approvers
Navigate to the Job Approvals panel and click Add Approval Step.
Click Add in the next window to select users from the dropdown menu. Repeat this step as necessary to add multiple approvers to this step.
- Site Admin with the user-specific permission Can see private notes, salary info, manage offers, and approve jobs/offers
- Job Admin with the permission stripe Can view and edit private job fields and approve/request approval on jobs on All Future Jobs.
Depending on how your organization decides to configure its approval flow, you can set how many approvers from the list need to approve a job before it moves to the next step. Use the Required dropdown menu at the top of the dialog box to select the required number of approvers.
In the following example, only 1 of 2 of the listed users need to approve a job before it advances.
When you're finished, click Save. The approval step will display next to the job approval stage.
When approval is requested, the selected users will receive an email notification about a pending approval.
You can repeat the steps above to add more than one step to your approval process. Once created, you can choose to make your approval process use sequential or non-sequential steps when moving a job through the pipeline. See the sections below for more information.
Sequential job approval steps
Sequential job approval steps mean that your approvers have to grant the offer approval in a specific order to move the job through the workflow. This sequencing allows you to maintain additional control if your organization has detailed processes.
Example: Your organization has decided any new job requires approval from both a mid-level and senior member of your recruiting team before you can start recruiting candidates.
However, to save time and reduce distractions, you only want the senior members of the team to review jobs that have already been approved by the mid-level recruiter.
In this situation, you can use sequential approval steps to ensure that all approvals are sent to the mid-level recruiter first, and only notify the senior member if they are approved.
To create a sequential flow of required approvals across multiple users, create at least 2 approval steps.
Select In Order from the dropdown menu in the top right corner of the step. This selection will now sequentially follow the stages as they've been outlined. When steps are in order, a small arrow icon will display between the sequential stages.
Non-sequential job approval steps
Using non-sequential job approval steps still requires users to approve the job, but allows the approval to occur in any order since all the notifications are sent at once. Non-sequential job approvals are ideal for organizations that require more than one approval in their workflow but don't need them to happen in a specific order.
Example: Before posting a job, you want approval from a both senior recruiter and a member of your finance team who verifies that the role's start date and other information is correct.
By setting up non-sequential steps, you can send the approval to the recruiting team and finance team simultaneously, and they can approve or not approve the job as needed.
To create a non-sequential job approval process across multiple users, create at least 2 approval steps.
Select All at once in the top right corner of the Official job approval box. When approval is requested, all the listed approvers will be notified simultaneously.
Configure job approvers by office or department
Instead of configuring a singular one-stage job approval for your entire organization, you can configure one-stage job approvals by office or department.
Note: Any office and/or department not configured with an approval process defaults to your organization's approval process.
To configure an approval process for a specific office and/or department, click Add Approval by office/department.
Use the provided dropdown menus to select an office and/or department. When finished, click Create.
Create an approval process for the selected office and/or department.
Note: Unlike default offer approvals that provide the option to apply newly created workflows to existing jobs in Greenhouse Recruiting, created default job approval workflows can't be added to existing jobs directly in-app.
Organizations can, however, loop in developer resources to utilize Greenhouse Recruiting's Harvest API, to add or replace created job approval workflows on their existing jobs.
Using the PUT: Create or replace an approval flowendpoint will create or replace the entirety of an approval flow on a certain job or offer as long as the following conditions are true:
- The Reopening a job with approval should require reapproval permission policy is enabled within your organization's permission policies
- The job status for existing jobs has been adjusted after the new approval flow is added