Permissions: Site Admin, and Job Admin who can manage custom fields

Product tier: Available for all subscription tiers

Company custom fields allow you to capture data custom to your organization in a standardized format. Greenhouse Recruiting includes custom fields for applications, candidates, jobs, openings, and offers, as well as custom referral questions and rejection questions. Over time, you may need to delete a custom field as you make process changes.

Note: Custom rejection questions are only available to Advanced and Expert subscription tiers.

What happens when I delete a custom field?

When you delete a custom field, it will no longer appear going forward on new applications, candidates, jobs, openings, or offers. The custom field will also be removed from any existing jobs that don't have any associated data for that field.

For existing jobs that have data associated with the custom field before deletion, the field and associated data will remain after you delete it. To completely remove a custom field and all its associated data, you must manually remove the data at the application, candidate, job, openings, or offer-level first, then delete the custom field itself.

Note: To manually delete existing custom field data, you'll need to edit the custom field to mark it as optional. Custom fields marked as required and associated data cannot be manually removed.

Will data from deleted custom fields still appear in reports?

No. Once you've deleted a custom field, any associated data will no longer appear in your reports and the field will be removed as a filter option.

How do I know which existing jobs use custom job fields?

If you intend to delete a custom job field and all the custom job field's associated data across all jobs, it may help to first run a report to see which jobs contain data for the custom job field.

Navigate to the All Jobs page and select the Filter drop-down. Filter by Custom Field. Be sure to filter by Job Status as well if necessary to capture all jobs.

Screenshot-of-the-custom-field-dropdown-on-the-all-jobs-page.pngUse the resulting list of jobs to delete the custom job field's values on the jobs. Then proceed to delete the custom job field itself.