Admin & Organization Settings
Organization Setup
Approvals
30 min
ashby supports opening, job, and offer approval processes approvals can be set up on the legacy plus, plus and enterprise plans foundations legacy plus plus enterprise ❌ ✅ ✅ ✅ approvals overview you can create an approval process when multiple stakeholders need to review and sign off on a workflow we currently support opening approvals, job approvals, and offer approvals you can set one or more approvers at each stage of the approval process when would i use each type of approval process? approval type use case common approvers opening approval commonly use to validate that headcount has been approved by finance finance, talent job approval commonly used to ensure the accuracy of the interview plan stages and other job settings and the quality of job postings talent offer approval commonly used to ensure appropriate stakeholders have reviewed offers ceo, finance, talent, hiring manager permissions approval creation and approvers see the table below for information on the permissions required to configure approvals and to be an approver access role can configure an approval? can make one off edits to an approval process for a specific candidate (if enabled)? can be set as an approver? limited access ❌ ❌ ✅ agency users ❌ ❌ ✅ elevated access external recruiter (not linked to an agency) ❌ ❌ ✅ elevated access analyst ❌ ❌ ✅ elevated access hiring team member ❌ ❌ ✅ elevated access hiring manager ❌ ❌ ✅ elevated access admin ❌ ❌ ✅ elevated access admin private ❌ ✅ ✅ organization admin ✅ ✅ ✅ 💡 when an approval request is sent, the user can approve or reject the request from their email they do not need to have a specific access role or level of permissions to approve or reject the approval request via email or via slack they will need to have at least elevated access to the role in question to be able to view the candidate’s profile prior to approving but users with limited access can be set as an approver and submit an approval create and configure an approval process create a new process navigate to https //app ashbyhq com/admin/organizational settings/approvals in admin to build an approval process before you click + new make sure that you’ve selected the correct object type tab options include offer job opening configure a new process to configure a new process, you’ll select the scope, add steps, and add approvers to each step the scope triggers the process to start, the steps are the rounds of review the approvers are the specific stakeholders completing the review you can include multiple approvers at each step or select a pool of users based on their role on the job consideration you can then choose whether all, one or some approvers need to provide approval once you’ve created your approval, click create once the approval has been created, you will have the option to edit, take a copy of, or archive your approval process ordering the process list activated processes in the list are processed in order if multiple processes have a scope that would apply, the one highest in this list will be used you can drag and drop each process to re prioritize as needed e xpand here for a detailed overview of the configuration options this screenshot highlights the 5 configuration options for setting up an approval process active offer approval processes list of activated processes if multiple processes have a scope that would apply to an offer, the one highest on this list will be used you can drag and drop each process to re prioritize as needed process title here you can give the process a descriptive title scope you can filter which offers this process applies to by matching against fields on the associated "job consideration" if an offer has multiple applicable processes, the process higher in the process list will be used steps here you can configure how many steps this process should have and which individuals should be included as approvers in each step you can also select a pool of users with a specific role on the job (recruiters, recruiting coordinators, sourcers and hiring managers) rather than selecting individual users stakeholder options here you can configure how many of the approvers in a step are required to approve to advance to the next step create enable your process once configured example scopes setting the scope is highly flexible, but the most common options selected are the department and the role examples of each are below scope by department in this example, the scope is set to the department all job considerations that an offer is generated for in the engineering department will follow this process scope by role in this example, the scope is set to the role all job considerations that an offer is generated for where arthur is the recruiter will follow this process use an approval process once activated, all approval types follow a similar flow the approvers will receive a notification prompting them to approve the offer once they submit their response, the process will move on to the next approver opening approvals you can learn more about openings at docid\ ksxxwi1zugaw8lrp8jwxz opening approvals are used to approve new headcount in ashby when you create an opening, it will be in a draft state you can then try to move it into the next state which will either be approved or pending approval if there is a matching process for a given opening, it will be sent to pending approval above once it is then approved by an approver, it will move into the approved state from there, you can open the opening and allow people to hire against it job approvals you can learn more about jobs at docid\ l nciszrb9ztdr4u3idzr job approvals are used to approve the opening of a role once you’ve created your job, click on the draft drop down under the job title to see the option to send for approval click this to then view the approval process and submit the request reviewers commonly ensure the interview plan has all steps needed to assess candidates’ role fit, and the job postings meet quality standards offer approvals you can learn more about offers at docid\ klimfx9n1tahebvkmgpoh offer approvals are used to approve generating an offer letter and extend an offer to a candidate on offers, changes like the candidates’ last name or address often don’t require reapproval reapproval fields allow your team to determine which fields do and don’t require a new approval process you can select your reapproval fields via the configure offer reapproval fields option on the approvals page enabling editing offer approval processes on a one off basis having the option to edit offer approval processes on a one off basis can be useful in the case of any unexpected changes, such as assigning a delegate if the usual approval is on pto or looping in an additional approver for a specific offer if you’d like to have the option to edit an approval process on a one off basis, either before the offer approval is submitted or during the active approval process, head to admin > organization setup> approvals > https //app ashbyhq com/admin/organizational settings/approvals/settings from here, using the allow editing one off offer approval processes dropdown, select an option to determine the users who are allowed to make these edits never never allow offer approval processes to be adjusted on a one off basis organization admins only only those with organization admin access can adjust offer approval processes on a one off basis organization admins and elevated access users organization admins and those with the required permissions as part of their elevated access role will be able to adjust offer approval processes on a one off basis the user would need to have elevated access admin private access in order to view the offer and adjust the offer approval adjusting the approval process for an offer please note, you cannot make ad hoc changes to the approval process once the offer has been approved you can make one off amendments to your offer approval process either before the approval request is sent for an offer, or during the approval process if you’re making changes to the approval process on the offer prior to submitting your request for approval, click on request approval on the offer within the candidate profile if making changes as your approval process is in flight, click view offer on the offer activity instead click configure approval process from within the approval process section of the offer on the following screen, you can add or remove approvers from steps, add steps or remove steps once you’ve made your adjustments, click use approval process to confirm your changes your amendments will now be reflected on the offer in question the original offer approval process set up within admin > organization setup > approvals will not be impacted by these changes please note that the option to make one off approval amendments is only available for the offer approval process this is not available for opening or job approval processes approval settings you can access and amend your approval settings on the https //app ashbyhq com/admin/organizational settings/approvals/settings tab allow unauthenticated approvals from email notifications if you enable this option, users in the approval chain can approve or reject approval requests directly from email notifications they receive without needing to log in to ashby each approval notification sent via email will include a secure unique link that will automatically authenticate users when used users will need to have email notifications enabled for approval requests to use this setting include interview feedback in offer approval email notifications interview feedback will be included in the body of approval email notifications, alongside the offer and opening details as such, approvers will be able to see interview feedback in their approval email if this option is enabled include ai summary in offer approval email notifications offer approval email notifications will include an ai generated summary of the candidate and interview feedback if this option is enabled faq what types of notifications can the reviewer receive? email and slack they will also see an approval task on their home page when logging in to amend approval notification settings, users can navigate to https //app ashbyhq com/settings/notifications within their personal settings and use the checkboxes to determine their notification preferences how many processes can i have? you can create unique approval processes which take effect under certain conditions as only one approval process will apply to each offer, the order of processes in the list determines the priority with which these processes will take effect you can optionally configure a default fallback process that runs when no other process applies is it possible to set the ‘hiring manager’ on the hiring team of a job as an approver instead of selecting a specific person? it is! you can now select a pool of users as approvers based on their role on the job you can pick from pulling an approver from the job consideration’s recruiters, recruiting coordinators, sourcers and/or hiring managers does a user need specific permissions to provide approval? when an approval request is sent, the user can approve or reject the request from their email they do not need to have a specific access role, a paid seat or a certain level of permissions to approve or reject the approval request via email or via slack they will need to have at least elevated access to the role in question to be able to view the candidate’s profile prior to approving can i send a reminder to a stakeholder about approving an offer? you can manually send out a reminder, yes! to do this, click view offer on the candidate’s profile to view the offer details and approval process steps a send reminders option will show next to the step where approval is still needed, along with the stakeholder or stakeholders who have yet to approve click send reminders from here, you can determine the stakeholder/s that should receive the reminder and add in an additional message to go alongside the original approval request information if needed click send reminder to x approvers to send out the reminder can a user be cc’d in to receive approval notifications? currently, only those involved in the approval process will be send notifications about the approval flow if an organization admin forces through an approval, does the approver receive a notification? the approver will not receive a notification but if they try to then click 'approve' they'll see that the approval already occurred and action is no longer needed can i set an approval chain via the api? the enterprise offer approval api tool is only available on the enterprise plan when creating an approval, you have the option to set it to be managed via the api to create an approval within ashby, head to admin>organization setup>approvals and click + new toggle on the managed by the api? option in the steps section you can opt to set up criteria within the scope section if only offers who meet a certain criteria should be managed via the api from now on, when an offer is created and submitted, a waiting for external process message will show in the offer overview this means that ashby is waiting for an approval chain to be submitted via an api call to pull data via the api to update the approval chain, you can use the approvaldefinition update request more on this https //developers ashbyhq com/reference/approvaldefinitionupdate once the approval chain has been received, the approval steps will be added to the offer please note this option is currently only available for offers will incomplete or blank offer fields be included in the email sent to an approver? the offer approval email will only include fields that have been filled in, including offer custom fields why isn’t the ‘hired’ stage appearing in the dropdown when i click on ‘change stage’? the hired stage will not appear in the change stage dropdown if there are active offer approvals set up in the https //app ashbyhq com/admin/organizational settings/approvals/offer you will need to complete the offer process by clicking the offer accepted option within the offer’s settings; once that has been done, the candidate’s stage will automatically change to hired how do i archive an approval process? click on the approval process within admin > organization setup > approvals you will have the options to edit, copy or archive the approval process you can restore archived approval processes by changing the active dropdown to archived when viewing your approvals you can then click on the process you’d like to restore and click restore can i trigger a reapproval process for jobs and openings once they’ve been approved? after a job or an opening is approved, it’s currently not possible to trigger a reapproval process when changes are made if reapproval fields are configured for specific fields, they will only trigger reapproval at the initial point of approval so if you have multiple steps in your approval process and a change was made after approver 1 had approved the opening but approver 2 had yet to approve the opening, the approval process would be triggered again and the approver in the first step of the process would need to provide approval again how do job approval processes work with confidential jobs? as part of the setup process for a job approval workflow, you can check the is confidential? checkbox within the scope section if you check this checkbox, then the approval process will only apply to confidential jobs that meet the criteria set in the approval scope if the checkbox is left unchecked, then the approval process will not be applied to confidential jobs, even if they meet the other scope criteria