Permission sets in Ashby's People Ops provide granular, field-level and workflow-level access controls that enable secure, cross-functional collaboration. With flexible visibility and editing permissions, permission sets help you protect sensitive information while ensuring the right teams can keep onboarding moving. This article explains how People Ops permissions work and walks you through each step of the permission set builder.

People Ops permissions are controlled separately from recruiting permissions. This separation is intentional: post-hire employee data carries higher privacy and compliance sensitivity than candidate data, so a Recruiter with full access to the applicant tracking system does not automatically get access to People Ops data.

Everyone with an Ashby login can switch to People Ops, but what they see depends entirely on their People Ops permission set. A user with no permission set sees only the tasks assigned to them.

An employee does not need a paid recruiting seat to receive a People Ops permission set.

If an employee is not assigned a People Ops permission set, their access in People Ops is limited to the People Workflow steps assigned to them.

To access broader People Ops functionality and visibility, an employee must have a People Ops permission set.

A permission set defines four things:

You can create as many permission sets as you need and assign them to individuals or to roles such as IT.

Access is additive. If a user is assigned more than one permission set, their access is the union of all of them. Each set can grant access to different employees and different fields, and Ashby combines them.

Two permission sets are created are available by default:

Manage permission sets at People Ops > Admin > Permission Sets. Only users with the permission sets admin access can view or edit this page.

Permission sets control which employee fields a People Ops user can view or edit.

To configure your permission sets in Ashby's People Ops, navigate to Admin > Permission Sets  . To configure a new permission set, select + New in the upper right corner.

Set the core details for the permission set, including its title, a description of the access it grants, and the employee(s) it is assigned to.

Define which employees this permission set applies to. Employees assigned to this permission set have access to the selected employees. The options are:

Configure employee field access for this permission set.

Users assigned to this permission set can view or manage the fields specified here for the employees they have access to. You can set the permission set to have no access, view access and/or edit access for each field.

View access allows users to see data associated with the field. Edit access allows users to modify data associated with the field. Leaving the View and Edit checkboxes unchecked ensure the permission set provides no access to the specified field.

You can use the View all, Edit all, and Clear all buttons to update the checkboxes for the permission set in bulk.

Configure workflow access for this permission set. In this step you set access for the following:

Workflow templates: Grants access to view and/or edit workflow templates, including adding and editing steps.

The permissions can be set as follows:

Workflow enrollments: Grants access to view and edit enrollments into the workflow. A workflow enrollment is the intersection of an employee and a workflow, e.g. John Doe is enrolled in the engineering onboarding workflow and if you do not have view or edit access to that workflow or John Doe as an employee, you will not be able to see the enrollment details.

The permissions can be set as follows:

The permission set grants View or Edit access to the workflow enrollments, and that access is limited by the employee access defined in the permission set.

Configure general access to permission sets. This permission set grants users the following level of access to permission sets:

App access controls which People Ops features users can access, independent of employee or workflow visibility. Here you can define which Admin features are available to users assigned to this permission set:

Click Finish to confirm and create your permission set.

To edit a permission set:

To archive a permission set:

Employees without an assigned permission set have minimal access to Ashby People Ops and can only see tasks assigned to them in their My Tasks  view.

If a user is assigned to multiple permission sets, the access provided is the combination of all granted access across those sets.

For example, if one permission set grants access to employee names for Engineering and Product, and another grants access to Personal Email for Engineering only, the user sees:

Yes. The Assessment Data field set controls access to background check results. Access to this can be granted in the Fields stage when creating a permission set.