Form-triggered workflows let you run people processes beyond onboarding inside Ashby's People Workflows. Build a form and workflow for any people process, such as offboarding, onboarding contractors who weren't hired through Ashby Recruiting, leave requests, or location change requests. When someone submits the form, either an employee requesting it themselves or an admin enrolling them, Ashby starts the workflow automatically.

Every workflow belongs to a category, which lets you organize workflows by process type. As such, configuring categories first helps you to keep workflows in the right place from the start. Ashby includes a built-in Onboarding category that's reserved for Onboarding Workflows. You can also create custom categories for any Employee Workflow, such as Offboarding, Transfers, or Compliance Training.

To manage categories, navigate to Workflows, then select Manage Categories.

The following popover will list your existing categories with the option to amend them. To edit an existing category, click the pencil icon. To delete a category, click the trash can icon.

To add a new category, click + Add Category. Add a title and a description for your new category, then click Submit.

From the Workflows page, select + New Workflow, then complete the following steps:

To edit a workflow:

This will take you to the workflow builder where you can:

The Requests tab lets employees submit forms to start processes such as parental leave requests and location change requests. If a workflow is self-serve, employees who match its eligibility criteria can submit a request from the Requests tab themselves.

After an employee selects, fills out, and submits a request, Ashby starts the associated workflow. The request appears under My Requests, where the employee can track its status.

Users with the Enroll employees in workflows permission can enroll employees they have access to directly into a workflow. This is useful for admin-driven processes, such as offboarding, where the employee doesn't start the workflow themselves.

The Workflows homepage includes tabs for viewing workflows in different statuses:

Enrollment happens when the trigger form is submitted, either by an eligible employee from the Requests tab or by a user with the Enroll employees in workflows permission enrolling someone from their employee profile. This date is always available as a reference point.

The anchor date is a second reference point you configure on the workflow. It lets you schedule steps around a date that matters to the process itself, such as the first day of a leave, an offboarding date, or a transfer date.

Without an anchor date configured, the Before anchor date and After anchor date sections have nothing to schedule against, so all your steps belong in After the employee is enrolled.

If the initial form submission needs to be viewed edited for any reason, this can be handled by a user with edit access to the workflow.

Users with permission to edit all workflow templates.

Users with the Enroll employees in workflows permission.

Yes. A user with this permission can choose from any active workflow the employee is eligible for, even if they don't have view or edit access to that workflow.

Users with permission to edit any workflow template can create, delete, and manage workflow categories.

No. The workflow type (Onboarding or Employee) and trigger type (form, form with approval, or no form) are set during creation and can't be changed afterward.

Yes. From the Workflow Builder, select the category name, choose a different category, and click Save.

Not yet, but we plan to support referencing date fields collected in the trigger form, such as first day of leave or date of offboarding.