Workflows help you to build, run, and track every step of the employee lifecycle. These guides cover how to configure workflows, set up steps such as tasks, communications, surveys, and integrations, coordinate stakeholders, and monitor progress across your organization.

A workflow is what brings your organization's process into Ashby's People Ops module. Create workflow templates to determine your steps, the step timing and assignees, and the logic that decides which steps apply. When editing templates, a version is created and changes only take effect when you publish. On publishing, you choose whether and how the changes affect employees already enrolled.

A workflow instance is one employee's enrolled run of that definition. Instances have a status of Active, Completed, or Cancelled.

Ashby supports multiple workflows, so you can maintain separate workflows for different populations rather than forcing everything through one path.

Each step in a workflow is one of the following types:

Steps support multiple assignees, so shared responsibility doesn't create a single point of failure. Assign a step to specific users, to a built-in workflow role, or to a custom group role you create.

Built-in workflow roles include Hiring Manager, Onboarding Buddy, Recruiting Coordinator, Recruiter, and HR Business Partner (HRBP).

Ashby generates name and email tokens for every workflow role, which lets you send an email from one role that references another, such as an introduction from the recruiter naming the new hire's HRBP.

Branching logic within a single workflow determines which steps apply to a particular new hire, based on their start date, job consideration attributes, or employee attributes such as job title, role, or location.

Each step carries a status of Future Step, Blocked, Pending, Completed, Skipped, Approved, or Rejected.

When a step fails, it moves to Waiting for Manual Retry, and anyone with access to the step can retry it.

Ashby records who completed each step and when. Steps Ashby completes automatically show Ashby Bot as the completer.

People Workflows supports two workflow types: onboarding workflows and form-triggered workflows.

New hire onboarding workflows run when someone is hired through Ashby Recruiting. Build a workflow to handle onboarding steps like sending welcome emails, assigning tasks, and provisioning equipment.

Form-triggered workflows let you run processes beyond onboarding inside Ashby's People Workflows. Build a form and workflow for any people process, such as off-boarding, onboarding contractors who weren't hired through Ashby Recruiting, leave requests, or location change requests.