You can create an approval process when multiple stakeholders need to review and sign off on a workflow. Ashby currently supports configuring approvals for openings, jobs, and offers.

This guide covers configuring approval processes for your team to use. For more on submitting approvals, see Submitting Approval Requests. For more on approval settings and notifications, see Configuring Approval Settings and Notifications.

Approvals can be set up on the Legacy Plus, Plus, and Enterprise plans:

Navigate to Approvals in Admin to build an approval process. Before you click + New, make sure you have selected the correct object type tab. Options include:

To configure a new process, first set your scope, then add steps and approvers to each step.

You set criteria by clicking + Add Field to Match, choosing your fields, and then determining your criteria using field values. The approval's scope contains the criteria Ashby must match to trigger an approval flow.

As an example, you could set your scope to only run this approval process for jobs within the Recruiting department. The approval process then only runs for roles that have the Recruiting team assigned to them.

Steps are the rounds of review within an approval. Click + Add Step to add additional stages to your review process.

You can add names to your steps to more easily identify them. Click the pencil icon to the right of the step name to amend it.

Conditional steps allow you to set scopes within approval steps. This means you can create additional stages for offers, jobs, and openings that may need further review without the need to configure a whole new approval flow for those edge cases.

To set a step to only run if specific conditions are met by the offer, job, or opening, click the Always dropdown within your step and set it to When condition matches.

To set your step conditions, click + Add Field to Match to select a field and then determine the values that are part of your criteria.

In the example below, this step of a job approval process only runs if the job's location is set to EMEA. If the job's location is not EMEA, Ashby skips that step.

Approvers are the specific stakeholders completing the review. Click + Add Approver within a step to add a stakeholder to a step. 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 finish configuring your approval, click Create. It becomes active immediately.

Ashby evaluates activated processes in the order they are listed, so review your approval list as part of your setup. If multiple processes have a scope that applies, Ashby uses the one highest on your list. In the example pictured below, if an offer linked to a job in the Product Support department was also linked to a job with the location set as New York City, the Product Support Offer Approval flow is used because it is higher on the list.

You can drag and drop each process to re-prioritize as needed. Hover over the six dots to the left of the approval flow's title, then click and drag the flows to re-order them.

As an example, if you have a general catch-all approval flow, move it to the bottom of your Approvals list so Ashby considers all other flows first.

In this example, the scope field is set to the job's department. All job considerations that an offer is generated for in the engineering department follow this example process.

In this example, the scope field is set to rely on a specific recruiter. All job considerations that an offer is generated for where Arthur is set as the recruiter on the hiring team follow this example process.

To edit an approval:

You can create unique approval processes that take effect under certain conditions. As only one approval process applies to each offer, the order of processes in the list determines the priority with which these processes take effect. You can optionally configure a default fallback process that runs when no other process applies.

Yes. You can 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.

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, navigate to Admin > Organization Setup > Approvals and click + New.

Toggle on the Managed by the API? option in the Steps section. Optionally, set up criteria in the scope section if only offers that meet certain criteria should be managed via the API.

When a recruiter creates and submits an offer, a Waiting for external process message appears in the offer overview. This means that Ashby is waiting for an approval chain to be submitted via an API call.

The Hired stage does not appear in the Change Stage dropdown if there are active Offer Approvals set up in the Admin > Approvals > Offers section. To complete the offer process, click Offer Accepted within the offer's settings. The candidate's stage automatically changes to Hired.

Navigate to Admin > Organization Setup > Approvals and click the approval process. From here, you can edit, copy, or archive the approval process.

You can restore archived approval processes by changing the Active dropdown to Archived when viewing your approvals.

Click the process you want to restore, then click Restore.

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, the approval process only applies to confidential jobs that meet the criteria set in the approval scope. If you leave the checkbox unchecked, the approval process does not apply to confidential jobs, even if they meet the other scope criteria.