Offer Approvals

22 min

Offer approvals let you build a structured review process that must be completed before an offer can be created and sent to a candidate, helping ensure the right stakeholders sign off at every stage. This article explains what offer approvals are, how to create and configure an approval process, how to use approvals once they're active, and answers to common questions. For a broader overview of all approval options, see Creating and Editing Approval ProcessesApprovals.

Permissions & access

Offer approvals are available on the Plus, Enterprise, and Legacy Plus plans:

Foundations	Legacy Plus	Plus	Enterprise
❌	✅	✅	✅

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 (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, users can approve or reject the request from their email. They do not need a specific access role or level of permissions to approve or reject an approval request via email or via Slack. They need at least Elevated Access to the role in question to view the candidate's profile prior to approving.

Create an approval process

An approval process consists of a sequence of one or more approval steps, each of which must be completed before an offer can be created and sent to a candidate. Each approval step consists of one or more stakeholders who must approve the terms of the offer before moving on to the next step in the process.

To create an approval process, navigate to Admin > Organization Setup > Approvals, then click + New in the top right corner of the page to begin configuring.

Next, fill in the title of the approval process and add a scope, if necessary.

Adding a Scope allows you to 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 is used. Click + Add Field to Match to add an additional filter to your scope.

Adding no scope means the process will apply across all offers, as a catch-all approval process.

Add the steps to complete your approval process. Here, you can define how many steps the approval process has and identify specific individuals or roles within the job consideration who must approve the offer.

Each step has configurable options:

Click the pencil icon next to the step name to give it a new name.

By default, a new step Always applies. Update the dropdown to When condition matches to define specific criteria that must be met to trigger the step.

If you have multiple individuals who may approve an offer at a particular stage, but not all need to approve, you can toggle the option to "Receive approval from all of the following stakeholders" to "Receive approval from any of the following stakeholders."

Select Add Approver to add one or more approvers to each step.

Select Add Step to continue adding steps.

Select Create when you are ready to create and save your approval process.

If you would like to require that an offer letter be generated prior to approval, navigate to Admin > Offers > Settings and toggle on the Require Offer Letter Before Approval? setting. Otherwise, the offer information will be sent for approval without a generated offer letter.

Managing approval processes

Offer approval processes can be managed by navigating to Admin > Approvals > Offers. On this page, you can take various actions to manage offer approval processes.

Toggle between viewing your active and archived processes using the filter on the right side.

Select the Configure Reapproval Fields button to configure which fields trigger a reapproval. For more information on these settings, see Offer reapproval fields.

Approval process application order

The order in which approval processes are displayed on the Approvals page determine in which order they are applied to offers. If multiple processes apply to a single offer, the one highest on this list will be used.

You can reorder approval processes in the list by clicking on the left side and dragging into place.

Editing and archiving approval processes

If you click into an existing approval process from the list, you have the option to Edit, Copy, or Archive the process.

Select Edit to make changes to the existing process.

Select Copy to use this process as the foundation for a new process.

Select Archive when the process is no longer in use.

Archived processes can be restored by using the filter on the right side to view archived approval processes, selecting a process, and clicking Restore.

Using approvals

Once active, approvals apply to new offers. To submit an offer for approval:

Create the offer on the candidate's profile.

Fill out the offer details, then click Submit to confirm.

If your organization has this setting configured, you may see a message stating that your organization requires an offer letter before it can be submitted for approval. Click Generate Offer Letter to generate the letter and continue to the approval process.

Review the approval process to confirm the correct approvers are listed, then click Submit Request.

The approvers receive a notification prompting them to approve the offer. Once they submit their response, the process moves on to the next approver.

Once all steps are completed, you can send an e-signature request and offer letter to the candidate.

FAQ

What types of notifications can the reviewer receive?

Email and Slack. They also see an approval task on their Home page when logging in.

How many processes can I have?

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.

Is it possible to set the 'Hiring Manager' on the hiring team of a job as an approver instead of selecting a specific person?

Yes! You can select a pool of users as approvers based on their role on the job. You can choose from the Job Consideration's Recruiters, Recruiting Coordinators, Sourcers, and/or Hiring Managers.

Does a user need specific permissions to provide approval?

Can I send a reminder to a stakeholder about approving an offer?

Yes, you can manually send a reminder. To do this:

Click View Offer on the candidate's profile to view the offer details and approval process steps.

Select Send Reminders next to the step where approval is still needed. You can see which stakeholders have yet to approve.

Determine which stakeholders should receive the reminder and add an optional message to accompany the original approval request information.

Click Send Reminder to X Approvers to send the reminder.

Can a user be cc'd in to receive approval notifications?

Currently, only those involved in the approval process receive notifications about the approval flow.

If an admin forces through an approval, does the approver receive a notification?

The approver does not receive a notification, but if they try to click Approve, they see that the approval already occurred and no action is 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. This option is currently only available for offers.

To set up an API-managed approval process:

Navigate to Admin > Organization Setup > Approvals and click + New.

Toggle on Managed by the API? in the Steps section.

Optionally, set up criteria in the Scope section if only offers meeting certain criteria should be managed via the API.

Once the approval chain has been received, the approval steps are added to the offer. When an offer is created and submitted, a Waiting for external process message appears in the offer overview, indicating 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.

Will incomplete or blank offer fields be included in the email sent to an approver?

The offer approval email only includes fields that have been filled in, including offer custom fields.

The Hired stage does not appear in the Change Stage dropdown if there are active offer approvals set up in Admin > Approvals > Offers. You need to complete the offer process by clicking Offer Accepted within the offer's settings; once done, the candidate's stage automatically changes to Hired.

Why am I seeing the message "Approval gap detected! Not all Offers are protected by approval processes"?

You're seeing this message because all of your existing offer approvals have scopes applied. Scopes are rules that determine which offers need approval based on specific conditions (for example, salary amount, department, or location). If an offer doesn't meet any of these conditions, it won't be sent through an approval process, creating a gap.

Ashby recommends creating a general (catch-all) approval process without scopes. This ensures that:

All offers are protected by at least one approval process.

Scoped approval processes still apply when their conditions are met.

Offers that don't meet any scope conditions fall back to the general approval process.