An Approval step gates a workflow on human sign-off before downstream steps continue. Use it whenever a workflow needs one or more people to explicitly approve, or reject, before the process moves forward, such as approving a relocation request or reviewing a background check exception.

This article covers how to add and configure an Approval step. For guidance on setting the step's delay, filter, and dependencies, see Configure your Workflow StepsConfigure your Workflow Step.

To add an Approval step, you need view and edit access to the workflow. Your permission set grants this access to either all workflows or specific workflows.

Navigate to Ashby's People Ops module and complete the following steps:

Add one or more approvers to the step. Approvers can be specific employees or user accounts, or a workflow role.

If multiple approvers are configured, set the Approval Mode to control how many approvers need to weigh in before the step completes:

A rejection from any assignee completes the step immediately as rejected, regardless of approval mode. Ashby tracks each assignee's individual decision, so you have a clear audit trail of who approved or rejected the step and when.

Notify Immediately? controls whether the approver gets a standalone notification the moment the step is assigned, or whether it's added silently to their task list.

Enable Notify Immediately? for assignees who receive relatively few tasks and aren't otherwise monitoring their task list, such as hiring managers or IT team members. Consider leaving it disabled for assignees like People Ops Coordinators, who may receive many tasks across every employee and don't need an individual notification for each one.

If several tasks land on the same assignee at once, consider sending one email or Slack message directing them to their task list  instead of notifying them for every individual task.

Set a due date relative to a reference point, such as the new hire's start date. The due date is primarily for visibility, helping you identify overdue tasks in reporting and on the task list.

The Title becomes the subject line if the task is delivered by email, or the task name shown on the assignee's task list. Use Instructions to describe exactly what the assignee needs to approve, and include tokens to pull in relevant details, such as the new hire's name, team, or shipping address collected earlier in the workflow.

The email editor supports the following features:

Substitution Tokens allow you to pull information about the workflow enrollee into the title and instructions. To add substitution tokens, click the T icon in the toolbar either by the title line or in the toolbar under the body of the instructions. From here, you can search for the specific token you need.

An Approval step behaves similarly to a Task step in that an assignee marks it complete, except the completion outcome is either Approved or Rejected rather than a simple checkbox. You can use that outcome as a dependency condition on a later step, for example, triggering a follow-up notification only if the request is approved, the same way you would build a condition against an integration or assessment result.

Yes. Add the Approval step as a dependency on a later step, and build a condition on the approval outcome, similar to how you'd build a condition on an assessment result.