A guide for hiring managers

How to sign in to Recruit and review candidates for your vacancies as a hiring manager or interviewer.

This guide is for people who have been invited to Recruit to look at candidates, not to run the hiring process. It follows the order you will meet things: signing in, finding your job, reviewing candidates, scoring, interview feedback, notes and offers. Setting up jobs, publishing, pipelines and organisation settings belong to your recruiter, HR team and Admin, and are not covered here.

What your access looks like

You see a job only if you are on its team, if you created it, or if it is waiting for your approval. Your role is set per job on the job's Team tab, and you hold one role on each job: Hiring Manager, Interviewer or Recruiter. You can be Hiring Manager on one job and Interviewer on another. If you are not on a job, you cannot see it or its candidates.

The two roles you are most likely to hold differ like this.

The person who creates a job is its hiring lead, whatever their role. A hiring lead can see the job and the pay on it, and can manage its team until it goes live, but that does not add any candidate permissions. Offers are created and sent by Admin and HR only. The full list of roles is in "Understanding roles and permissions".

Signing in

You cannot create your own account. An Admin or HR user invites you, and the invitation email contains a link to set your password. The link expires after 48 hours, so if it has stopped working, ask them to resend it. After that, go to your organisation's Recruit sign-in page, enter your work email, select Continue and then enter your password. If your organisation uses single sign-on, the page shows a Continue with button for your provider instead. If two-factor authentication is on for your account you will also be asked for a verification code. See "Logging in to Recruit" and "Setting up two-factor authentication" for the details.

The dashboard and menu

You land on the Dashboard. Four cards across the top show Open Jobs, Active Candidates, Interviews This Week and Hired This Month. Each card is a link to the matching list. Below them are three panels: My Tasks (tick the box to complete a task, or select its title to open the candidate), Recent Activity for the jobs you can see, and Pipeline Overview, which shows how many candidates sit at each stage.

The left-hand menu has Dashboard, Jobs, Candidates, Referrals, Interviews and Settings. Reports appears if you are a Hiring Manager on at least one job, and Onboarding appears if your organisation uses it. Your Settings are limited to My Profile, Notifications and Cookie Preferences.

Finding your job

Select Jobs. Each row shows the job title with a status badge, then the department and location. The Candidates column reads like "4 new / 27 total", where new means active candidates still sitting at the first stage of the pipeline. You can also see the Created date and the Expiry date, and select either heading to sort. Use the search box (title, location or department) and the Location, Department, Status and Created by filters to narrow the list. Select a row to open the job.

Opening a job

A job that is still a Draft, Pending Approval or Pending Setup shows only the Details tab. Once it is set up you also see Pipeline (with the number of applications), Shortlisting, Events, Team and Referrals. The job opens on Pipeline. If Hiring Manager is your only role on the job, you do not see the Job Boards, Onboarding or Settings tabs. Interview events are set up by Admin and HR, so you do not need the Events tab to give feedback. Salary on the Details tab is shown only to Admin, HR and the job's hiring lead.

Reviewing candidates in the pipeline

The Pipeline tab lists candidates by stage. Switch between List and Kanban with the buttons at the top. Type in Search candidates... to find someone, and use Filters adds Source, Tag, From and To application dates, Sub-status and, in the list view, Stage. Clear Filters resets them. Stages that are set to be hidden from your role do not appear.

Select a candidate to open the review panel. It shows their documents on one side and their details on the other, with Previous candidate and Next candidate arrows so you can work through the whole stage. Choose View full profile for everything held on the candidate.

Candidate profiles and CVs

A profile opens on the Overview tab, which holds contact details, an application summary, the CV, cover letter, work history, education and the answers the candidate gave on the application form. The other tabs you will use are Offers, Timeline (the candidate's activity history) and Notes & Feedback.

To read the CV, open the Documents section and select View CV. The CV opens on the page and Hide CV closes it. Download saves the file. If the file is a type that cannot be previewed, download it instead. Your Admin can switch off CV access for Members across the organisation. When that is on, the CV section shows "No document uploaded." and you cannot preview or download CVs anywhere.

When candidate details are hidden

Two job settings, chosen by your recruiter or HR team, change what you see.

• Confidential shortlisting hides who the candidate is. Their name shows as "Candidate" followed by their application reference. Email, phone, location, postcode, LinkedIn, job title, company and tags are removed, the cover letter is not shown, and the CV is replaced by an anonymised copy. If that copy is still being prepared you see "CV is processing. Please check back later." You cannot email the candidate while their details are hidden. Identities are revealed when the candidate reaches the reveal stage, or by an Admin or HR user. The reveal stage is the Auto-Reveal Stage on the job. An Admin or HR user who is also a Hiring Manager or Interviewer on that job is treated like you and cannot reveal them.
• Blind scoring hides who the reviewers are. On a blind stage you see only your own evaluation. On interview feedback, reviewer names, notes and free-text answers are withheld and reviewers appear as Reviewer 1, Reviewer 2 and so on. Admin and HR still see everything.

A shortlisting stage can also limit non-recruiters to their own evaluation without hiding names. If a stage lists assigned reviewers and you are not one of them, the review panel shows "You are not assigned as a reviewer for this stage" and the fields are read-only.

Scoring in Shortlisting

1. Open the job and select the Shortlisting tab. If more than one stage has shortlisting switched on, choose the stage under Shortlisting stage. The panel shows the checklist in use, whether the stage uses Scoring or Ranking, and how many reviewers are required.
2. Candidates at the stage are listed with their Assessment and Status. Filter by All, Reviewed by me or Not reviewed by me, each with a count. Comparison view lays candidates side by side and List view switches back.
3. Select Review on a candidate. The CV, cover letter and application responses show on the left and the evaluation form on the right.
4. For a Scoring stage, enter a number for each criterion, from 0 up to that criterion's maximum. For a Ranking stage, pick a level from the Rank list. Add Notes if you want to.
5. Select Submit & Next to move on to the next candidate (shown while more candidates remain), or Submit & Close. You see "Evaluation submitted successfully". Open the candidate again later to change your evaluation and resubmit.

Under the form, Other Reviewers shows the group's totals and each reviewer's evaluation, subject to the visibility rules above. Export downloads the stage results as CSV or Excel, and hidden identities stay hidden in the file.

Interview feedback

You can give feedback only on interviews you are assigned to, or where you are in the stage's interviewer pool or an attendee of the event. Otherwise you see "You are not assigned to interview this candidate".

1. Select Interviews in the menu. The Interview Calendar shows booked interviews by week, and filters narrow the page by job, interviewer and location.
2. Under Feedback Required, select Submit Feedback next to the candidate.
3. Complete the Scorecard. Ratings use stars, some questions are Yes or No switches, and others are text boxes. Required questions carry a red asterisk.
4. Choose an Overall Recommendation: Strong No, No, Maybe, Yes or Strong Yes. This is required.
5. Add any Additional Notes and select Submit Feedback.

If you leave out the recommendation you see "Please select an overall recommendation". If a required question is blank you see "Please answer all required questions before submitting". After you submit, the page shows "Feedback Submitted!" and takes you to the candidate's Notes & Feedback tab. A submitted scorecard is read-only. If the stage has no feedback form, the page says "No feedback form for this stage" and there is nothing to complete.

To read feedback later, find the interview under Completed Interviews and select View Feedback. The same page shows a Feedback Summary with average scores and recommendations, and Team Feedback with each reviewer's response. If the job uses blind scoring, names and free text are hidden as described above. See "Submitting interview feedback" for more on the form.

Notes

Open a candidate, go to Notes & Feedback and use the Notes box. If the candidate has applied to several jobs, pick the job first, or choose All Jobs to read notes across them (you cannot write in that view). Type your note and select Add Note. Type @ to mention a colleague on the job's team, and they get an email if their notification preferences allow it.

Hiring Managers can choose Team only or Global visibility. Interviewers post team-only notes. Select the pin icon on a note to pin it to the top. If you are not on the job's team you see "Only admins or members assigned to this job can add candidate notes." See "Adding notes to a candidate".

Moving, rejecting and withdrawing

As a Hiring Manager you can reject, withdraw or reactivate applications on your jobs. Interviewers cannot. Moving a candidate to another stage needs your Admin to have allowed hiring managers and interviewers to move candidates. Without it you see "Only admins, HR and this job's recruiter can move candidates between stages." and should ask your recruiter.

• Reject: open the candidate in the review panel and select Reject. Pick a Rejection Reason. Add Additional Details if you wish. If you choose Other, the details are required. Whether the candidate is emailed, and when, follows the rejection email settings on the job.
• Withdraw: select Withdraw, add an optional reason and choose a Withdrawal email, or No email.
• Reactivate: a rejected candidate shows Reactivate, which puts the application back to active. No email is sent.

A move can be refused. "Shortlisting review is incomplete" or "Shortlisting Threshold Not Met" means reviewers have not finished or the candidate has not reached the pass mark for the current stage. A warning about interview feedback below the threshold, or too few respondents, does not block the move.

Viewing offers

Open the candidate and select the Offers tab. Offer History lists each offer with its salary, status (Draft, Sent, Accepted, Declined, Expired, Superseded or Withdrawn), start date, sent and response dates, and any decline reason. Creating, sending and withdrawing offers, and downloading the signed contract, is done by Admin and HR. Tell your recruiter when you are ready to make an offer.

If you cannot see or do something

Check that you are on the job's Team tab and which role you hold there. Then check whether the job uses confidential shortlisting or blind scoring, which hide things on purpose. If neither explains it, ask your recruiter, an HR user or an Admin to add you to the team or to change the organisation setting.