Job statuses explained
The full lifecycle from Draft to Archived, and how to reverse each step.
The full lifecycle from Draft to Archived, and how to reverse each step.
Every job in Recruit sits in exactly one status at a time. Knowing what each one means helps you understand what a job still needs before it can go live, and what your options are once it does.
The status lifecycle
- Draft: being built, not yet submitted for approval.
- Pending Approval: submitted, waiting on one or more approvers. (Skipped entirely if your organisation doesn't require approvals for new jobs.)
- Pending Setup: approved, but still needs its application form, team, and pipeline configured before it can be published.
- Approved: fully approved and ready to publish (used when your organisation's setup flow separates approval from publishing).
- Published or Scheduled: live, or scheduled to go live on a future date.
- Paused: temporarily taken offline without closing it completely.
- Closed: no longer accepting applications, but not yet archived.
- Archived: closed and soft-deleted. Archived jobs still exist but are out of your active view.
Reversing a status
Several of these steps can be undone:
- Reopen brings a Closed job back to Published.
- Unpause brings a Paused job back to Published.
- Unarchive brings an Archived job back to Closed (administrators only).
- Withdraw pulls a job in Pending Approval back to Draft. Either the person who submitted it or an administrator can do this.
- A rejected approval also sends the job back to Draft, so you can make changes and resubmit.
Permanently removing a job
Archiving is a soft delete, the job's data is kept, just hidden from your active lists. If you need to remove a job and its data entirely, administrators can use Delete Advert from a Closed job. This is permanent, and you'll be asked to type a confirmation before it goes through.