Recruit Release 14/08/2026

 

Candidate self-service

What it is

Until now a candidate who changed their mind, or who wanted their details removed, had to email someone on your team and wait for that to be picked up and actioned by hand.

Candidates can now do both themselves. Every application acknowledgement and candidate email carries a link to a manage your application page. From that page the candidate can withdraw the application, or ask for their personal data to be deleted. Neither action happens silently, and neither bypasses your team.

Withdrawing an application

A candidate who withdraws is moved out of your active pipeline straight away, and the hiring team on that job is notified so nobody keeps working a candidate who has already stepped away. The application record is kept, so your reporting and audit history stay intact.

Requesting deletion

A deletion request does not delete anything on its own. It raises a request that is sent to your Administrators and HR users for a decision, and the candidate is told their request has been received.

The request is scoped per application rather than to the whole candidate record. That matters where someone has applied for several of your roles: asking to be removed from one job does not wipe their other live applications. Where a request would affect a candidate who is still active elsewhere, it is routed for approval rather than being actioned automatically.

What you need to do

Nothing. The link is added to candidate emails automatically and the page is available now. Deletion requests will start appearing for your Administrators and HR users as candidates use them.

Send email from your own domain

Recruit can now send email from your own domain rather than from a Hireroad address, so candidates see mail from a sender they recognise and your messages are less likely to be filtered.

Set this up in Settings, then Email Domains. Enter the domain you want to send from and Recruit gives you the DNS records to add. Once your IT team has published those records, Recruit checks them and marks the domain verified.

A few things worth knowing:

• Verification is checked automatically on a schedule as well as on demand, so a domain that was not ready when you first added it is picked up without you having to come back and press anything.
• Until a domain is verified, mail continues to go out on the existing sender address. Nothing breaks while you are waiting on DNS.
• Once verified, the domain is used for the email Recruit sends on your behalf.
• You can add more than one domain, which is useful where you recruit under more than one brand.

Adding the DNS records is a job for whoever manages your domain. Speak to your account manager if you would like the setup guide sent over.

Job alerts

People who visit your careers page when nothing suitable is open can now subscribe to be told when something is.

A subscriber gives their name and email address and picks what they are interested in: category, job type, working pattern and location. They then get an email asking them to confirm the subscription, so nobody is signed up without agreeing to it. When a job is published that matches what they chose, they get an email with links to the matching roles and to your main vacancies page.

Every alert email carries links to update preferences and to unsubscribe. Subscribers are also asked periodically whether they want to stay on the list, so the list does not quietly go stale.

Your subscribers are visible in Recruit, so you can answer questions about who is signed up without asking us to run a query for you.

Job alerts are off by default and are turned on per organisation in settings. Speak to your account manager if you want them enabled.

Register your interest

The other half of the same problem. Someone lands on your careers page, likes the look of you, and there is nothing open they can apply for.

When this is switched on, your careers page shows two tabs: Open Roles and Register Your Interest. The second tab shows an application form of your choosing, and a submission creates a candidate record placed straight into your talent pool. No job and no application is created, so it does not distort your reporting on live roles.

Setting it up is in Settings, then Careers. You choose the application form template to use and the wording of the page heading. If you do not pick a template, the form falls back to first name, last name, email, phone and CV.

A consent tick box is always shown, whatever template you choose, and it links to your privacy policy. The form cannot be submitted until consent is given. Someone who registers gets a confirmation email, and the wording of that email is yours to set.

This is off by default for every organisation.

What's new

Sign in with a code sent to your email

Two factor authentication previously required an authenticator app. That blocked anyone whose organisation does not allow work apps on personal phones, and where your policy requires two factor authentication it blocked them from signing in at all.

You can now enrol using a code sent to your email address instead. Set it up in your own settings, verify the code, and you are done. The code is time limited and can be used once.

You can enrol in both methods and remove one while keeping the other. At sign in, anyone with more than one method enrolled picks which to use. Recovery codes work the same as before, and anyone already using an authenticator app carries on as they are with nothing to redo.

Filter and export the interviews page

The interviews page was limited to three views: booked interviews in the week calendar, interviews awaiting feedback, and completed interviews. Answering a question like "what has Priya got on next week" meant scrolling.

Administrators and HR users can now filter by interviewer, location, date range and job. Filters are held in the page address, so a filtered view can be shared with a colleague or reloaded without setting it up again, and there is a clear action that resets everything.

There is also an Export action that downloads whatever the filters are currently showing, with candidate, job, stage, date, time, interviewer and location. That is the file to send to reception on a Monday morning, or to an interviewer who wants their week in one place.

Sort the candidates list

The candidates list was always ordered by most recently added, with no way to change it. Click a column heading to sort by it, click again to reverse, and the heading shows which sort is active.

On the main list you can sort by candidate and by first application date. On the Talent Pool tab you can sort by candidate, source and added to pool. Tags are not sortable.

The sort survives paging and reloading, and it works alongside the search, source, job and stage filters. Candidates who have never applied appear at the end when sorting by first application date rather than filling the first page.

Formatted text on application forms

Application forms could hold images and videos but had no way to show formatted text, so policies, disclaimers and instructions had to be squeezed in elsewhere or left out.

Content blocks now include a text option with a proper editor: bold, italic, underline, bulleted and numbered lists, alignment, and links with your own wording rather than a bare address. Pasting from Word keeps the formatting that is supported and drops the rest cleanly.

Text blocks are for display only. They do not collect an answer and do not appear in submissions or exports.

Organisation-wide notification defaults

Administrators can now set the notification preferences for everyone in the organisation, rather than every user picking their own from scratch. There is a new dialog under notification settings where you choose which notifications are on by default.

There is also a switch controlling whether individuals may then change those choices. Leave it on and personal preferences work as they always have, with your defaults as the starting point. Turn it off and the organisation's choices apply to everyone, and personal notification settings are suspended.

Changing a single option now saves only that option, so two people editing their preferences at the same time no longer overwrite each other.

Send a second offer without replacing the first

Sending a new offer to a candidate who already has a live offer for the same job used to replace the existing one automatically and without asking. Now you are asked what you meant to do.

You get two choices. Send additional offer leaves the existing offer live, so a candidate can hold two offers at once, which is useful when you want to present alternative terms side by side. Supersede existing offer behaves as before and replaces it.

When an offer is superseded, its link now stops working for the candidate and shows a message saying it is no longer live, rather than continuing to display the old offer as though it were current.

Turn Onboarding off

Onboarding can now be switched off for organisations that do not use it. With it off, the Onboarding tab, the onboarding options in the offer dialog, the HRIS tab, and the onboarding entries in candidate communications and source filters are all hidden, so your team is not looking at a part of the product they will never use.

Existing organisations are unaffected unless the switch is turned off. Speak to your account manager if you would like it disabled.

Attach files to internal task forms

Internal task forms now accept file uploads, so a task that needs a document attaching to it can be completed in one place rather than the file being emailed separately.

Scoring settings on interview feedback forms

Interview feedback forms now carry the same scoring settings that shortlisting checklists already had: a pass threshold and a minimum number of respondents, set per stage.

Where a stage requires interview feedback, moving a candidate on before the threshold or the minimum number of respondents has been met shows a warning first. You can still proceed, but you are told what is missing rather than discovering it later.

Smaller additions

• Approval chains cannot be reshaped at submission -- Selecting an approval workflow now populates its configured approval groups in their configured order, and the requester cannot add, remove or reorder them. Attempts to submit an altered chain are rejected.
• Reports open on a twelve month range -- Reports now default to the last twelve months rather than a shorter window, so the first thing you see is a useful picture.

Improvements

Shortlisting scores now show what they are out of

The assessment column on the shortlisting list view showed a bare average, so a 3.50 could have been out of five or out of ten. It now shows the total against its maximum, matching the comparison grid and the review form.

Scoring criteria can also be marked Essential or Desirable in the shortlisting checklist editor. The designation shows as a tag next to each criterion on the shortlisting view and is included in the CSV and XLSX exports, so a reviewer can tell a must-have from a nice-to-have.

Your template controls where the interview join link goes

Where an interview creates an online meeting, the join link used to be bolted onto the end of the candidate email as a fixed paragraph you could not move or style. Worse, the merge field only picked up a manually entered link, so anyone who had written it into their own template got a blank space and a duplicated looking paragraph underneath.

The merge field now resolves whichever link applies, including the one the calendar integration generates. A link you enter by hand still takes precedence, so you can override. Where your template contains the merge field, the appended paragraph is not added and placement is entirely yours. Where it does not, the link is still appended as before, so nobody loses a link on release.

The manual meeting link field is also available across event types and when creating an event, not only when editing. Email previews show the same link the send will use, scheduled invites include it, and reminder emails resolve it too.

Salary Type drives how salary appears on Reed and TotalJobs

The Salary Type set on a job now determines the Display Salary As value sent to Reed and TotalJobs, so the salary presented on those boards matches how you described it in Recruit rather than needing to be set twice.

Reed rejects bad postings before they are sent

Two Reed validation rules, on job title and on minimum description length, were previously treated as warnings and a posting could go out and fail at Reed's end. They are now treated as errors, so the problem is raised while you can still fix it.

Application form setup happens after approval

Configuring a job's application form is now confined to the post-approval setup step. Previously the form could be edited while the job was still going through approval, which meant approvers could sign off one version and candidates receive another. Restarting an approval no longer locks the form either.

This also closes a gap where a hiring manager who saved a job as a draft could reopen it and change the application form before sending it for approval. Application form configuration is now an Administrator and HR responsibility, at the setup stage, on every path into the job.

Video interview options only appear when the integration is on

The Hireflix video interview stage was offered when building or editing a pipeline whether or not the integration was set up, leaving an empty position selector that looked broken. It is now hidden unless the integration is enabled, and appears without any further configuration once it is.

Bug fixes

• Word CVs would not open on the candidate -- CVs uploaded as Word documents now render inline on the candidate profile and in the shortlisting review screen alongside PDFs. Older Word formats, RTF and OpenDocument files are converted for viewing rather than landing on an unsupported format message, and the original file is kept unchanged and still downloadable. Where a conversion fails you get a clear message and a download link, not a blank panel.
• Signature questions blocked an application -- Candidates can now complete an application form containing a signature question. The answer was being rejected for being too large and the submission failed.
• Interview reminder texts were not being sent -- The 24 hour and 1 hour reminder texts for interviews booked through the scheduling page were failing on every run and never reaching candidates. Bookings were unaffected, which is why this went unnoticed.
• Text message opt-outs were not honoured -- Someone who replied STOP was correctly shown as opted out, but further messages were still being sent to them rather than suppressed.
• Notification preferences could not be saved -- Every switch on the notifications settings page failed to save and showed an error. All of them were affected, with no way around it.
• Notification switches reverted for administrators -- Where an organisation manages notification preferences centrally, an administrator could still change their own switches. The change reported success, then quietly reverted and the emails kept coming. Administrators keep access to the organisation defaults dialog, but their own switches are now shown as read-only with an explanation.
• Job feeds served every organisation's jobs -- The feed link shown in integration settings for Indeed and LinkedIn served a combined feed containing all organisations' jobs rather than only your own. Each feed now contains only your jobs.
• The video interview tab looked empty while loading -- The tab now shows a loading state, and an error if something goes wrong, rather than showing an empty result that made it look as though there were no video interviews.
• Video interview templates could not be chosen on a pipeline stage -- A video interview template can now be selected against a pipeline stage in settings, and moving a candidate to a pool that has no feedback form no longer carries a stale one across.
• The candidates list showed the wrong date -- The column is now labelled First application date and shows the candidate's earliest application rather than the date their record was created. The candidate screen continues to show the most recent application date, so where the two differ it is now clear why.
• The Applied stage showed a shortlisting status it should not have -- Candidates sitting in the first stage were showing an Unstarted shortlisting badge before shortlisting had begun, which read as an outstanding action that did not exist. Shortlisting statuses now appear only on the stages where shortlisting actually runs.

Behind the scenes

When an application submitted through your careers page fails validation, the failure now records which field was rejected. Previously it recorded only that something had failed, so a report of "candidates cannot apply" had to be reproduced by hand before anyone could act on it. No candidate details are written into those records.

Automated regression coverage was also extended around draft job editing and the approval workflow screens.