Setting up onboarding templates

Phases, tasks, and an important note on how templates apply to live candidates.

Onboarding templates define the phases and tasks a new hire works through. You manage them under Settings > Onboarding, on the Templates tab.

Creating a template

1. Select Add Template.
2. Fill in the Template Name and Description.
3. List your Phases, for example "Compliance, Pre-start, Day 1", separated by commas.
4. For each phase, add tasks in the order you want them completed.

Building a task

Each task has:

• A Task Title.
• A Type: Content (something to read), Form (something to fill in), Email Trigger (an email sent automatically), or Internal (a task for a staff member rather than the candidate).
• A Due Offset, set in days after the start date.
• An optional Dependency, another task that must be completed first.

What else you fill in depends on the type. Content tasks get a title and body, with an optional form attached. Form tasks let you pick which form to use, and whether it's emailed to the candidate or requires review once submitted. Email Trigger tasks let you choose who receives it, the candidate, their reporting manager, an assigned user, or a custom address, and which email template to send. Internal tasks are assigned to a specific user or department.

Once you're happy with a template, select Save. You can also Set As Default, Duplicate, or Delete a template from the same screen.

A template only applies to candidates going forward

This is the most important thing to understand about onboarding templates: once onboarding has started for a candidate, it's running from a frozen copy of the template taken at that moment, not a live link back to the template itself.

That means if you edit a template afterwards, renaming a task, adding a phase, changing a due date, none of it affects anyone already partway through onboarding. It only affects onboarding started after your edit. If you need an already-started candidate to follow the updated version, the only way to do that is to cancel their onboarding and start it again, which builds a fresh copy from the current template. There's no "reapply" or "refresh" option for onboarding templates, unlike some other templates in Recruit.

Adjusting onboarding for a specific job

A job's own Onboarding tab lets a recruiter assign a template to that job and adjust its phases or tasks just for that job, without changing the shared template used elsewhere.