Sign Off Workflows are designed to add an approval process to the creation of jobs, offers to candidates, or the creation of new requisitions. When a sign-off workflow is applied, one or more signatories need to approve the details before a job vacancy is posted, an offer of employment is made to a candidate, or a requisition can be turned into a job. You may, for example, want your CEO to approve any new headcount for the business, or perhaps you want a department manager to approve the details of an offer, and then have the the CFO make the final approval. Pinpoint's sign off system allows for these and many other possible combinations to allow the correct approval process to take place.

Please note: In order to set up Sign Off workflows, you'll need to have the Pinpoint permission of 'Company Manager'. Learn more about assigning roles in Pinpoint, click here.

This guide is split into 2 parts.

Pinpoint's Sign Off Workflow system has a few key concepts you'll need to be familiar with.

Signatories

These are Pinpoint users who can give their approval on the details of an offer or a job requisition.

Stages

A sign-off workflow can have multiple stages to it. For example, the first Stage in your workflow might be getting approval from the Head of Department to make the hire, followed by someone from the Finance department agreeing to the salary details. Stages flow in order, so in this scenario, the Finance team won't be able to sign-off until the Head of Department has first given their approval.

Stages can have any number of signatories assigned to them, so the Finance team Stage may consist of a number of people from Finance who are able to give approval to the job or offer details.

Of these users, you can set a Minimum number of signatories, so if any of these people can give departmental approval, you can require only 1 of them give their approval before the system considers the stage complete, and moves on to the next stage. This is done by adjusting the Minimum Signatories number.

Triggers:

In order for a sign-off workflow to be initiated when a new role or a new offer is created, you need to specify which details trigger the workflow, and there are many possibilities here.

You may want any vacancies with a salary above £50,000 to go to the CFO for approval on.

You may want vacancies in a particular department to be signed off by the head of that department. In this case, you could create workflows for each different department, assign the head of each department as a signatory to those workflows, and use the new Job's department to trigger the correct workflow.

You may want a detail from one of your Custom Fields to be the trigger; in this case, a new headcount hire as opposed to a replacement for someone who's leaving.

First, head to the Templates page, located under the Settings heading in the main left hand navigation bar in Pinpoint. Then click the Sign Off Workflows tab:

Click Create New, and give the workflow a name:
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To add a new stage to the workflow just drag and drop the New Stage block as shown here. You can repeat this process to add as many stages as you need.

For each stage, you'll need to fill in the details of the users who will act as signatories, and the minimum number of signatories who'll need to sign before the stages is considered 'signed off' and the system moves onto the next stage, or the job/offer is made live if this is the last stage in the workflow.

Once the workflow order has been established and the signatories set, you'll need to assign the triggers that initiate the correct workflow. Click on the Workflow Triggers tab (A) at the top of the page, and from there, you can add new Trigger Conditions. In this example, the trigger for the workflow will be if a new job or offer is created in the Customer Success Department.

With the correct triggers in place, you then need to decide if this workflow needs to apply to New Jobs, New Offers, or both, by toggling these options at the bottom of the Workflow Triggers page.

Once this is done, click the Finish Editing button at the bottom, and the workflow will now be in place.

Signatories will be sent an email that lists the job they need to sign off on, and a link to view the details within Pinpoint.

Signatories can also enable dashboard widgets that will show them all their outstanding approvals in their Pinpoint dashboard, which they can set up by following this guide.

When they click the 'Review Job' button in the email, they'll be taken to a page with all of the job details on it.

From there they can either approve the job or decline it and add some commentary, which will be fed back to the team that created the role to action.