Requesting offer approval

How to request offer approval

To generate an offer for a candidate, their opportunity must have reached the offer stage in your pipeline. Once in the offer stage, a Create Offer button will appear at the top of their opportunity profile. Clicking this button will initiate the offer generation process.

Once you have filled in the required details on the offer form, click Next Step to proceed to the approvals step.

If the offer is subject to approval, you will see a summary of the approvers in the approval chain and will be prompted to submit an approval request. If the approval chain contains a custom approver, you must select an approver to which to submit the request. To learn how custom approvers are added to approval chains, check out our help article on building offer approval workflows.

Before submitting the request note that you have the ability to attach a message and/or file to your request. You can also include interview feedback and relevant files attached to the candidate profile so approvers have everything they need to make an informed decision.

You will be unable to proceed past this step in the offer generation process until the offer has been approved by each approver in the chain. If an offer requires approval from multiple approvers, you can monitor how far down the approval chain the offer has advanced in the offer generation modal. If you wish to make changes to the offer if approval has been denied, while it is pending, or has received approval, click the Modify Offer button in the status banner of the offer generation modal.

If an offer approval request has stalled due to the absence of an approver or needs to be expedited to quickly close a candidate, users with proxy approval capabilities can approve or deny a request on another approver's behalf (for full details, refer to our help article on approving by proxy):

• The proxy approver can open the offer details and click Make decision next to the name of the approver they wish to override.

• If the proxy approver created the approval request, then they will also see any pending approvals listed on the Home page under 'Approval Requests.' 
• Clicking Review approval opens the Approval Review Request page where a proxy approver can review, approve, or reject the approval request. 

• The proxy approver will be required to input a reason for their action in order to proceed to complete the override.
• The original approver will be notified via email if a proxy approver makes a decision on their behalf and the action will be reflected in the approval history on the candidate's profile story.

Once the offer has been approved by all approvers in the chain, you can click the Next Step button in the offer generation modal to proceed to the next step in the offer generation process (i.e. drafting the offer letter).

Which offers are subject to approval?

If you have a default offer approval workflow enabled in your Lever environment, all offers generated in Lever will be subject that workflow provided they meet the conditions defined in the steps of the workflow. Steps and conditions are defined when an offer approval workflow is constructed.

Lever also supports the ability to create custom offer approval workflows. If an offer meets both the conditions for the default approval workflow and the criteria for a custom approval workflow, the custom approval workflow will take precedence. If an offer meets the criteria for more than one custom approval workflow, the highest-listed workflow in the list of custom approval workflows will take precedence.

For full details on offer approval workflow creation, included defining steps, conditions, and criteria, refer to our help article on building offer approval workflows.

Approving and rejecting offer approval requests

There are three ways to approve or reject an offer approval request:

1. Email

Each individual in the approval chain will receive an email prompting them to approve or reject the drafted offer. Below is close-up of what an approval request email looks like. Note that, although not shown in the image, the email also contains all relevant offer details.

2. In-App via the Home page

The Home page includes a section for all approval requests created by or are assigned to the user. Users can view their pending approval requests by filtering for requests 'assigned to me' and clicking Review approval. This opens the Approval Request Review page where users can view a summary of all the relevant offer details provided, and provide approval or reject the request. 

3. In-App via the candidate opportunity

If the approver has the necessary level of access in Lever, they will have the ability to approve or reject the offer by opening it via the candidate profile.

Approvers that deny an approval request will be required to provide a reason in order to submit the rejection. The user that drafted the offer will see the reason provided by the rejecting approver and can make the necessary revisions to the offer details. To learn more, refer to our help article on revising offers.