Building offer approval workflows

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Available for Roles Super Admin, Admin
Permissions • Edit approval chains for requisitions, postings, and offers
Packages LeverTRM for Enterprise, Advanced HR add-on

 

This article depicts and describes Lever's User Workspace approval request enhancement included in the Summer 2024 Product Release, scheduled to rollout progressively in August 2024. For full details, refer to our Summer 2024 Product Release Notes.

Getting offers out to candidates as quickly as possible is critical in keeping up with your hiring goals. Lever’s offer approvals feature allows you to approve offers in record time and  empowers you to create customizable workflows to ensure that each stakeholder, from finance and HR to the hiring manager, is on board with the offer you have generated. This article deals primarily with how to build offer approval workflows. To learn how offer approval workflows operate in practice, check out our help article on requesting offer approval as well as our article on the information included in offer approval requests.


Configuring approval settings

All approval workflows are managed from your Settings.  When Lever users are asked to provide approval they will receive an automated email from Lever. 

If you would like to review the company settings for approval emails, navigate to Settings > Approvals > Approval Settings:

  • If you want to require users to authenticate their identity and log into Lever before approving a request, then make sure the 'Require user authentication for making decisions on approval requests' toggle is turned on. 
  • If you also want to hide the details of the request from the email body, then make sure the 'Hide approval details from approval emails' checkbox is selected. 

 

User authentication settings will apply to all offer, posting, and requisition approval requests. If you have questions about how to approve offers by email, please refer to our help article on requesting offer approval

Building the default offer approval workflow

The default offer approval workflow is applied to all offers that are not subject to a custom offer approval. There can only be one default offer approval workflow in a Lever environment. To build the default offer approval workflow:

  • Navigate to Settings > Approvals > Offers.
  • Click the Create Approval button and select Default.

Close-up of Create Approval button with menu containing Default and Custom options. Default option is highlighted on hover.

  • In Step 1 of the approval editor, start by adding approvers. If you are adding more than one approver, you must also define the minimum number of approvers required to approve the offer. There are three types of offer approvers you can add:
    • Dynamic approvers - users with a specific relationship to the objects associated with offers, defined as follows:
      • Posting hiring manager — the Hiring manager of the posting associated with the offer; this user does not appear on the offer form and cannot be overridden.
      • Requisition hiring manager — the Hiring manager of the requisition associated with the offer; this user does not appear on the offer form and cannot be overridden.
      • Requisition owner — the Owner of the requisition associated with the offer; this person does not appear on the offer form and cannot be overridden.
      • Offer direct manager — this is an optional field that can be added to the offer form; the person creating the offer can then see this field on the offer form and select a user at that point.
      • Offer hiring manager — this is an optional field that can be added to the offer form; in LeverTRM instances using Requisitions, Lever will auto-populate this field with the Requisition's hiring manager by looking at the requisition associated with the offer's posting; although this field is auto-populated, the person creating the offer can still manually designate another user to be the 'Offer hiring manager.'
    • Static approvers - specific users in your Lever environment.
    • Custom approvers - an approver 'token' with a custom title; during offer creation, the user drafting the offer will select an approver from among the users in your Lever environment to fill the spot of the token. If an approval chain contains multiple custom tokens, an approver must be chosen for each token before approval can be requested. To learn how custom approver tokens appear in the offer creation process, refer to our help article on requesting approval for offers.

Approvers field in approval editor.

Dynamic approvers appear in blue, status approvers appear in grey, and custom approvers appear in pink.

  • If you wish to make a multi-step approval chain, click on the Add Step button and repeat as necessary for each additional step you wish to add. In a multi-step approval, the offer passes to the next individual or group of approvers in the sequence once approved by the minimum required number of preceding approvers.

Approval editor with multiple approver steps and arrow pointing to Add Step button.

  • When you have added all required approvers to the chain, click Create.

 

If you are building a multi-step approval workflow with dynamic and/or custom approvers, check to make sure that the same individual will not prompted for approval at multiple points in the workflow.

The default offer approval workflow will activate upon creation. All offers created will be subject to the approval workflow unless superseded by a custom offer approval workflow or the offer is excluded based on the conditions built into the default approval logic. To learn more about how conditions can be be used to make exceptions to offer approvals, jump to the section of this article on adding conditions.

Building custom offer approval workflows

Custom offer approval workflows can be used to supersede the default offer approval workflow for offers that meet a specific set of criteria based on department/team, work type, locations, and/or custom fields on your offer form. To build a custom offer approval workflow:

  • Click the Create Approval button and select Custom.

Close-up of Create Approval button with menu containing Default and Custom options. Custom option is highlighted on hover.

  • Select criteria using the menus in the 'Details' block to define which offers to which you want the custom approval workflow to apply.

Close up criteria buttons in offer approval editor.

Custom approval editor close-up of department/teams field with menu extended.

  • Incorporating custom fields into your custom approval chain allows you to apply the chain to offers based on values in custom 'dropdown' fields on your offer form (other field types such as 'text input' or 'currency' cannot be used). Refer to our help article on custom offer form fields to learn more.
    • When selecting a value for a custom field, click the Edit offer fields button to be brought to your offer form editor where you can add and remove fields as needed.

Custom field in custom offer approval editor.

  • Here is an example of a custom offer approval that applies to multiple departments, locations, work types, and a custom offer field.

Custom offer approval editor with details fields populated.

  • Proceed to add approvers, steps, and defining minimum approver requirements as you would to build the default offer approval workflow (outlined above).
  • When you have added all required approvers to the workflow, click the Create button at the top of the editor.

Adding conditions to offer approval workflows

When building an offer approval, you can define criteria for inclusion/exclusion of the offer from specific steps in the approval chain. To add a condition to an offer approval:

  • In the approval editor, click + Add condition beneath the approver fields.
  • In the 'Require step if:' field, select from the following options:
    • Requisition field: Outside of compensation band - if the compensation in the offer is outside of the compensation band on the associated requisition, the offer will be subject to that step of the approval chain.
    • Offer fields - select from custom fields on your offer forms that have a field type of 'currency,' 'dropdown' or 'number.'
      • If the selected offer field is a 'number' or 'currency' field type, choose from the following conditions: is, is between, is empty, is greater or equal to, is greater than, is less or equal to, is less than, is not, is not between, is not empty
      • If the selected offer field is a 'dropdown' field type, choose from the following conditions: is, is empty, is not some, is some

Conditions menu in approval editor.

Example of an offer field conditional.

  • If you are adding more than one condition to a step in an offer approval, you must select a logical operator (AND or OR) that combines the conditions. You can include a maximum of five conditions on a single offer approval step.
    • Choose AND if the approval step is triggered when all conditions are true.
    • Choose OR if the approval step is triggered when one of the conditions are true.

AND/OR operator menu between conditions in approval editor.

Example of an operator being selected to combine multiple conditions.

If an offer meets the criteria of conditions in more than one custom approval workflow, the workflow with the largest number of matching criteria will take priority. In cases where the same number of criteria match, the matching criteria will be weighted in terms of importance as follows: (1) Team, (2) Department, (3) Location*, (4) Work type, (5) Custom fields

*Note that multi-location postings, both the primary and secondary locations are used for the location condition. For how to configure multi-locations, refer to our help article on creating and managing multi-location postings.

Example
An offer for a candidate being considered for a part-time position based in New York is submitted for approval. There are two active custom offer approval workflows, with the following criteria:

      • Workflow A:  Departments/teams - all; Locations - all; Work types - Part-time
      • Workflow B: Departments/teams - all; Locations - New York, NY; Work types - all

Although the offer meets the same number of criteria in both approval workflows, Workflow B will take precedence because the location criteria has a higher importance than the work type criteria.

Custom approvals can be reordered by hovering your cursor to the left of the custom approval title and then clicking to drag the approval to a new location in the list.

Custom offer approval being dragged to a new location in the custom offer approval list.

Editing and deleting offer approval workflows

To make changes to an offer approval workflow:

  • Navigate to Settings > Approvals.
  • Make sure the 'Offers' tab is selected.
  • Select the offer approval workflow that you wish to edit.
  • Click the Edit button in the approval editor.

Approval editor with arrow pointing to edit button.

  • When you have made the necessary changes, click the Save Changes button.

To delete an offer approval workflow:

  • Navigate to Settings > Approvals.
  • Make sure the 'Offers' tab is selected.
  • Select the offer approval workflow that you wish to delete.
  • Click the ellipses (⋯) button in the approval editor.
  • Select Delete Approval Workflow.

Approval editor with option extending from ellipses button to delete approval workflow.

Approval workflows can also be edited and deleted by clicking the ellipses (⋯) aligned with each entry and in 'Approvals' list and selecting the corresponding option.

Close up of Approvals list with menu extended next to one approval entry with options to edit or delete it.

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