What is a Flow?
Flows describes a suite of tools that you can use to create an automated information gathering process.
There are three main types of Flow:
Candidate Flows are used at Application, Action and Hire stages to capture information from Candidates as specific points within your Recruitment Workflow.
Structured Reviews work in a similar way to Form Flows, but here the target audience is your Hiring Manager population and Recruitment Teams. Structured Reviews are most commonly used to gather structured Interview notes either from an individual interviewer or from a panel.
Compliance is a special type of flow. This tool does not capture information, but is used to prevent a user from progressing an Application, Interview or Hire until specific conditions are met. When not met, a custom message is displayed to the user. The classic use case for Compliance is to prevent a user from marking onboarding as complete until all operational, regulatory and legal checks have been marked as complete within the system.
Flows are dynamic in nature.
By adding Conditions to your flow, asking Eploy to look at the state of specific fields within a record, the path taken by the Candidate or User can be varied. For example, different Application Forms can be displayed to Candidates based on the nature of the Vacancy (e.g. Sales, HR, Operations, etc) or different Onboarding journeys can be assigned based on whether the Candidate is internal or external or whether additional information is needed for specific Vacancies.
Viewing a Flow
Accessing a Flow
Flow Type | Click Path (from Menu) |
Candidate Flow | Admin > Flows > Candidate Flows |
Structured Review | Admin > Flows > Structured Reviews |
Compliance | Admin > Compliance |
To view a flow, click it's Title.
Settings Tab
Within the Settings tab of a flow you'll find the flow Title, Description, Active toggle, flow Type (Application, Action, Hire), Stage, Editors. These settings are shown for all flows.
Candidate Flows also include the ability to toggle whether a Progress Bar and Navigation Bar should be displayed to Candidates.
Additionally, Application based Candidate Flows include a Create Applications at Status drop down list. This tells you which status Eploy will use when creating a new Application. This option is only shown in the flow that all new Applications would be directed to.
As Action and Hire flows are triggered once an Application has been submitted, Candidates need to log back into the Candidate Portal to complete these flows. When they log in a Things to Do message is displayed. Within an Action and Hire flow you can specify what this message should be - this is known as the Widget Text. You can either choose to Enter Text now or select a pre-defined Resource.
Finally, Compliance flows include an Apply To setting. Here you can specify whether the compliance check should apply to all users, just Hiring Managers or just Core System (Standard) Users.
Design Tab
Within the Design tab you'll see the canvas and the design of your flow.
A flow is made up of several blocks, and a connector between each, representing the flow from one block to the next.
Start Block
The start block represents the beginning of the flow.
Depending on the flow type, the start block will either use Application Statuses, Action Outcomes or Hire Statuses.
Only statuses and outcomes used within a Recruitment Workflow can be added to a Start block.
Condition Block
Condition blocks are the magic behind the dynamic nature of a flow.
By adding a series of conditions, either within a single or multiple condition blocks, you can create a truly dynamic branching flow to create an information gathering process unique to each Vacancy.
Form Block
Form Blocks are found within Candidate Flows and Structured reviews and are the mechanism used to tell the system which form to display at this point in the form.
If your form includes graded questions, you can include each grade option as an output from the form to create a new branch within the flow or set a status on the record e.g. knock-out questions.
When viewed within a Structured Review, the form block is also where you'll find the settings for that questionnaire including the number of required reviewers, which user types can skip that form and, in the case of graded questions, how many times that grade must be achieved to be considered a pass or fail.
Status Block
If you'd like to set a status or outcome, following the completion of a flow, include a Status Block.
As with Start Blocks, only statuses or outcomes used within a Recruitment Workflow can be added to a Flow.
🤓 Tip - a single status can be used both within a start and status block. For example, you might wish to have a two-stage Application process with some basic qualification questions first followed by more detailed, role specific, questions later. By using a single status, such as Proceed to Next Step, as both a Start and Status block, you can have both sets of questions within a single flow and Recruitment Workflow stage, making things simpler for your Candidates and Hiring Managers!
Message Block - Compliance Only
Message blocks are used within Compliance Flows to display a message to a user when a condition is met.
For example, you might have a field on your Hire Record to capture whether compliance checks have been completed. If these checks haven't been completed, when trying to progress the record, the message will be displayed to the user.
🤓 Tip make your messages as useful as possible, providing instructions to the user on how to clear the error. But remember, the message displays as a pop-up and only as a single block of text, so try to keep it as succinct as possible.
Connectors
The arrowed line linking one block to another is the Connector. This not only is a visual representation of how the flow progresses, but also tells Eploy how to move from one block to another.
Connectors are added by dragging from the anchor point of one block to the anchor point of another block.
🤓 Tip if your flow is quite complex and you're struggling to see where a connector goes, hover your mouse over it. It'll turn into a series of red "marching ants" which you can trace to find its end point.