Career Application

A career application is one candidate applying for one vacancy. The candidate creates it himself on the public careers page, it lands against his Recruitment Applicant record, and from then on it is the thing that moves: shortlisted, interviewed, offered, hired or rejected. Every move e-mails the candidate.

Where

Created by the candidate on the public careers page. Visible on the Portal Applications tab of Recruitment Applicant

Who uses it

The candidate creates it, the recruiter moves it along

When

From the moment a candidate applies until he is hired or rejected

Needs first

CareerPageSetting, Recruitment Project, Questionnaire

What it is for

The public careers page is a separate site. A candidate opens it from outside the company, with no PeopleNest login and no idea that PeopleNest exists. He sees the companies that are hiring, he picks a vacancy, he writes a covering note, and he applies. What he creates at that moment is a career application.

That application is not a loose web enquiry sitting in somebody's inbox. It lands inside PeopleNest attached to a candidate record on Recruitment Applicant, which is the same list HR enters walk-in candidates into. There is no separate pile of web candidates to go and look at.

One application is one candidate and one vacancy. A candidate cannot apply twice to the same vacancy, and if he tries the careers page tells him he has already applied. He can apply to as many different vacancies as he likes, and each application then moves on its own: shortlisted for Production Supervisor and rejected for Quality Inspector is a perfectly normal pair of outcomes for one man.

The application carries a stage, and the stage is the whole point. Each time a recruiter moves it on, PeopleNest writes the candidate an e-mail saying so, and the e-mail names the application so a candidate holding two live applications gets two separate messages and is not confused about which job is which.

One stage needs care. Moving an application to Hired creates the employee record there and then, using today's date as the joining date, because an application has no agreed joining date on it. If the client has agreed a joining date with the candidate, raise an Offer and let the acceptance do the hiring. Marking the application Hired by hand gets you an employee who joined today.

What a consultant must set up for any of this to happen

1. Set Applicant Portal User on Recruitment Setting, or the careers page can display jobs but cannot record an application.
2. Tick Career Page Enabled on CareerPageSetting for the company, and write its welcome message. Without this the company is not on the careers page at all.
3. On the vacancy on Recruitment Project, tick Company Website and check that today falls on or after the Opening Date and on or before both the Application Deadline and the Close Date.
4. Attach a Questionnaire to the vacancy, built from questions on QuestionBank with marks on their options, and set the questionnaire's pass mark. Skip this and candidates are asked nothing, so nothing is scored and HR has three hundred unranked applications.
5. Make sure the vacancy's Notes read as a job description, because that is what the careers page publishes as one.

Every field, in plain words

This record has no entry form of its own in the current build. The candidate creates it on the careers page, it is shown read only on the Portal Applications tab of Recruitment Applicant, and the Offer screen points at it through its Application ID field.

The application

Field	What it means	What to put in it	Notes
Legal Entity	The company the candidate applied to	Fills itself from the vacancy.
Application	The reference of this application	Fills itself when the candidate applies.	This is what the Offer screen's Application ID points at, and what the candidate's e-mails are headed with.
Applicant	The candidate	Fills itself from whoever was signed in to the careers page.	A candidate cannot apply on somebody else's behalf.
Recruitment Project	The vacancy applied for	Fills itself from the job the candidate clicked.	One application per candidate per vacancy.
Status	The stage the application has reached	Starts at NEW. Moved on by the recruiter. See the list below.	Each move sends the candidate an e-mail.
Application Date	The moment the candidate applied	Fills itself with the date and time he pressed apply.
Cover Letter	What the candidate wrote when he applied	Fills itself from what he typed.	The only free text the candidate writes himself. Worth reading before the interview.
Question Score	The marks he got on the vacancy's questionnaire	Fills itself when he submits his answers.
Passed	Whether that total reached the questionnaire's pass mark	Fills itself when he submits his answers.	Submitting answers sets only the score and this flag. It does not move the stage, so a candidate you have already shortlisted stays shortlisted.

The stages an application moves through

• NEW Applied. Where every application starts. The candidate is told nothing, because he already knows he applied.
• SCR Screening. Somebody is reading it. The candidate is e-mailed that his application is under screening.
• SHL Shortlisted. He is worth interviewing. The candidate is e-mailed that he has been shortlisted.
• INT Interview. An interview is arranged. The candidate is e-mailed that an interview is scheduled.
• OFR Offer. An offer is coming. The candidate is e-mailed that an offer is on its way. Raise the actual Offer at this point.
• HIR Hired. He is in. The candidate is e-mailed a welcome, and PeopleNest creates his employee record immediately, using today's date as the joining date. Let an accepted Offer do this rather than setting it by hand, so the real joining date is used.
• REJ Rejected. He is not going further. The candidate is e-mailed an update on his application, deliberately neutral wording.
• WDN Withdrawn. He pulled out. The candidate is e-mailed that his application has been withdrawn.
• TPL Talent Pool. Not this job, but keep him. Nothing is sent to the candidate, which is on purpose: a talent pool is for the client's benefit, not an announcement.

Older applications may show the stage in longer words, for example Shortlisted, Interview, Offered or Hired. They mean the same thing as the codes above.

Scenarios

"A fitter applied through our website on Sunday night, what do we do on Monday?"

Open his candidate record on Recruitment Applicant, which already exists, and look at the Portal Applications tab. His application is there with the vacancy, the date and his covering note, and if the vacancy had a questionnaire attached it also carries his score and whether he passed. Fill in the rest of his candidate file from his CV, then move the application to Screening. He gets an e-mail saying so, which is the whole reason clients want this and is the single most common complaint about recruiting without it.

"The same man applied for Production Supervisor and for Quality Inspector"

Two applications on one candidate record. Move each one separately. He can be shortlisted on one and rejected on the other, and because the e-mails name the application he gets two clear messages rather than two contradictory ones. Do not create a second candidate record for him.

"He answered the questions wrongly and now he wants another go"

He cannot submit answers twice. The score and the pass flag stay as they are. If the client wants him considered anyway, move the application along by hand and ignore the score. The score has never stopped a recruiter doing anything, it only sorts the pile.

"We want to keep somebody for next year"

Move the application to Talent Pool. Nothing is sent to the candidate, his record and his CV stay, and when the next vacancy opens he applies to it or HR raises it for him. Rejecting him instead sends him an e-mail you then have to explain.

"We marked somebody Hired and now there is an employee who joined today"

That is what the Hired stage does. It builds the employee record at once and, having no agreed joining date to work from, uses today. Correct the dates on Employee Basic Information, and for the next hire raise an Offer with the real joining date and let the acceptance do the work.

What it is connected to

• CareerPageSetting, Recruitment Project and Recruitment Setting between them decide whether an application can be made at all.
• Recruitment Applicant is the candidate, and shows his applications on its Portal Applications tab.
• Questionnaire is what the candidate answers, and Career Answer holds the answers.
• Offer points at the application through its Application ID, and an accepted offer moves the application to Hired.
• Employee Basic Information is created when the application reaches Hired, by whichever route.

If something looks wrong

• "A candidate says he applied and we have nothing" - the Applicant Portal User on Recruitment Setting is blank, so the careers page had nowhere to file it.
• "He says the website would not let him apply" - either the vacancy is past its Application Deadline or Close Date, or he has already applied for that same vacancy.
• "Candidates are not getting the e-mails" - the stage was never changed. The e-mail is written when the stage moves, and NEW and TPL send nothing by design.
• "A shortlisted candidate went back to screening" - that was an older behaviour of the questionnaire. Submitting answers now writes only the score and the pass flag and leaves the stage alone.
• "An employee appeared with today's date as his joining date" - an application was moved straight to Hired. Use an Offer with the agreed joining date instead.