Recruitment, Hiring & Onboarding Checklists

Recruitment lives under Human Resources → Overview → Recruitment, which lists your vacancies; each vacancy shows its applicants by stage. A new vacancy needs a title, an employment type and the number of openings. You can also set the department, position, location, a description, a hiring manager and a closing date. Its status is one of draft, open, on hold, closed or filled. The department and position matter later than you might think: they are what the employee record inherits when someone is hired, and the hiring manager becomes the new starter’s line manager when they have an employee record.

A closing date is enforced, not decorative. A vacancy whose closing date has passed is closed automatically overnight, and applications for it are refused — move the closing date to accept more. A vacancy marked Publish online also appears on your organization’s public jobs page, once your organization has a public link, where anyone can apply with their CV. Those applications arrive in Recruitment as applicants at the Applied stage with Online application as their source, and whoever manages recruitment, plus the hiring manager, is told. The vacancy leaves the public list once it is no longer open or its closing date passes.

In practice: a Nairobi microfinance bank opens “Loan Officer — Thika branch” with two openings, the Credit department, the Loan Officer position, the Thika branch manager as hiring manager and a closing date of 15 November. HR ticks Publish online and shares the jobs-page link on the bank’s social channels. Over two weeks 38 people apply online and HR adds 6 more from a staff referral scheme. On the morning of 16 November the vacancy shows as closed, and a late applicant who tries the link is told applications have closed.

HR adds applicants who come in by email, referral, agency or a job board directly on the vacancy: name, email, phone, source, notes and up to five documents — PDF, Word or images, up to 10 MB each. Documents are stored in the Document Vault as confidential. Recording the source on every applicant is what lets you see later where good candidates come from. The same email address can apply to a vacancy only once, so a candidate who applies online and is also referred by a colleague is one applicant, not two.

Applicants move through Applied, Screening, Interview and Offer, or the application is closed as Not taken forward or Withdrawn, with a reason. Closing an application calls off its open interviews and tells the interviewers, so nobody turns up to meet a candidate who has already withdrawn. The final step is not a stage you pick from the list: you use Hire, because Hire is what creates the employee record. Moving someone to a hired-looking stage by other means would leave you with a “hired” applicant and no employee — which is why the stage list will not let you.

In practice: of the 44 Loan Officer applicants, HR moves 12 to Screening after reading CVs and closes 30 as Not taken forward with the reason “Below minimum experience”. Two candidates are left at Applied pending references. One screened applicant, Mercy, emails to say she has accepted another job; HR closes her application as Withdrawn, and the interview already booked with the branch manager for Thursday is called off, with the branch manager told. Six candidates move on to Interview.

From the applicant you schedule an interview: a future date and time, the format — in person, video call or phone — a location or link, and the interviewer. Scheduling moves the applicant to the Interview stage if they were at an earlier one. The interviewer is notified and sees the interview under My interviews, with the applicant’s documents to read beforehand. After the interview they record written feedback and a recommendation: take forward, undecided, or do not take forward.

Interviewers need no HR permission. Being the interviewer is the check, which is what lets a branch manager or a technical lead take part without being given access to the whole recruitment module. An interview can be rescheduled — to a new time, place or interviewer, each of whom is told — or cancelled with a reason, up until feedback has been recorded. When the time of an interview changes, reschedule the one you booked rather than booking a second: two interviews for one meeting leave one of them waiting for feedback forever.

In practice: HR schedules six video interviews for the Loan Officer role with the Thika branch manager, Kamau, across two mornings. Kamau has no HR permissions; he opens My interviews, reads each candidate’s CV beforehand, and after each call records his notes and a recommendation. One candidate asks to move from Tuesday 10:00 to Wednesday 14:00, so HR reschedules the existing interview and Kamau is told of the new time. By Wednesday afternoon three candidates are marked take forward, two do not take forward and one undecided, and HR moves the three to Offer.

To hire, open the applicant and go to the Hire card. Enter the start date, the employment type and the work country, and confirm. The employee record is created on probation with the vacancy’s department and position, and the hiring manager as line manager when they have an employee record. Any onboarding checklist set to start automatically begins for the new employee, and the hiring manager is told when someone else made the hire. When every opening is filled the vacancy is marked Filled, and further hires into it are refused until you raise the openings or reopen it. A hire counts against your plan’s HR employee limit exactly as adding an employee by hand does. Hiring creates no login — that is provisioned separately if the person needs one.

Hire is the start of the record, not all of it. Add the new employee’s contract, pay and statutory numbers from their profile before their first payroll, because a payroll run only pays employees with an active contract. Applicant data has its own end. A closed application can be erased from the applicant page, for a data-protection request or once you no longer need it: the name, contact details, notes, reason, interview feedback and every document are removed, and the record stays as an erased applicant with its stage and dates so your pipeline numbers still add up. To do this automatically, set Keep rejected applications for (months) under Human Resources → Overview → Targets & alerts; applications that were not taken forward or withdrawn are erased once they pass that age. Hired applicants are never erased this way, because their record is now the employee’s.

In practice: the bank hires Grace and Daniel into the two Loan Officer openings, starting 2 December, employment type permanent, work country Kenya. Both employee records appear on probation in Credit, with Kamau as their manager, and the “New starter” checklist starts for each. The vacancy is marked Filled; when HR tries to hire the third take-forward candidate, the hire is refused until the openings are raised. HR adds both contracts the same week so the December payroll includes them. The bank keeps rejected applications for 6 months, so the 30 early rejections are erased automatically in May.

Onboarding and offboarding checklists template the steps that happen when someone joins or leaves — contract on file, equipment ready, access revoked, final pay settled. Open Human Resources → Overview → Onboarding & Offboarding and choose Templates. If you have none yet you can create a starter pair, a New starter onboarding list and a Leaver offboarding list, and edit them freely. Each template has a name and is either for onboarding or for offboarding.

Each step has a title, an optional description, an owner and a due date. The owner is the HR team, the line manager, the employee, or a named person. The due date is counted in days from the start date for onboarding, or from the end date for offboarding, and negative days fall before it — so a step can be due three days before someone starts. Tick Start automatically on hire or termination and keep the template active to have it begin on its own: onboarding templates start when you add an employee or hire one through Recruitment, and offboarding templates start when an employee’s status changes to terminated. HR can also start any template by hand from the employee’s profile, optionally with a different date to count from.

In practice: a Kampala hotel group edits its New starter template. “Signed contract on file” is owned by HR at minus 3 days; “Uniform and locker ready” by the line manager at 0; “Fire safety induction” by the employee at plus 2; and “Probation review booked” by HR at plus 60. Its Leaver template has “Return uniform and keys” for the line manager at 0 and “Final pay and leave balance settled” for HR at plus 5. Both are active and set to start automatically. A receptionist hired for 1 March has her contract step due on 26 February and her probation review on 30 April.

Starting a template copies it onto the employee. Each step’s owner becomes a real person and its due date a real date, so later edits to the template, or a change of manager, never reshuffle a checklist already under way. An employee can have only one open copy of the same template. Each owner is told when their steps are created. A step that cannot reach a person falls to the HR team, with the reason shown — when the employee has no manager set, the employee has no login, or the owner’s login is inactive — and HR can hand any open step to someone else, or back to the HR team.

The board lists every open step across all running checklists for HR, soonest due first, with a Mine filter; everyone else sees only their own steps. Owners tick their own steps without any HR permission, so a line manager or the new starter can take part, and they can add a note. When the last step is ticked the checklist is completed; unticking a step on a completed list reopens it, and the reopening is recorded. A cancelled checklist is frozen. Every morning the owner of each overdue step is reminded, at most every three days per step, and offboarding steps more than three days overdue are also copied to HR, because those are the access and final-pay steps that cannot slide. If a terminated employee is set back to active, their open offboarding checklists are cancelled and HR is told.

In practice: at the hotel group, a chef is terminated with an end date of 31 March. The Leaver checklist starts on its own, with “Return uniform and keys” for his line manager due 31 March. His manager has no login, so that step falls to the HR team with the reason shown beside it, and HR hands it to the kitchen supervisor. The final-pay step, due 5 April, is still open on 9 April; the HR officer who owns it has been reminded, and because it is more than three days overdue the whole HR team is now copied too.