Purpose

This article introduces customers to the Eightfold workflow automation feature. After reading this article, customers will understand the purpose and benefits of WFA and will be able to begin using automated workflows.

Audience

This article is directed toward new users of the WFA feature and may be especially helpful for recruiters.

Other relevant articles

To learn about Eightfold recommended workflows, read the Workflow Automation recommended workflows article.

Background

Sourcing and recruiting teams spend a substantial amount of time identifying prospects, nurturing them, and moving them forward in sourcing and recruiting stages. Much of this work is repetitive in nature, and for a sourcer managing tens of prospects at a time or a recruiter managing multiple open positions at a time, these repetitive tasks consume bandwidth that could be used on more meaningful strategic engagements.

WFA aims to address this issue by helping TA teams automate the most repeated recruiting and sourcing tasks across talent communities and hiring pipelines. WFA can provide the following benefits:

• Help enterprises jumpstart their TA efforts with an Eightfold recommended workflow library
• Enable creation of tailored automated workflows to support each customer’s unique real-life use cases across talent communities and hiring pipelines
• Provide easy-to-serve UI to ensure that recruiters and sourcers can tailor the workflows

Workflow automation is most often used in the following circumstances:

• A task is repetitive.
• A procedure that must be standardized across positions and communities.
• A series of simple tasks can be made more efficient.

When used in such cases, workflow automation enables an organization to streamline its business processes and increase workplace efficiency and productivity.

What is a workflow?

Eightfold workflows have three essential components:

1. A trigger
2. A condition or conditions
3. An action or actions

When a defined trigger occurs, and when certain conditions are met, as configured by the customer in a workflow, then an action or a series of actions will occur as a result. There are several combinations of conditions and actions that can happen based on each workflow. Here’s an example of a workflow in action.

In this example, when a candidate’s stage changes from Recruiter Screen to Phone Interview, the hiring manager will receive an email (with a template of Outreach Template 1).

This same pattern would apply to any combination of triggers, conditions, and actions.

When A (Trigger) occurs and B (Condition) is met THEN C (Action) occurs.

Or, if a user sets multiple conditions, then: when A (Trigger) occurs and B (Condition) and C (Condition) are met THEN D (Action) occurs. And so on.

Getting started

You can access WFA through Positions and Eightfold Talent Communities by taking the following steps.

Roles and Permissions

Eightfold’s client users having any of the recruiting roles can be associated with this access. Eightfold WFA aims to give the client users access to automation permissions through perm_manage_position_workflow and perm_manage_community_workflow.

Note: Users will require the perm_manage_all_position_workflow permission to get access when the Automation Center is globally enabled.

To access WFA through Positions

1.Once you're logged in to your Eightfold account, go to the Positions tab and select the position for you which you’d like to automate a workflow.
2. From the Overview page for the position, select Automate Workflows.

This will bring up an Automated Workflows window with several Eightfold recommended workflows. (Note: The list of recommended workflows that show up in your environment is dependent on which workflows have been configured for your organization.)

3. Select the workflow you would like to enable by selecting the workflow name or the Enable button. The first time you open the workflow, a new user tour will open. Take the tour if desired by selecting Next, or exit the tour by selecting the X.

4. Complete the workflow fields as needed. The trigger will already be set up, but you can select from dropdown menus for the workflow condition and the workflow action.
5. Select Enable Workflow.
6. You will see a confirmation message about your workflow, as well as a new Position Workflows section, where your workflow will appear.

7. Once you start using your workflow, you will see how many profiles have been affected by the workflow.

To access WFA through Communities

1. Once you're logged in to your Eightfold account, go to the Communities tab and select the community for you which you’d like to automate a workflow.
2. From the Overview page for the community, click Automate Workflows.

Like accessing WFA from Positions, this will bring up an Automated Workflows window with several Eightfold recommended workflows. The recommended workflows in Communities are different from the recommended workflows in Positions, but you can set up the Communities workflows by taking the same steps as described for workflows in Positions.

Types of Workflows

Eightfold adopts and embraces workflow automation to increase efficiency and productivity at the workplace. We have two types of workflows:

1. Eightfold Recommended Workflows - A few ready to use workflow automations that users can enable for each entity (position or community). These recommended workflows are enabled from within each entity by the respective recruiter or sourcer.
2. Enterprise (Custom) Workflows - In case the recommended workflows do not solve your use case, you can create your own custom workflows by selecting a combination of actions, triggers & conditions. The created workflow will be available to all users for use the same way as the recommended workflows within each entity.