How to create a job requisition approval process

Learn the basics of building a job requisition approval process.

Article Summary

A job requisition approval process is a workflow that almost every manager participates in when leading a team. If your company grows fast, this task may occur multiple times in a quarter. The bigger your team grows, the more frequently your managers will have to cast the net to find a new hire.

A documented job requisition approval process will eliminate ambiguity by clearly outlining the steps hiring managers should take to fill a role quickly. When processes are understood, teams work more efficiently together, and those efficiencies are felt at every stage of the job requisition process.

You'll benefit from enacting a job requisition approval process whenever you hire for a new position. Your employees could be backfilling an existing role or adding a new function to their team. Regardless, you’ll find that outlining a process and gathering all the information results in a faster and more orderly approval.

What information is required in a job requisition approval process?

Building a job requisition approval process for your company requires you to think about who should be a part of the decision-making chain. In mid-market and enterprise companies, HR teams usually develop these processes in partnership with other departments. They’ll work with you to determine what documentation to gather during the process. Your job requisition approvals will use this documentation to determine whether or not your request is approved or denied.

So what might you need to collect? You can require whatever company-specific information you need during the process. Here are some thought-starters for your requisition form. These forms can be designed as a simple pdf but many organizations are now automating the job requisition approval process with workflows.

Job requisition information you may want to collect:

  1. Title and role level
  2. Position description / job requirements
  3. Temporary or permanent position
  4. Department
  5. Suggested work location
  6. Salary range
  7. Is the position in the budget?
  8. Is this a new or existing position?
  9. Suggested working hours
  10. Supervisor
  11. Equipment and software
  12. Target start date

Outlining the job requisition approval process:

Now that you know what information to collect, you can think about what your job requisition process (or workflow) should look like when your employee needs to hire for an open position. Often there are several layers of approvals to kicking off a job requisition. In larger enterprise companies, this process could be far more complex and require additional layers of approvals. For this exercise, we're assuming that your internal processes are straightforward, requiring a couple of approvals.

  1. A manager identifies a hiring need and submits a job requisition approval form.
  2. The request is routed to the department VP for approval.
  3. After VP approval, the request may land on the C-level desk for approval.
  4. Often, finance will give a final thumbs up before the job requisition is sent to HR.
  5. Once all approvals have been obtained, the request is routed to HR for final approval. If they approve, a set of tasks begin to pass the approved job requisition to recruiting.

Note that at this stage, we may consider the job requisition process complete, but if we wanted to, we could build a process that automatically passed this job req over to recruitment, and after a hire is identified, we could continue the process through to employee onboarding.

Visualizing the job requisition approval process

The process we've described has multiple layers and approval chains. In the past, organizations accomplished these processes with a series of printed documents. As we moved into the digital age, businesses started using tools like email, chat, and project management applications to track the progress of a job requisition request. Today, hiring managers and HR teams can rely on workflow automation to accomplish many of these tasks saving enormous amounts of time and energy.
Workflows also provide better tracking and measurement for your internal operations. These tools can manage the entire job requisition approval process and ensure a smooth transition from requisition to employee onboarding.

To automate this process, let's begin by visualizing the steps we outlined earlier in a workflow diagram.

Automate the job requisition approval process with a workflow

Wrangle makes the job requisition approval simple by allowing employees to manage the process inside of their Slack channels. Let's learn how to automate this flow with Wrangle. First, create your free Wrangle account. Once you've logged into the web application, click Create Workflow on the upper-right-hand side of the UI.

Now, click blank workflow. We’ll create our job requisition approval workflow using this as our starting point.

Now, we need to name our workflow. We’ll call this one job requisition since it will serve as our process approval flow for a hiring process.

Once you've built your intake form, we can go back to our process map and see which roles are required in this approval flow. Let's add an approval to our process by clicking “add approval” on the left.

At this step, we assign the appropriate VP who should approve this request as we outlined in our flow. We'll also be able to see automatic post updates in the appropriate Slack channel, meaning whenever an approval or denial occurs, we’ll get a notification. If we wanted, we could choose multiple approvals at this step, but for simplicity, we’ve selected one VP who can approve or deny. You'll note I've also selected remind assignees if they're taking too long. I also selected the appropriate Slack channel where job requisition updates should take place.

Conclusion

We’ve shown you how to build the workflow. Now, let’s take a look at how your employees can access it with a few keystrokes in your Slack channels. Once Wrangle is installed in Slack, you can kick off a workflow easily. One popular way is to simply type /wrangle inside the Slack channel you’re working in. You can also go to the dashboard by navigating to your Slack apps and selecting Wrangle. Let’s just type /wrangle. You can see the job requisition we created is already showing up. Let’s select that workflow. Once selected, we simply click start workflow.

Now, the form we created using Wrangle’s web app is in your organization’s Slack channel for your users to access. Let’s fill out the workflow form we created and begin the job requisition approval process for a new marketing manager.