Workable now enables companies on the Premier plan to manage and customize the permissions associated with hiring roles on their account. This gives Admins greater control over what each user can see and do during the recruiting process.
- Changes apply account-wide to all current and future users with the role.
- Custom role permissions do not currently impact settings related to Employee management access or account-level configuration; these are expected in a future release.
Overview of hiring roles
Workable includes four roles used in hiring teams that can be customized:
- Recruiter (formerly Recruiting Admin)
- Hiring manager
- Hiring contributor (formerly Standard Member)
- Candidate reviewer (formerly Reviewer)
Managing permissions per hiring role
As an Admin user:
- Navigate to Settings > Roles and permissions to view and manage permissions.
- Click Manage permissions for the relevant hiring team role to open the full permissions table.
- For each role, you can enable or disable specific permissions. There are 55 permissions grouped by function. The groups are:
- Job management
- Candidate profile & progression
- Candidate communication
- Team collaboration & internal tools
- Candidate evaluation & screening tools
- Offers & hiring decisions
- Post-hire actions
There is a reset option on the upper right to easily reset roles to the Workable default settings. Please note that this is a permanent action and cannot be undone unless you manually reapply your custom settings.
Permission hierarchy and dependencies
Workable enforces hierarchy rules to simplify permission management:
- If a permission is disabled for a higher role (e.g. Hiring manager), it’s also disabled for all roles below it.
- If a permission is enabled for a lower role (e.g. Candidate reviewer), it is also enabled for higher roles.
Permissions also have dependencies. For example:
- Enabling a child permission (like ‘Send candidate surveys’) will automatically enable its parent (‘Send and reply to candidate messages’).
- Disabling a parent permission (like ‘Edit job’) will disable all associated child permissions.
These relationships are visually indicated in the permissions interface with the grey boxes.
Mandatory permissions
The below two permissions cannot be disabled for any role and will appear greyed out in the table:
- View jobs
- View candidate profile and timeline
Customizing these permissions does not override visibility settings for comments, emails, texts, and custom fields. These are still controlled via the visibility widget on candidate profiles and can be restricted separately per field or interaction.
FAQs
- What will happen if I downgrade from Premier to a lower-tier plan?
- All previously configured permissions remain active.
- Editing becomes read-only — changes cannot be made.
- You can still use the ‘Reset to default’ option, but this action is irreversible and removes all custom settings.
- How do custom roles and permissions affect automations?
When setting up an automation, Hiring managers and Recruiters will only be available as senders if they have the permission to perform the corresponding action, e.g., send a message or send a video interview/assessment test. When specific users are selected and at the time of the automation trigger they no longer have the required permission, the automated action will fail with the relevant error message.
- How are requisitions impacted by custom roles and permissions?
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Requisition roles are excluded from permission checks:
- Requisition creator: Can see the requisitions they have created even if they subsequently lose the 'View and manage requisition' permission.
- Requisition hiring manager: Can see the requisitions they have been assigned as requisition hiring manager, even if they subsequently lose the 'View and manage requisition' permission.
- Requisition owner: Can see the requisitions they have been assigned as requisition owner, even if they subsequently lose the 'View and manage requisition' permission. They can also manage the requisition statuses even without the 'open and put on hold' permission.
When creating a requisition, available jobs are those where the member is part of the hiring team with a role that allows requisition creation, or where a collaboration rule permits creating requisitions.
The rules for selecting a requisition hiring manager or requisition owner have not changed and are not dependent on permissions. You can learn more here.
Viewing and editing the offered salary - available for filled requisitions - is only possible for hiring team members with the role of Recruiter or Hiring Manager and is not dependent on or controlled by any other permissions.