Managing departments

Use the Departments section of your account to manage department names and organization. Control how you organize departments internally, as well as what prospective candidates see.

• Filter your careers page, dashboards and reports based on your custom departments.
• Segment certain features and functionality by department with an Advanced Annual plan.
• With Language Kit, include your own translations for departments.

 

Department management actions

Add

Add a new department or sub-department. Once added, the department will be available for selection when creating a job. You’ll also be able to use the department to segment account features. Certain features like hiring teams, email templates, pipelines and approval workflows can be made available for jobs in specific departments.

To add a top-level department, click the option in the upper right of the Departments settings.

With an Advanced Annual plan you have the option to add sub-departments. These work like a folder hierarchy. A top-level “Marketing” department might have sub-departments for things like “Digital Marketing” or “Product Marketing”. Highlight the department to which you want to add a sub-department and click the + to do this.

Top-level departments cannot share the same name, nor can sub-departments that share the same parent department.

 

Rename

Change the name of the selected department. The name will be updated for all jobs and for any feature or workflow segmenting that’s been set up. This includes features like templates, pipelines, requisition workflows and more. All settings remain intact, but the new name is applied.

The new name will also appear on your Workable-hosted career page or other career pages where you’ve pulled in or referenced department names from Workable.

Move

This option is available with an Advanced Annual Workable plan.

Move a department under another department. This works similarly to moving one folder of files into another on your computer. Use this option if your organization’s structure is changing. Departments can be moved up or down a level. All of the department’s sub-departments and jobs will move with it.

Select a destination for the department to be moved to or turn it into a new top level department.

Merge

Merge everything from one department into another.

• Hierarchy for sub-departments will be maintained through the merge
• All jobs and requisitions will be carried over with the merge
• The original department name will be removed from Workable
• Any feature segmenting will be updated to work for the department absorbing the merge

It’s not possible to “undo” a merge. If a merge is accidentally confirmed, add a new department in place of the one that was merged, then move jobs back to that department.

When merging, select the department that you want to have merged into another department. You’ll then be prompted to choose which department should absorb it. Here, the G&A department (our initial selection) will be merged into the Marketing department:

 

In some cases it may be better to use the Move option instead of merging. Merging is best utilized when your internal structure changes and two departments are being combined.

Delete

Workable will highlight account areas where information will be deleted prior to confirming the deletion. Deleted data is not recoverable.

Confirm deletion by typing in "DELETE".

Effects of deletion:

• The department and all its sub-departments will be deleted; all related jobs and requisitions remain in the account, but will have their department details removed
• The department and its sub-departments will be removed from any feature segmenting
  
  • Important: If the deleted department is the only department for a template, a user’s hiring team role, an approval workflow or a pipeline, then that template, role, workflow or pipeline will be deleted from the account.

Here, if the Operations department is deleted this email template would also be deleted because it is only for the Operations department:

 

Or here, if the Marketing department is deleted this email template will remain since the Sales department may still be using it, but the Marketing segment will be removed:

 

 

Organizing Workable features by department

With departments added, you can segment certain Workable functionality to be accessible to specific departments. An Advanced Annual plan is required to do this.

Segment the following features based on departments:

• Interview kits
• Email templates
• Offer letter templates
• Hiring team user assignment
• Custom pipelines
• Requisition approval workflows

For example, if there are interview questions that you ask when hiring for jobs in Sales, Account Management and Finance departments, you can segment an interview kit to be available for jobs in any of those departments.

Segmenting can be done from each feature's settings page (accessed via your user icon).

When segmenting anything by a department, permissions for all its sub-departments are granted.

Consider this department structure:

Segmenting an email template for the “Advertising” department, makes that template available for all jobs under Advertising, Digital Advertising and Print Advertising.

 

Segmenting a user for “Digital Advertising” would mean that user is added to the hiring team only if the job is specifically in that one department - because it is at the lowest level of hierarchy.

During job creation you’ll be prompted to select a department for the job. You can select any level of department. Selecting an option at the lowest level will ensure that the job inherits all the relevant functionality that has been segmented for it and that it does not inherit extraneous functionality.

 

Manage career page hierarchy visibility

Set the level at which candidates will be able to see department details.

Consider this example:

With this structure, you could categorize a job internally for the Digital Advertising team, but for your careers page you may only want to show “Marketing” as the candidate-facing department name.

On the Departments page, set the level of visibility you want candidates to have. By default all sub-departments are hidden so candidates will only see the top-level department name.

Grant visibility down through sub-departments, level-by-level. In the example above, allowing visibility to the next level would show the Advertising department on the careers page. Candidates would be able to sort and filter for that department.

 

Manage department selection for job creation

Set the department levels that should be selectable when creating a job or requisition. You may have (for example) a top-level department for reporting and segmenting purposes, but you want to make sure coworkers choose a more specific sub-department any time they create a job.

You can restrict which level of department is selectable to help job/req creators avoid mistakes. Do this in the Departments settings under the Department Selection section. Filtering and reporting options will not be impacted.

Allow job creators to choose: 

• Any department or sub-department
• A certain level of department (including its sub-departments)
• Only departments that don't have sub-departments (the lowest level available for a given hierarchy)

 

Filtering dashboards and reports

As more departments are added in, you can begin filtering dashboards and reports. Filter at any level of department. All sub-departments are included based on your selection.

Filter on the following pages:

• Job dashboard
• Hiring Plan / requisition dashboard
• Reports

 

Drill down to see details for any level of sub-department. Or select a top-level department to see the full picture.