Managing departments
Follow

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: