An evergreen role is a position that stays open continuously because a company hires for it on an ongoing basis; for example, Customer Support Representative, Sales Development Representative, or any role with high volume or regular turnover. Rather than opening and closing the same job repeatedly, you can keep a single job open in Workable for ongoing candidate collection. This article covers best practices for setting up, managing, and reporting on evergreen roles.
Setting up an evergreen role
The recommended approach for evergreen hiring is to create a single job and keep it open, rather than duplicating the same position multiple times. This gives you one shared candidate pool, a consistent application experience, and a single place to manage all candidates for that role.
If you are using Hiring Plan, when a new vacancy opens, create a new requisition for that job. This is the most effective way to track individual hiring cycles accurately - see the section below for more details.
Managing job postings
Many job boards have their own guidelines to prevent duplicate listings. To keep your evergreen roles visible and performing well on job boards without violating those guidelines:
- Keep a single active posting per job board rather than creating multiple listings for the same role.
- Refresh your posting periodically; archiving the job and republishing it every 4–6 months can help maintain visibility.
- Update the job description periodically to keep it accurate and relevant to current needs.
Tracking hiring cycles
With the Hiring Plan
The Hiring Plan is the recommended tool for managing and reporting on evergreen roles. Because an evergreen job stays open indefinitely, the job's activation date is not a reliable reference point for measuring individual hiring cycles. Requisitions in the Hiring Plan each have their own open date, making your reporting data far more meaningful.
With the Hiring Plan:
- Each requisition represents a single vacancy and has its own open date, giving you a clear starting point for each hiring cycle.
- Reporting metrics such as time to hire and time to fill are calculated per requisition—not per job—so the numbers accurately reflect each cycle.
- You can have multiple requisitions open simultaneously for the same job when hiring for several vacancies at once. You can also use headcounts for requisitions when hiring for multiple positions at the same time.
- Closing a requisition marks the end of a cycle without affecting the job itself or other open requisitions.
Tip: Create a new requisition in the Hiring Plan each time a new vacancy opens for your evergreen role. This is the most effective way to keep your reporting accurate and your hiring cycles clearly separated.
Without the Hiring Plan
If you are not using the Hiring Plan, there is no built-in way to separate hiring cycles within a single evergreen job. The only option available is to archive the job and republish it, which resets the job's activation date and starts a new reporting baseline.
This workaround has the below limitations:
- Archiving removes the job from job boards and may disrupt your active pipeline until the new job is published to job boards.
- All job-level metrics reset, so historical data from previous cycles is no longer visible in context.
- It is not possible to track multiple simultaneous vacancies as separate cycles.
For these reasons, using the Hiring Plan is strongly recommended for any account with ongoing, high-volume, or evergreen hiring needs.
Reporting on evergreen roles
Reporting on long-running jobs requires some care, particularly when interpreting time-based metrics.
Time to hire vs. time to fill
These two metrics behave differently for evergreen roles:
- Time to fill: Without requisitions, this is calculated from the job's activation date to the point a candidate is hired. Because an evergreen job can be open for months or years, time to fill will be a very large number and is not a useful metric in this context. If you use the Hiring Plan, time to fill is calculated from the requisition's open date — not the job's activation date. This makes it accurate and actionable even for roles that have been open for a long time.
- Time to hire: This is calculated per candidate, from when they applied (or were sourced) to when were moved to the hired stage. This metric remains meaningful regardless of how long the job has been open, and is the recommended metric to focus on for evergreen roles.