What are job templates? How do we use them?
Updated 2 weeks ago
There is no “right way” to hire people, only the way that’s right for your business. Job templates help you customize and scale your recruiting process.
As organizations grow, recruiting can get complicated. This happens because it’s healthy to customize the hiring process for different teams and roles. For example, your engineering team might include a take home problem solving exercise while your sales team asks candidates to run a presentation in their onsite interview.
Organizations also need people to follow increasingly complex rules as they grow. For instance, you might need jobs in Arizona to be approved by Karen, Arvind and Mike, while jobs in Paris need to be approved by Yolanda or Sariose.
Job Templates help make this complexity more manageable.
Opening up a new job can be a lot of work. It’s not unusual to have to figure out how to get a job approved, determine the appropriate compensation range, author job requirements, select media, define an assessment strategy, configure the workflow, and set up a job application form. (phew!)
All of this can be a bit overwhelming, and it's understandable that people look for shortcuts when adding and opening jobs. The goal of job templates is to prepopulate as much job information as possible, increasing the likelihood of running an efficient, high quality recruiting process.
To template or not to template?
When you add a new job in JobScore you have two choices: you can use a job template or copy a pre-existing job in your account:
Copying existing jobs just makes sense. When you’ve done the work to get a job “just right” - it's easier to copy it and make a few small adjustments than to start from scratch. This is how most small and medium sized companies use JobScore and it works great.
Job templates become important when there is no similar job to copy. Each account comes with a single “standard job template” with presets that you can easily change. While a single template can make it easier to add a job for smaller companies, the goal of job templates is for organizations to create multiple unique templates to serve the needs of different locations and departments.
Some organizations ask their teams to not copy jobs and always use a job template. This is so that newly added jobs don't accidentally inherit the inaccurate settings of older copied jobs.
How to use job templates
Job templates are a reflection of your hiring process. The idea is to create a template for each major variation of your recruiting process. Here's what you can customize per template:
Job Description: The idea isn’t to write a complete job description here, it’s to add reusable content that makes it easier for someone else to write a great job description. This typically includes "about us" bullet points and information about your perks and benefits. We recommend including some directions about what additional information you want people to add under job responsibilities and requirements. Need some inspiration? Read our article about writing great job descriptions.
Media: In addition to the "about us" content of your job description, consider selecting some pictures and videos that showcase your team culture… as well as whether to show a map and profile photos of individual hiring team members.
Job Application Form: Customize what information you want to ask candidates when they apply. Don't see the question you want? You can add custom questions and insert them into your job application form.
Approvals: JobScore includes job approvals and offer approvals. Assign a job approval chain and/or an offer approval chain that will control who needs to approve jobs and offers. Questions? Learn more about approvals
Workflow: Add, remove and re-order the stages of your hiring workflow. You can also assign note, email, task, action and offer templates to stages. You can even assign some of these workflow templates to roles (like hiring manager or recruiter), but you can’t assign them to specific individuals in job templates.
Job Details: You can add custom job fields to your account and set them in the job details area. A good example might be categorizing jobs by division in addition to department.
Referral Reward: Set whether you want to offer a referral reward, who it’s available to, and the amount.
Though you may already have documented aspects of your hiring process outside of JobScore, our goal for job templates is to have you retire your existing documentation. Our hope is that job templates become de-facto living documentation inside the system where your team can easily use and leverage it (instead of referencing external spreadsheets). Job templates help minimize questions and errors when your team adds jobs because as much information as possible is pre-populated for them.
What's not in job templates
Once you've set up your job templates, adding new jobs becomes a 3 step process. First you select a template, then you confirm the pre-populated information is correct and finally you fill in the additional details.
There are many job attributes we've deliberately decided not to include in job templates. This is because sometimes it's too risky to have incorrect information from a job template inserted into a job by accident. It's safer to add these values carefully for individual jobs. Examples include:
Job Type: It would be pretty bad to miscategorize a part time job as a full time job, or vice versa.
Department: We used to include department but many customers choose to use the same template across multiple departments, and having jobs miscategorized was a problem.
Openings: Information about how many people you want to hire, whether they each hire is new headcount or backfill, and corresponding external budget codes are certainly unique per job. Learn more about openings.
Compensation: How much you plan to pay people is certainly unique per job.
Hiring Team: When your organization is small likely you'll have the same people owning each step of the process, but as you grow this changes. We haven't included hiring team assignments because it's a best practice to carefully consider who will own each step of the process when opening a job.
Search Firms: Due to the cost of search firm fees, and the fact that most companies only use search firms for select jobs, we haven't included them in job templates.
If you find that you need to reuse almost exactly the same information every time for these excluded values, we recommend copying an existing job and making tweaks.
The purpose of job templates is to keep track of specific re-usable details for departments and locations, not to be a library of every job at your company. Because JobScore never deletes any job you create, your "job library" will be built automatically over time as you use the system. It's comprised of the closed and filled jobs in your account.
If you don't want your team to copy jobs, you will likely want to recommend that they review old jobs in your library and cut and paste in other useful content when using job templates.
By excluding these values from job templates we reorganize we might be adding a little more data entry when you add jobs, but we feel it's a good tradeoff for the healthy discussions your team will have when adding and opening jobs.
Job Template Names
When your team is asked to select a template, they can’t easily see it’s details - so it’s important to give job templates appropriate names. We recommend using simple template names that signal when templates should be used, for example:
Sales
Warehouse
Finance
Albuquerque
London
Remote worker
Try to avoid obscure template names that won’t help other people understand when to use them like “Mary’s job template” or “Job template 1057.” Job templates are shared with everyone in your account who can add jobs - so you aren’t just creating templates for yourself, but for coworkers who won't be familiar with your work. Taking a few moments to name things appropriately will save you a lot of time later because your team will easily pick the right template from the list and have all of the correct default details filled in and updating a job created with the wrong template can be slow and cumbersome.
Inheritance & bulk editing
Despite all of their configurability and power, job templates do just 1 thing: they populate information into the add job form.
Some people assume that job templates create unbreakable rules, and that the settings defined in job templates cannot be edited. Nothing could be further from the truth. By default all job attributes are editable (provided you have the correct access level). The only way to "lock" the ability to edit job attributes is to use the job approvals feature and turn on the "triggers approval" setting for specific job fields you want to lock down. If you are concerned about people making changes willy nilly, know that JobScore records every edit made to a job and who made it, so if someone does go rogue and make an out of bounds edit, it's easy to find the culprit in the history and take action.
Finally, job templates can't be used to bulk edit jobs. When you make a change to a job template, it doesn't impact any of the jobs you created with it. The change will only be factored in the next time you add a new job using the template.
JobScore does include the ability to bulk edit the workflow across many jobs, but you can't do that using job templates. If you need to bulk edit anything other than the workflow for more than 20 jobs, please ask your enterprise account manager for help.
Job templates & recruiting success
It takes effort to set up job templates, but doing so pays long term dividends. Our success team has found that setting up and using job templates is a key indicator that a company is getting the most out of the JobScore. We think this is for a few reasons:
Job templates are a great way to learn about all of JobScore's features and make it easy to set your team up to successfully use them.
The flexibility of job templates removes much of the pressure to be perfect for inexperienced hiring managers, setting them up for easier hiring wins.
Organizations that run structured recruiting kickoff meetings consistently have more recruiting success and job templates help streamline these sometimes difficult meetings.
Job templates are flexible and you can come back and edit them later as you learn and your organization grows. They aren't a "set it and forget it" feature, but a powerful tool that you come back to as you get better at recruiting and your process evolves.
We've seen a direct correlation between job template maturity, feature usage, value extraction, recruiting efficiency, time to hire and hire quality. We hope you enjoy using job templates and that they are a catalyst for your recruiting success.