Creating Hiring Team Roles

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to create and assign Hiring Team roles.

Hiring Team Roles in SmartRecruiters

The primary use of Hiring Team roles is to define which actions each user can perform at job and candidate level during the hiring process for a specific opening. Hiring Team roles in SmartRecruiters are essential for defining responsibilities and driving the workflow for a specific job requisition.

It is important to understand the difference between a Hiring Team Role and a System Role.

Hiring Team Roles and System Roles Comparison

Feature	Hiring Team Role	System Role
Scope	Job-specific. Assigned for a single job requisition.	Global. Assigned to the user's profile and applies across the entire platform.
Purpose	Defines a user's access and permissions in the hiring process of a specific job.	Defines a user's capabilities and access across the entire platform (for example, access to settings, reporting).
Example	Hiring Manager (for the Marketing VP job).	Admin or Recruiter.
Assignment	Set on the job requisition.	Configured in Settings→User Management.

Note

For those familiar with SAP SuccessFactors, Hiring Team Roles are known as Recruiting Operators in the SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting solution.

When someone adds a user to a hiring team, they assign the user a Hiring Team Role that determines:

the user's level of access to certain information about the job and candidates on that job
the actions the user can take on the job or candidate, such as extending an offer or editing the job’s details

Types of Hiring Team Roles

Hiring Team Roles can be categorized into two high level types:

Standard/Default Hiring Team Roles: These are the five Hiring Team Roles that appear in the Hiring Team Roles Configuration menu. They come with out-of-the-box permissions, but, other than their names, are fully configurable.
Additional Custom Roles: Consists of a maximum of five additional roles that you can create and configure to your liking. They are fully configurable from the Custom Roles menu, including their role name.

Standard/Default Hiring Team Roles

There are five standard/default Hiring Team Roles that are pre-built into the SmartRecruiters system.

Standard Hiring Team Roles

Standard Hiring Team Roles - Types	Standard Access and Permissions
Hiring Manager	The default Hiring Manager role gives users full access to the job and candidates who apply to the job, and they can perform all job and candidate actions without restriction.
Interviewer	The default Interviewer role grants the most limited level of access. This role is only able to view candidate profiles and resumes, and rate and compare candidates.
Recruiter	The default Recruiter role gives users full access to the job and candidates who apply to the job, and can perform all job and candidate actions.
Executive	The default Executive role gives users full access to the job and candidates who apply to the job, and can perform all job and candidate actions without restriction.
Coordinator	The default Coordinator role gives users full access to the jobs they are assigned to, but they have limited access to candidates who apply to that job. They can't advance candidates through the hiring process, extend offers, or reject.

Essentially, Hiring Team Roles exist to help companies manage users with Standard and basic system roles, and give them different levels of access and permissions on each job for which they are part of the hiring team.

Users with Admin or Extended system roles have full access to jobs and candidates, no matter what hiring team role they have. Their system role takes priority over hiring team roles.

In many organizations, there may be other individuals involved in the hiring process such as an HRBP. AS previously mentioned, in SmartRecruiters, you can build up to five additional custom Hiring Team Roles as needed.

Actions and Access Levels

The permissions assigned to a Hiring Team Role in SmartRecruiters are narrowly focused on job-specific actions and candidate access for that particular requisition. They determine what a user can do with the job and its candidates, rather than their global access to the system.

The process of assigning Hiring Team Role permissions requires understanding the action that is being permissioned, and the access level to that action. Each action can have a different access level to ensure that the right roles have the access to perform the appropriate actions.

Actions

Each custom and default hiring team role's permissions is defined as a list of actions they can or cannot perform about the job or candidates on the job.

For example, job actions include:

Publishing/unpublishing/cancelling a job.
Editing the job's status manually (without moving the candidate forward or back in the process.

When added to a job's hiring team and assigned a role, the user is assigned the role's list of allowable actions for that job and any candidate applications to that job.

Access Levels

Each role is assigned an access level for each action. The access level determines exactly what a user who is assigned that role can do in relation to that action.

Some actions have three levels (for example creating and sending offer for approval or sending to candidate):

Access Levels - Table 1

Permission Type	Description
Write	User can see and modify information.
Read	User can see but not modify information.
None	User cannot see or modify information.

Others have four (for example, reviews of the candidate):

Access Levels - Table 2

Permission Type	Description
Write	User can see previous reviews and write reviews.
Write only	User can only own previous reviews and write reviews.
Read	User can see the reviews tab but cannot write a review.
None	User cannot see the review tab at all.

Others have only two (for example, requesting the consent from the candidate and the status of that consent):

Access Levels - Table 3

Permission Type	Description
Yes	User can perform this action.
No	User cannot perform this action.

Modify Default Hiring Team Role Permissions

Through the Hiring Team Roles menu, admins can precisely configure and customize the access and actions granted to existing or additional Hiring Team Roles.

Steps

Navigate to Settings.
Within the Permissions section, select Hiring Team Roles.
Within the Configure Default Roles tab, you will find a table displaying the default Hiring Team Roles and permissions assigned to two categories: Job and Candidate.
Find the permission you would like to modify for a Hiring Team Role.
Select the pencil Edit icon.
Choose the role's Access Level for that action from the list.
Select Save.
Note
Changes take effect immediately.

Create a Custom Hiring Team Role

To create a custom hiring team role:

Steps

Navigate to Settings.
Within the Permissions section, select Hiring Team Roles.
On the Additional Roles tab, select Manage additional roles.
Select Add a role.
In the Name field, enter a name for the role.
Select Save.
When you create a new role, SmartRecruiters defaults all of the role's Access Levels to None, No, or Read as appropriate for each action. In the Job and Candidate Actions tables, go through each action and assign an Access Level by clicking on the pencil Edit icon and choosing an access level from the dropdown menu that appears.
Select Save.

Assignment of Employees to a Hiring Team Role

Once a user is added within the job to one of the Hiring Team roles, the role will determine which job-specific actions they can take and the job or candidate-related data they can see within the job.

The hiring team can be added to the job when it's created and can be modified at any time. When creating a job, it's always mandatory to add at least a Recruiter or a Hiring Manager to the hiring team.

Displays Hiring team members, their roles, and search bar to find and add other users to the Hiring team.

Example Use Case: Configuring Hiring Team Roles for Company A Recruitment Strategy

The company HR team is implementing SmartRecruiters across the organization. Before posting any jobs, they need to define standard Hiring Team Roles that align with their recruitment governance model.

After analyzing their hiring process, they identify that their stakeholders typically include:

Engineering Managers: Need full control over their technical hires.
Technical Interviewers: Should evaluate candidates but not make hiring decisions.
Recruiting Coordinators: Handle scheduling and logistics without candidate decision-making authority.
HR Business Partners: Review compensation and approve offers but don't manage the day-to-day hiring process.
Department Executives: Require visibility into senior-level hires for final approval.

Once the list of stakeholders has been developed, the admin team configures the system:

They customize the five default roles (Executive, Hiring Manager, Recruiter, Coordinator, Interviewer) to match Company A's standard permissions.
They create a custom HRBP role with:
- Read access to candidate information.
- Write access to offers and compensation.
- Read access to reviews.
- No (None) access to advancing candidates through stages.

Result: Now, whenever any recruiter creates a job requisition across Company A, whether for engineering, marketing, or finance, they can assign team members to these standardized roles, ensuring consistent permissions and responsibilities across all hiring processes company-wide.

Additional Notes

Admins cannot deactivate an additional role if the role is currently being used in an existing approval chain.
Admins cannot delete an additional role if there is at least one user assigned to that role on a hiring team.
There are some inter-dependencies between actions. SmartRecruiters will resolve these inter-dependencies as needed. For example, assume an admin has granted a user Write permissions for Offers, but None permissions for Messages. The user will need to be able to send an offer, so SmartRecruiters will ignore the Messages permission. In the future, they may add de-confliction rules, but this is the current logic.
SmartRecruiters will automatically update candidate status based on user actions, even if the user doesn't have the ability to edit status in following situation:
- First email, message or review made on an application will move automatically the application from New to In Review – first step.
- If Offer Accepted step is activated, when an offer is accepted by the user in the UI, the application will move automatically to Offer Accepted step.

Note

If workflows are enabled, the system behavior might be different.

Summary

Hiring Team Roles clarify responsibilities for actions during the hiring process for a specific job, defining access to job and candidate information.
Hiring Team Roles are job-specific, defining responsibilities within a specific job requisition, whereas System Roles are global, defining a user's capabilities across the entire SmartRecruiters platform.
The five standard roles (Executive, Hiring Manager, Recruiter, Coordinator, Interviewer) come with pre-built permissions that can be customized.
Admins can create up to five additional custom roles and configure them to your liking, including their role name and permissions.

Continue to quiz