What are openings?

Most of the time companies open a job, find the right person, hire them... and then call it a day.  But sometimes you need to hire multiple people at the same time for the same role – say 3 customer care representatives for a call center.

Openings track how many people you are trying to hire for a job role, so you can open one job in JobScore and use it to hire multiple people at the same time. 

The finance department often uses openings to track the company's hiring plan and forecast how much money will be spent in the future. 

When you hire one person per job at your company, you'll likely not even know openings exist - and everything works great.  If you are asked to hire multiple people at the same time for the same job, or need to start reconciling recruiting activity with finance, openings quickly become essential.

Opening Basics

  • Candidates are hired into openings, not jobs.
  • When you add a job it has 1 opening by default, but you can add more.
  • To move a job into the OPEN job status, there must be at least one opening in it without a hired candidate.
  • To move a job to the FILLED job status there must be a candidate hired into every opening.

Opening Attributes

To help with tracking, reporting, and reconciliation with external systems, each opening includes 7 attributes:

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  1. Opening ID: A system-generated unique ID for the opening derived from the Job ID.  Each opening has an additional letter, so if there are 3 openings for job 0047, their opening IDs will be 0047a, 0047b, and 0047c.  Opening IDs cannot be edited.
  2. Created On: A timestamp of the date the opening was added to JobScore.  This date is used to calculate both time to fill and time to start.  The opening created on date cannot be edited.
  3. Target Start Date: The date you'd ideally like to have a new hire start work.  This is important for financial forecasting and budgeting purposes.
  4. Reason for Hire: Why the opening was created in the first place, either as new headcount or backfill for a departed or terminated employee.
  5. Backfill For: If it's a backfill opening, the name of the former employee you are replacing.
  6. Budget ID: A customizable text field typically used to store a corresponding unique ID for an opening from a financial system.  Storing budget IDs in JobScore makes it easier to reconcile recruiting data with financial forecasts.
  7. Candidate Hired: The name of the candidate hired into an opening.  These candidate(s) are assigned to the job and are in the hired candidate stage.  They can be removed by moving the candidate out of the hired stage (usually into the withdrawn stage by logging a fallout).

Hiring candidates into openings

If a job has multiple available openings you'll be asked to choose which opening you want to hire the candidate into:

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If you are NOT using job approvals, when there is only 1 available opening for a job and you choose to keep the job OPEN when you hire a candidate, JobScore will automatically create an additional opening. 

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Approvals and openings

Here are some additional details about how openings work with the approvals feature:

  • Openings don't have a specific approved on date, only a created on date.  Only jobs are approved in JobScore, not openings.
  • JobScore will not automatically create new openings for jobs.  If you want to add more openings to an approved job, you must get it re-approved.  
  • If you want to keep track of when openings are added to your budget, we recommend you store that in your financial system (most do this automatically). 

Reports and openings

The current number of openings for a job and how many of them have a hired candidate is displayed on the job manager and the view job page:

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There are two export options on the job manager:

  1. Download by job, which is useful for your team to track recruiting activity
  2. Download by opening, which is useful for the finance to track progress against the budget.

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The hire report is based on openings, not jobs. (again, because candidates are hired into openings, not jobs):

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If you have any questions about how to use openings to meet your financial forecasting or hiring needs, please don't hesitate to contact support@jobscore.com.

 

 

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