Candidates View

This guide covers the Candidates view — the dedicated list of hired candidates going through onboarding, separate from the general candidate list in Recruitment — along with the self-service portal invite it sends and what the new hire does once they receive it. It's one of the module's two screens; the other is the Onboarding view.

Purpose

Once someone is hired, HR needs a focused view of exactly the people still being brought on board — not every candidate the company has ever seen — plus a way to get that person set up without typing all of their details in for them. This answers: "Who's currently onboarding, what do they still need from us, and how do they finish setting themselves up?"

The Onboarding Candidates List

• Shows every hired candidate whose job opening is still open, so the list naturally clears itself out as openings close.
• Can be filtered, grouped, and searched the same way the Recruitment candidate list can.
• A candidate can also be added directly here — for a walk-in hire, or anyone who doesn't need to go through the full Recruitment pipeline first.
• Existing entries can be edited or deleted, with the same safeguards as elsewhere: a candidate still referenced by other records (documents, tasks, ratings) can't be deleted outright.

Sending the Portal Invite

• Selected candidates can be emailed their personal onboarding portal link in bulk, one email per candidate.
• The email can include documents generated from the company's mail templates (offer letters, policies, and so on), plus any other files attached manually.
• Sending the invite also drops the candidate onto the Onboarding view board, in the first stage of their job opening.
• The system won't send an invite to a candidate who's already been converted to an employee — whether that happened through the portal or through Recruitment's direct conversion.

The Portal: What the New Hire Does

Once the invite is sent, the candidate receives an email with a private link. The link isn't a login page — it's a personal, one-time URL tied specifically to them, valid until they finish the process. Nothing about it requires them to already have an account with the system.

They work through four steps, in order:

1. Create an account. They choose a password; their username is set automatically from the email address on file.
2. Add a profile photo. Optional, but carries straight through to their employee profile.
3. Fill in personal & employee details. Contact information, address, date of birth, qualification, experience, and emergency contact details. Basic fields (name, phone, address, date of birth) are pre-filled from their candidate record so they're not re-typing what's already known.
4. Provide bank details. Bank name, account number, branch, and address — needed for payroll to pay them once they've joined.

Finishing the bank details step is what actually creates their employee record — it copies their job position, department, and company from the candidate record, carries over any documents already collected during recruitment, and logs them into the system as an employee for the first time. They land on a Welcome Aboard page to close out the process.

If a new hire leaves partway through and comes back to the same link, the system remembers they've already completed the earlier steps and can take them straight to the bank details step rather than starting over.

How Portal Access Works

Unlike the rest of the system, the portal isn't protected by roles or permissions — it's protected by the link itself. Whoever has the private link can complete the steps; there's no separate login required until the account-creation step. Once the new hire finishes all four steps, that same link stops working — it can't be reused, and revisiting it afterward simply shows a not-found page.

If a new hire needs to start over (lost the email, made a mistake, or the link expired unused), HR can resend the portal invite from this view — this issues a fresh link and clears any progress on the old one.

Offer Letter, Joining Date & Probation

• Offer letter status moves through: Not Sent → Sent → Accepted → Rejected → Joined. It can be updated one candidate at a time or in bulk across a selection.
• Joining date is recorded on the candidate once it's known.
• Probation end date is tracked per candidate, once they've joined.

These three fields also feed the Recruitment Dashboard's offer-letter chart — the same numbers, viewed from the hiring side.

Turning Down a Candidate During Onboarding

Occasionally a hire doesn't work out before onboarding finishes. The same rejection record used in Recruitment — a reason plus a note — can be added here too, and removed again if it was recorded in error.

What Each User Sees

Action	Employee	Onboarding Stage / Task Manager	Recruitment Manager	HR Administrator
View a candidate's onboarding detail	—	✅ (their assignment)	✅ (their opening)	✅
View the full onboarding candidates list	—	—	—	✅
Add, edit, or delete a candidate directly	—	—	—	✅
Send the portal invite	—	✅	✅	✅
Update offer letter status, joining date, probation	—	✅	✅	✅
Record or remove a rejection	—	—	—	✅

The new hire themselves isn't a role in the table above — they aren't a system user yet. They interact only through their private portal link, described below.

How Visibility Is Decided

1. Permissions. The full candidates list, and adding, editing, or deleting a candidate directly, all require the specific permission — being a manager alone doesn't unlock these.
2. Assignment. Viewing a single candidate's onboarding detail, sending portal invites, and updating offer letter or stage progress are open to anyone managing a relevant stage, task, or opening (see the Onboarding overview).
3. Company. Candidates belong to the company of the opening they were hired through.
4. The portal is the one exception to all of the above. It doesn't check roles or permissions at all — access is the private link itself, which is why it's covered on this page rather than under the system's usual permission model.

Customization Options

• Portal invite emails can attach any combination of the company's mail templates and manually uploaded files.
• Rejection reasons draw from the same reusable, company-maintained list used in Recruitment.

Good to Know

• This list and the Recruitment candidate list show the same underlying records, just filtered differently — Recruitment shows everyone in the pipeline; Onboarding shows only those already hired and still active.
• Adding a candidate directly here bypasses the recruitment pipeline entirely — there's no requirement that they ever went through Recruitment's stages or interviews.
• Offer letter status lives on the candidate, not a separate document — it's a status field the system tracks, not proof that an actual letter was generated or sent elsewhere.
• There are two ways a candidate becomes an employee, and they're not the same. A recruitment manager can convert a candidate straight to an employee from Recruitment — quick, but it doesn't set the new hire up with their own login. Completing the portal is the guided alternative: the new hire fills in their own details and chooses their own password along the way, so they land on day one already able to log in.
• The system won't let the same candidate go through the portal twice, and won't send a new invite to someone already converted to an employee by either path.
• Documents collected during recruitment carry over automatically — a candidate's uploaded documents from their Recruitment record become their employee documents the moment they finish the portal, with nothing to re-upload.
• Employees created through the portal are tagged as such, distinguishing them in reporting from employees added directly or converted straight from Recruitment.

Their first step, made simple.