4 Ways to Improve Your Job Offer Approval Process

In today’s difficult labor market, organizations need to have an optimized plan in place to make an offer when the right candidate comes along during a job search. A candidate might be juggling multiple offers, and if this is case, ensuring a fast and efficient job offer approval process will help you land the candidate.   

Of course, obtaining internal job approvals is often difficult. After all, job offer approvals take time and require clear communication between internal team members. As such, it can be challenging to process hiring requests in fast-moving, distributed work environments.  

Luckily, with a bit of planning and coordination, your team can enhance the job offer approval process and turn it into a core strength. Keep reading for an overview of what the job offer approval process entails and also some tips to enhance the way your company handles it. 

What Is Job Offer Approval?

Job offer approval is the process of submitting a job offer for internal review before sending it to a candidate for consideration. At a high level, the purpose of job offer approval is to make sure your internal team is in agreement about extending an offer to a new candidate. It helps to reduce conflict, ensure compliance, and avoid having to rescind or modify offers. 

For example, an HR specialist or hiring manager may recommend a particular individual for an open position. Then, the internal approval process commences—and what happens next depends on the organizational structure. In some cases, the job offer may require approval from a director or department lead, another manager, and potentially finance for budgetary clearance. 

Why Job Offer Approvals Are Important

While it may seem like a hassle to go through an internal job offer approval process, taking the time to do so can help the business in a number of ways. Here are a few reasons to consider establishing a clear internal job offer approval process. 

Ensure Speedy Hiring

Teams often need to hire on short notice in order to keep projects and workflows from falling too far behind. But without an efficient hiring system in place, this can be difficult to accomplish—and it can lead to unhappy customers and project delays. For these reasons, companies need to have efficient approval systems in place to quickly vet candidates, agree on the best ones, and extend offers promptly.  

Avoid Rescinding Offers  

Team members need to be in complete alignment before issuing job offers to candidates. Rescinding an offer can lead to reputational damage, and it can also potentially have legal consequences if it leads to emotional or financial harm. By having a careful review process in place, your team can avoid complications when hiring and ensure positive outcomes.  

Hire the Right People

Hiring should never be a hasty process, even when you are short on time. It should involve multiple team members and robust conversations so that everyone can weigh in and determine whether candidates are a good fit. With this in mind, you can use the job offer approval process to collect feedback from team members and conduct thorough reviews. This reduces risk and improves your chances of making successful hires.  

What Components of a Job Offer Require Approval?

There are no specific guidelines as to what you should include in a job offer approval process, as requirements tend to vary across different companies and industries. However, teams need to be in agreement about what elements require approval. Here are a few general components to consider when building your approval process.  

The Candidate

One of the most important aspects to consider is the candidate itself. Key stakeholders like hiring managers, directors, and executives should carefully assess the candidate and review their experience, qualifications, capabilities, and certifications.  

Compensation and Benefits

Once you send out a job offer, you need to be confident that the compensation arrangement is correct—meaning it aligns with your budget, the role, and industry standards. Lowering the compensation structure after sending a job offer is embarrassing, and it can lead to a variety of negative consequences with potential legal ramifications.  

Location

Many companies are now at a crossroads and are trying to determine whether they want to have remote, on-site, or hybrid environments. As such, teams need to be on the same page before extending offers to attract and hire the right candidates.  

Roles and Responsibilities

In some cases, you may need to request approval for specific roles and responsibilities. For example, suppose a marketing department needs a full-time content producer. It may be necessary to gain approval for a writer, a designer, or a hybrid role. 

What Documents Are Needed to Support a Job Offer Approval?

Hiring documentation also tends to vary depending on the industry, organization, and open position. For example, team members may need to see specific certifications, recommendations, work samples, or credit reports, to name a few examples.  

It’s a good idea to consult with your team and find out what documents key decision-makers want to see when making an approval. That way, you’ll save time and prevent delays. 

Tips to Improve the Offer Approval Process

It’s no secret that hiring can be a stressful process—especially for smaller companies and startups where employees are very busy and wear multiple hats. In light of this, it’s necessary to optimize your hiring approval process and make sure it remains fluid and efficient.  

Here are some tips that you can use to streamline offer approvals and make the experience easier and more enjoyable for employees.  

1. Outline Protocols and Procedures

It’s necessary to clearly document hiring protocols and approval procedures so that team members have a clear understanding of how they should route approval requests. To prevent confusion and errors, team members should have easy access to this document.  

2. Review Your Process From Time to Time

Your offer approval process may change over time as your company grows and its needs change. As such, it’s necessary to revisit your hiring approval process periodically to make sure it reflects the current state of the organization.  

3. Create an Inclusive Process

A new hire can impact the chemistry of a team or department. For this reason, it pays to make hiring a community affair and give others a chance to voice their opinions.  

4. Use a Communications Platform Like Slack

It’s much easier to request approvals when everyone is using the same communications system. For example, a platform like Slack can centralize communication and make it faster and easier to route and respond to approval requests. With Slack, you can set up a special channel—or a chat group—specifically for hiring approvals. Plus, you can create automated job offer approval workflows to notify relevant employees when you need their attention. 

How Wrangle Helps With the Job Offer Approval Process

Managing job offer approvals may seem simple. But hiring teams often encounter obstacles that slow down workflows. For example, issues tend to arise when processes are unclear or team members overlook requests. 

Wrangle offers a business process management system for Slack, which your team can use to map and automate hiring approvals. With Wrangle, you can create automated workflows and track progress across every step. Our platform can be used for automating nearly any business process like expediting hiring, managing finance approvals, routing IT ticketing and so much more. 

To experience Wrangle in action, schedule a demo. Better yet, jump right in and create a free account today. 

This post was written by Justin Reynolds. Justin is a freelance writer who enjoys telling stories about how technology, science, and creativity can help workers be more productive. In his spare time, he likes seeing or playing live music, hiking, and traveling.

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