Unified Automations

At Team Engine, we want to be a one stop shop for all of your people-related milestones, activities and communications. Our unified employee timeline gives you full visibility of the employee experience from application to hire, and beyond.

Throughout am employee’s tenure, there are many milestones starting from when they apply all the way to their termination. These milestones are frequently the same across your employees, and the steps you have to take for each one can become repetitive and time-consuming. Team Engine helps you define these milestones once and then automatically takes care of communication at each step moving forward, making your process more consistent while giving you time back in your day.

Automated Messages in the Hiring Process

Team Engine can trigger automatic messages as you move people through the hiring process. Automating the bulk of the hiring process keeps you from having to complete repetitive tasks while still being able to gather information, schedule interviews, and easily communicate with applicants:

Automate outreach when you mark someone as interested in the review tab
Automate sending interview reminders/confirmations
Automatically re-engage with promising applicants

For example, the first couple steps of the hiring process could go as follows:

You mark someone as interested and Team Engine can automatically reach out to them to find a time for an interview.
Once the candidate responds, you can easily click the "schedule interview," enter the date and time, and add the even to your external/personal calendar if you wish. Team Engine can also send out automated interview reminders to the candidate to help reduce the chance of them no-showing, while also giving them an easy way to request a reschedule.
Once an interview has been confirmed, it will be marked as such on the In Progress tab and will also show on the Team Engine calendar so you can see all upcoming events that your team has.
If someone is marked as interested but didn't respond to the automated message about the interview, they will get follow-up messages 24 and 48 hours later to keep you on the candidate's mind.

Time Zones

These messages default to being sent between the hours of 8:00 am and 6:00 pm, based on the time zone of the associated job (if no time zone is found for the job, we default to using Central time.) There are a few exceptions to keep in mind:

Interview reminders will always be sent out 2 and 24 hours before an interview to ensure we aren't sending reminders after an interview has taken place.
Application receipt confirmation messages will be sent immediately after an application is submitted.

You do have the ability to modify this and send at any hour of the day or at a specific delay of your choosing.

Editing Automated Messages

If any of the automated messages within the "Automations" tab of a job don't quite fit your company's culture or language, you can change them by clicking the edit button in the bottom right corner of the message. As a best practice, we recommend keeping the message short and direct. Additionally, you can personalize it so that the candidate doesn't feel like they're talking to a robot. Using your first name and introducing yourself or your company can make applicants know that you are excited about their application. Be like one of our customers in Hawaii, start with an Aloha, or just a friendly hello!

Automated Referrals

People tend to be associated with other individuals that share the same skill set. Using your employees' personal networks to find qualified applicants is a successful method to find new hires. Team Engine offers employers the option to utilize their employees' personal networks with the use of an automatic referral system. With automated referrals, you no longer need to remember to bring up the program with employees every month or worry about tracking and administering a referral program. To learn more about how to set this up, read about Employee Referrals

With all of this in mind, it's time for you to see how automation can save you time to focus on the perfect candidates. Now that you don't have to review hundreds of unqualified applicants or call dozens of people to screen them and set up interviews, it's time to improve the overall hiring process. You can read our ultimate hiring guide here.

Adding Additional Hiring Automations

If you feel that the default messaging that we have set up isn't quite fitting your needs, you can always add your own hiring automations. To set up additional messages, you can go to the automations tab and click the hiring process tab.

There you can go to the phase in the hiring process that you would like to add a message to, and click the "+Add Automation" button. A window will pop up and you can type out your message and chose when you would like it to be sent and then just click save!

Automated Messaging for Employees

Once you move an applicant to "started" the automated messages continue, just from your employee phone number.

To get started with existing employees, set up your employee directory. Note: Make sure to include start dates and birthdays with your employees or you will not be able to take advantage of the automations.

Types of Actions

Team Engine provides 3 different types of actions you can automate for an employee milestone

Send Message

This type will send a message to the employee. You can choose either text or email. This type is useful for providing information (e.g. You have now earned an extra 3 days of PTO) or expressing appreciation (e.g. You have been here for 3 years now. Thanks for everything you do!). You can select the time this message is sent out by selecting "show advanced settings" and then changing the time.

Survey

A survey is a specialized type of message to the employee where you expect a response (e.g. a 30-day feedback survey). Using a survey instead of a message, in this case, is useful because all responses across all employees will be collected together on your Survey page. This way, you can draw connections between responses over time. For more information, see: Employee Surveys

Alert to another team member

At certain employee milestones, you may need an office team member or supervisor to take some kind of action. Rather than keeping track of this via calendar reminders and manual steps, Team Engine can send alert emails to the right people at the right time.

For example, maybe you have a 90-day probation period after which employees are eligible for benefits. If you have a benefits administrator who needs to put together a packet or meet with employees when they get to this milestone, you can add an alert and have Team Engine send that benefits administrator a reminder to do this when someone reaches 90 days.

You can also send an alert to the person’s supervisor. This is valuable for things like a 6-month performance check-in or to let the supervisor know that it’s a person’s work anniversary so they can express appreciation on the job site.

Setting up your employee milestones

Team Engine includes a set of example milestones to get you started. These include:

A Welcome message that goes out in an employee’s first few days to let them know how to get in touch with you, An onboarding survey after 30 days to hear feedback about their initial experience, A message and an alert related to benefits eligibility at the end of a 90-day probation period, an annual work anniversary message

You can customize all of these messages if necessary. For example, maybe your probation period is 60 days instead of 90 or you want to give slightly different instructions.

Adding a new milestone

You can also select specific groups to send automated messages to. This function can help separate things like benefits automations, for example, which may have different eligibility requirements for full-time, part-time, and contract workers. Additionally, location-based groups can be used to send different first-day messages to in-office and field based employees.

Employee Automations can also be scheduled to send prior to a Start Date and Birthdate. This is useful for managers who would like to receive notification a few days before a start date or birthday, so they can prep a card, gift, or event. To set up an annual message before a date, select "Before" in the top drop-down menu, and in Additional Settings, check the “Send Annually” box.

Copying an existing milestone

You are also able to create employee automations by copying an existing one. To do this, select the three dots in the top right corner of the automation, and select "Copy." This will bring up the creation window with all of the information pre-filled. This can be extremely useful when sending automations to specific groups, so you can easily copy and make slight adjustments to tailor the automation to each recipient group.

Frequently Asked Questions

If I add an employee that started in the past, which of the automations will they get?

Employees you add will only get the automations from the point you add them forward. For example, if you add an employee with a start date 35 days ago, they would not receive the 30-day feedback survey.

What are some examples of when I might want to add an automation?

When you want to add an additional message in the sequence e.g. “I want another start day reminder. I like the 24 hours out, but I also want one 72 hours out to remind the new hire of any additional materials to bring with them on their first day.”
When you want to add an automated message as someone is moved to a new hiring stage, such as:
- phone interviewing e.g. “We are excited to have a phone interview with you at John’s Service Co. We will call you from (303) 900-5402 at that time.”
- finalizing hire e.g. “We are excited that you have chosen to join us! The next step is to complete these 3 steps…”

When might I want to modify the time (or delay) when an automation is sent?

As an example, for the interest confirmation:

Rather than sending at 1 hour, you’d like them to send 3 hours after an application is completed submitted
You’d like them to send 1 hour after submission, regardless of the day of the week

Can I still customize hiring automations at the job level, since some jobs require different messages than my organizational defaults?

Yes, while we want to make it easier to manage the lifecycle of your people, we understand that some jobs warrant their own version of a message. You are still able to set a different interest confirmation for individual jobs and are not limited to the same automation across all positions.