<aside> 💡 Openings allow you to build and track your headcount plan directly in Ashby, ensuring your team’s data quality and giving you the information you need where you need it. The Openings feature in Ashby lets you track your open headcount, hiring goals as well as metrics for each individual headcount accurately.

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Openings Management is available on the following plans:

Section overview:

Openings Overview

Headcount planning is essential to achieving operational excellence in hiring. Doing so helps your team to understand if you have the knowledge and skills on the team to achieve your goals, and to reduce costs on hiring workflows that don’t yield results. This guide covers openings, which represent individual headcount that your team wants to fill. Openings in Ashby let you track your open headcount, hiring goals as well as metrics for each individual headcount accurately.

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How to use openings

Openings allow you to ensure that hiring only happens against approved headcount. To that end you should follow these best practices:

• When you are actively hiring for a job, it should be linked to at least one approved opening.

• Whenever you make a hire, it should be linked to an approved opening (and if you enable Strict Mode Ashby will require this).

  It is recommended to input your forward-looking hiring plan into Ashby (e.g. for the next quarter or next half year). You can input openings as Approved but not yet Open.

  Ashby allows you to input openings ahead of opening the corresponding jobs (often you know you want to hire for a certain role, but it’s far enough out that you don’t have a job description yet and haven’t completed an intake meeting).

An opening should be marked as Open as soon as you actively start hiring for it. This allows you to track time to fill (the time from when a specific opening was opened to when it was filled with a hire) on the opening level.

Enable Openings in Admin

To enable the openings feature, navigate to Admin > Openings, then toggle the Enable Manual Opening Management option. Configure the other options on the page before moving on.

Note: The Headcount Planning page in Admin has been renamed to Openings.

1. Enable Manual Opening Management - use this to enable/disable the openings feature.
2. Opening Identifier Prefix - you can append an opening identifier to the beginning automatically generated numeric value.
3. Next Opening Identifier Number - Add in the next opening identifier here (if you’d like it to start on a specific number).
4. Strict Mode - when toggled on, your team will be required to link openings when creating new jobs. We recommend leaving strict mode off while setting up openings so your team isn’t blocked.