Odoo Recruitment: pipeline, stages and applicant tracking for fast-hiring SMEs

What Odoo Recruitment does for an SME

Odoo Recruitment is the applicant-tracking module inside Odoo's HR suite. Odoo keeps all job applicants organized with a preconfigured series of steps and stages that each applicant goes through, with each stage carrying specific actions and templated communications. Odoo documents this as the applicant flow.

For a small or mid-size business, the appeal is that a single native application gives you the candidate-facing job posting, the recruiter's Kanban pipeline, automated acknowledgement and interview-scheduling emails, structured interview questionnaires, and the hand-off into Odoo Employees when someone signs — without bolting on a separate ATS.

• →One native app covers job postings, applicant pipeline, surveys, résumés, and the hire hand-off.
• →Default pipeline runs New to Contract Signed across six stages.
• →Designed for SMEs that want recruitment tied to HR in a single install rather than a standalone ATS.

The default Odoo recruitment pipeline and Kanban stages

When an applicant applies for a job position, Odoo automatically creates an applicant card for that specific job position. The recruitment team then moves the card from stage to stage as the applicant progresses through the pipeline. The default Kanban view for a job position shows six stages: New, Initial Qualification, First Interview, Second Interview, Contract Proposal, and Contract Signed.

In the New stage, all applicants appear whether they submitted online or were entered manually by a recruiter. The final stage, Contract Signed, is folded by default — folded columns appear gray and the applicants in them are hidden from view until the column is clicked to expand.

Configuring stages, status bars and automated emails

Each Kanban stage shows a color-coded status bar beneath the stage name: green means the applicant is ready to move to the next stage, red means blocked, and gray means in progress (neither ready nor blocked). The status is set manually on each applicant card via the status circle in the lower-left of the card. Applicants move between stages either by drag-and-drop in the Kanban view or by clicking the stage on the status bar at the top of the applicant card; each stage change is logged in the chatter.

Stage settings are where the automation lives. The Edit Stage form has one required field — Stage Name — plus an optional Email Template that is automatically sent when an applicant's card enters the stage, and options for Folded in Kanban, Hired Stage (which drives the applicant's hire date and shows a Hired banner), Job Specific (so the stage only applies to certain positions), and Show in Referrals with a referral Points field. There are also editable status tooltips (the three label names In Progress, Blocked, and Ready for Next Stage can be renamed) and an internal Requirements notes field.

Stages can be configured to automatically send a preconfigured email template as soon as an applicant's card enters the stage. Stages apply to all job positions unless marked as job-specific.

Preconfigured recruitment email templates

Odoo ships several preconfigured recruitment email templates so that the communications around each stage are mostly done for you. Recruitment: Applicant Acknowledgement auto-sends in the New stage to confirm the application was received. Recruitment: Schedule Interview auto-sends in the Initial Qualification stage to let the applicant know they passed the first screen and will be contacted for an interview. Interest, Not interested anymore, and Refuse cover the typical decision paths.

At any point in the pipeline, an applicant can be refused. Templates can also be created, modified, or deleted to suit the business, and the full composer in the chatter supports attachments and saving a message as a new template.

• →Applicant Acknowledgement (auto-sent in New)
• →Schedule Interview (auto-sent in Initial Qualification)
• →Interest, Not interested anymore, and Refuse for decision paths

Interviews, surveys and structured assessments

Odoo can send a survey to an applicant to gather more information. Surveys can be thought of as exams, questionnaires, tests, or certifications tailored per job position — for example, a programming quiz for a developer role or an availability questionnaire for a restaurant server.

Enabling the Send Interview Survey option in Recruitment Settings adds an Interview Survey link that lists every survey in the database (not only those used in Recruitment). Enabling the option also installs the Surveys application once settings are saved, if it is not already installed. Sending a survey requires an email address on the applicant's card.

This is a useful SME pattern: instead of buying a separate assessment tool, the recruitment pipeline reuses Odoo Surveys for skills tests, screening questions, and certifications, all launched from the applicant card and tied back to the candidate record.

Résumés, OCR digitization and SMS

Résumé handling in Odoo Recruitment comes in two layers. The free Résumé Display setting surfaces the applicant's résumé (CV) directly on the right side of the applicant card in full-screen mode; all submitted résumés are stored in the Documents application and are accessible from the applicant card.

Résumé Digitization (OCR) is an In-App Purchases (IAP) feature that extracts the applicant's name, phone number, and email address from the résumé and populates the applicant form. Three modes are available: Do not digitize, Digitize on demand only (a Digitize document button appears on applicant cards), and Digitize automatically (all résumés digitized on submission). Disabling the OCR option entirely uninstalls the module, while the Do not digitize mode keeps the module installed but inactive so it can be re-enabled later without reinstalling. Credits for OCR are purchased via the Manage Service & Buy Credits link, an IAP service; the View My Services link shows remaining balances.

SMS text messaging to applicants is supported from the Recruitment app and requires the same IAP credits, managed through the Manage Service & Buy Credits link.

The Salary package configurator setting lets recruiters set an offer-expiration window in days; after that window passes, an unaccepted offer is no longer available.

The Dynamics 365 HR recruitment equivalent

Dynamics 365's recruitment story is split across two experiences, and SMEs evaluating platforms should understand both. Native Dynamics 365 Human Resources recruitment (the Recruitment projects experience) organizes recruiting requests and applicants per legal entity via recruitment projects; a single applicant may have multiple applications within the same legal entity or across multiple companies. Its core strength is the hand-off from candidate to employee inside the same HR system, and it is explicitly designed to coexist with a separate external recruiting application — HR enters the request, the external tool sources candidates, referrals come back into HR, and approval runs there. Candidates can also be managed manually without a separate tool.

The newer HR Recruitment experience is delivered through a Recruiting add-on app (currently in Preview). Per Microsoft's setup documentation, the add-on requires a Dynamics 365 finance and operations environment on version 10.0.40 (10.0.1935.72) or later with the latest quality update, a Dynamics 365 Human Resources license for that environment, system administrator permissions on both Dynamics 365 Human Resources and Power Apps, Microsoft Power Platform integration with Dataverse, and the Finance and Operations Virtual Entity and Microsoft Flow Approvals solutions installed. It is enabled through Feature management (the (Preview) Enable recruitment add-on feature) and the Human resources parameters Recruitment tab, and the app itself is installed from the Power Platform admin center.

The Recruiting add-on includes a Power Pages-based careers site (reactivated from the Inactive sites tab in Power Pages) and a set of cloud flows grouped under the HCM recruiting flows and HCM Recruiting solutions — including a Portal create candidate flow that must be active for candidates to create a profile. The add-on manages connections through Recruiting approvals (Approvals connector) and Recruiting dataverse (Microsoft Dataverse connector) references.

Compared with Odoo's single-app, Kanban-default, OCR-IAP-bundled model, D365 recruitment is more enterprise and modular: more licensing prerequisites, a legal-entity and project structure rather than per-position Kanban, and a heavier add-on install before you get the candidate-facing portal. Odoo's bundled pipeline is faster to stand up for a small team; Dynamics 365 is the path for organizations already on the Dynamics 365 finance-and-operations stack that want recruitment tied to legal entities, formal approvals, and the HR master record.