The four methods for adding new employees are:
▪ Automatically from another tool
▪ Manually from another tool
▪ Manually
▪ CSV import
Likely, you'll want the process to be as automated as possible, so you don't have to think about it. Someone in recruiting marks an applicant as hired and Sora automatically imports the new hire.
But, it's good to at least know the other ways you can add an employee, in case you ever need to improvise. Like, say you need to add a new employee who isn't in your ATS. Why would that happen? Who knows, the world is a crazy place, right?
One thing to note for all other methods, to add an employee they must have the Required fields.
By default, those fields are first name, last name, personal email, and timezone. But your Sora admin can make any field required on the Data management settings page.
Automatically add employees from another tool
Now the best way to add employees is to have Sora automatically add the employee from another tool, like your ATS, by adding them to your onboarding workflow.
To do this, first, your ATS must be integrated with Sora. This was probably already done as a part of your implementation. But if not, you can get help integrating your tool either by checking the help docs or reaching out to your Sora representative.
Then you'll need to create the webhook. A webhook is basically instructions for when and how the tool will send the employee to Sora.
To create the webhook, you'll need to go to your onboarding workflow. Find it on the Workflows page and click it. You'll see an overview of all of the employees currently being onboarded. Click the Manage workflow button on the top right.
Now on the workflow management page, click the Actions dropdown and select Workflow settings. In workflow settings, switch to the Trigger tab. This is where you'll add the webhook that you just created as the trigger for adding a new employee to Sora.
Select the tool and then the status that you want to listen for. Sora will give you an endpoint URL and a secret key. This is the information you need to give your ATS. Here are instructions for how to do that in Greenhouse and Lever.
Click the Create trigger button and now when a candidate is marked as hired in your ATS they'll automatically be added to Sora and added to the onboarding workflow.
Manually add employees from another tool
If an employee is in your ATS, and for some reason, they have not been automatically added to Sora, you can manually import.
From the Employees page, click the Add employees button on the top right.
Select Import from another service from the dropdown.
Now, chose the tool you'd like to import from in the drop-down.
To find the employee, either search by email address or, if it's easier, you can see a list of recently updated employees in that tool.
Now you'll see the employee profile, with all of the data imported from the tool.
Simply click the Create employee button at the bottom to add the employee.
Manually
The simple manual way to add an employee is right from the employees' page. You probably wouldn't want to add every employee this way, but it gets the job done in a jam.
From the Employees page, click the Add employee button in the top right corner.
From the dropdown, select Create new.
You'll get a fly-out where you can manually enter all of the data to create the new employee.
At the top of each section, you can see how many required fields it has. And next to the required fields you'll see either an asterisk or Required.
Until all required fields are filled, the Create employee button on the bottom right will be de-activated.
At any point, if you want to see which required fields are not filled, just hover over the de-active button and a tooltip will tell you which required fields are empty.
When those fields are filled you can click the Create employee to, you guessed it, create the employee.
CSV import
Another manual, but slightly more at-scale way of adding employees, is the CSV import.
With the CSV import, you're able to add multiple employees at once, and with the right data source and the right formatting, you might be able to copy and paste data into your CSV, instead of manually entering it.
To start, go to the Employees page and click the Add employees button on the top right.
Select From CSV from the dropdown.
As a start, Sora will generate a template with all of your data fields. To download it, click the download a template link.
When you open the template CSV in your spreadsheet tool - like Excel, Numbers, or Google Spreadsheets - the first row is the header. This is how Sora will map each piece of data to the correct data field. Every row after the header is an employee.
After you've added all the employees and employee data, save the CSV. Note that often using the "save" function in spreadsheet tools creates a program-specific file, like import.xlsx import.numbers. If you're unable to save as a CSV, look for an option to export the file as a CSV.
Now, back on to the Import from CSV page in Sora, either drag and drop the CSV file into the CSV section or click it to use the file browser to find and upload the CSV file. Then click the Continue to map fields button.
On the mapping fields page, Sora uses the header from your CSV to map the data to the correct field. If you used the template and did not make any changes to the header row, all of the fields should already be correctly mapped. But give it a quick skim to double-check. If you made any changes to the header row or are using your own custom CSV, pay extra attention that the fields you're importing are mapped to the correct field in Sora.
Because of this, you should be extremely cautious of empty fields. If your CSV import is updating an existing employee who has data in a field and your CSV import is blank in that field, it will override that data with an empty field.
When all fields are correctly mapped, hit the Next step button and you'll see a table of the employees and the data you are importing. Once again, give this a quick look to make sure that you have mapped all the fields correctly. You'll probably need to scroll horizontally to see all of the columns.
An important note about CSV import: If the employee isn't already in Sora, CSV import will create the employee. But if the employee is already in Sora, the import will update the employee's fields. On this page you will see a column
When you're certain that all fields are mapped correctly, click the Validate button to run a quick check on the data in your uploaded CSV to help you catch some annoying errors before you attempt to import the data.
Then, when your data is ready, hit the Import button in the top right corner of the page. If it's a larger CSV, it may take a few moments. Just give it some time. When the import is successful, you'll be taken back to the employees page where you'll be able to search and find the employees you just added.
