Stage Types: Application Review, Active Stages, Offer, Completed

Every interview plan in Kula is built around five fixed milestones that form the core hiring pipeline. These milestones cannot be deleted or reordered — they represent the universal structure of a candidate's journey from prospect to hire.

Within each milestone, you can add custom stages to reflect your team's specific process. Here is how each milestone works and what you can do within it.

The Five Milestones

1. Prospect

The opening milestone for sourcing and early-stage engagement. Candidates in this stage have been identified but have not yet formally applied.

• Contains a default locked Prospect stage

• You can add additional stages here (e.g. Sourced, Contacted, Interested)

• Typical activities: outreach emails, intro calls, initial screening notes

2. Application Review

This is where active applicants are reviewed and shortlisted. Candidates who submit an application through your job posting land here first.

• Contains a default locked Application Review stage

• You can add additional stages for multi-step screening (e.g. Pre-screening, Shortlisted)

• Typical activities: review activity, email acknowledgements, automated rejection workflows

Reporting note: Application Review is a fixed milestone in pipeline analytics and is tracked separately from Interview stages.

3. Interview (Active Stages)

The Interview milestone is where the bulk of evaluation happens. Unlike the other milestones, the Interview stages are fully customizable — you can rename, add, remove, and reorder them.

Default stages provided:

• Phone Screen

• Assessment

• Face-to-Face

You can edit any of these or create entirely new ones using Add Stage within the Interview milestone.

Important: All stages you add between Application Review and Offer — regardless of what you name them — are grouped together as Interview stages in Kula's pipeline reporting. Custom stage names are preserved for your team's view, but they roll up into a single Interview category in reports.

Typical activities per stage:

• Scheduling interviews (one-on-one or panel)

• Sending automated emails

• Dispatching assessments (native or via integrations like HackerRank, HackerEarth, CriteriaCorp)

• Requesting reviews with scorecards

• Sending candidate surveys

You can also add custom stages under locked milestones (Offer, Hired, etc.) to give more granularity to those parts of the pipeline — for example, creating an Offer Review stage within the Offer milestone or an Onboarding stage within Hired.

4. Offer

The Offer milestone is for final selection, offer creation, and negotiation.

• Contains a default locked Offer stage

• Custom stages within Offer show full offer details and allow editing or sending offers from any sub-stage

• Typical activities: offer letter generation, approval workflows, salary negotiation tracking

5. Hired (Completed)

The Hired milestone is for post-hire engagement and onboarding.

• Contains a default locked Hired stage

• Custom stages within Hired surface the HRIS banner (if connected) and allow candidate sends

• Custom stages allow sending candidates to integrated HRIS systems

• Typical activities: onboarding surveys (candidate or hiring manager), welcome emails, HRIS sync

Stage Behaviour Summary

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Can I rename the default locked stages like "Application Review" or "Hired"?

The four locked milestone stages (Prospect, Application Review, Offer, Hired) cannot be renamed or deleted — they are core to Kula's pipeline structure. You can, however, add additional stages within each milestone and name them anything you like.

Q: Can I add stages inside the Offer and Hired milestones?

Yes. You can now add custom stages within Offer and Hired milestones. Offer sub-stages show full offer details and allow offer actions from any sub-stage. Hired sub-stages surface the HRIS banner and allow sending candidates to your HRIS system.

Q: What happens if a candidate is moved back to a previous stage?

Candidates can be moved forward or backward between stages at any time. Moving a candidate backward does not retrigger activities that have already been completed (like emails already sent), but any activities configured for the stage they are moved into can be triggered manually.

Q: Can I have different stage configurations for different jobs?

Yes. While the global template sets the starting structure, each job's interview plan is its own independent copy. You can customize stages at the job level without affecting the global template or any other jobs.

Need Help?

If you have questions or need assistance with setup, feel free to reach out to us at support@kula.ai or use the in-app chat for assistance.