Job closure reasons are the list you pick from when closing a job — they capture why a job closed (filled, put on hold, cancelled, and so on), feed job closure reporting, and are included in data exports alongside Candidate Source and Rejection Reason. This article covers creating, renaming, and turning reasons on or off. For the actual steps to close a job, see "Archiving and closing a job."

Managing the reasons list

• Add a reason. Go to Settings → Job Closure Reasons, add a new reason, and name it.

• Rename an existing reason. Editing a reason's name is available from the same settings page, though see Needs Verification and Good to know — renaming has had a real, long-standing reliability issue.

• Turn a reason off instead of deleting it. As with rejection reasons, you can disable a reason to remove it from the picker going forward without deleting the underlying record — the safer option if the reason has already been used on jobs you want to keep an accurate historical record for.

What closure reasons are used for

• The reason picked when a job is closed feeds job-level reporting — including closure-rate views in Job Reports — and is included alongside Rejection Reason and Candidate Source in data exports.

• Organizations typically group their reasons into a small set of categories that reflect why a job closed — for example, one account's reason set includes categories like Plan, Incremental, Hiring Freeze, and Cancel, alongside outcome-specific reasons such as a hire being made.

• Your own list is fully custom, so the categories that make sense for your hiring process are up to you to define.

Good to know

• Renaming a closure reason has a real, still-open bug where the edit doesn't reliably save. If a rename doesn't stick, contact support — one customer had Kula's team apply the rename on their behalf rather than resolve it themselves.

• If you migrated from another ATS, cleaned-up or disabled reasons may still appear in the close-job dropdown. This happened on at least one real, migrated account, where reasons that had already been cleaned up in Settings kept showing up when closing a job — Kula's engineering team had to remap the old values on the backend. If you see reasons you don't recognize or thought you'd removed, flag it to support.

• A job stuck in Pending Approval can't be closed directly. It needs to be approved first — either through the normal approval flow, or by having an Admin or Super Admin override the approval — before the close action, including picking a closure reason, becomes available. See "Job approval workflows" for more on approval overrides.

• Reopening a closed job sends it back to Draft, not directly back to Open. You'll need to relaunch the job after reopening it before candidates and the posting become active again.

• Kula doesn't automatically notify candidates in active interview stages when you close a job. This is a real, current, unresolved gap — the workaround today is bulk-rejecting remaining candidates manually, which is capped at 100 candidates per action. For a job with a large applicant pool, this can mean doing that cleanup in many batches.

FAQ

• Where do I manage the list of job closure reasons? Settings → Job Closure Reasons.

• I renamed a closure reason and the change didn't save — what do I do? This is a known, long-standing issue. Contact support if a rename doesn't take — they can apply it for you if needed.

• We migrated from another ATS and old closure reasons are still showing up even though we cleaned up the list — why? Cleanup in Settings doesn't always remove legacy, migrated reasons from the close-job dropdown. Contact support for a backend remap.

• Can I close a job that's still Pending Approval? Not directly — it needs to be approved first, or have an Admin/Super Admin override the approval, before you can close it.

• Does Kula email candidates automatically when I close a job? No, not currently — candidates in active stages aren't auto-notified. You'd need to bulk-reject and notify them manually, in batches of up to 100.

Need help?

Reach out to us at support@kula.ai or use the in-app chat.