Stage automation

Last updated: September 8, 2026

Stage automation lets you attach a reusable sequence of activities — emails, interviews, reviews, assessments, surveys — to a pipeline stage. The moment a candidate enters that stage, the sequence runs on its own, in the order you set, instead of a recruiter triggering each activity by hand.

  • Who can do this: Manage automations: Super Admin, Admin, and the job's Primary Recruiter. Read-only: Hiring Manager (attempting to edit returns a permission error). Blocked: external recruiters and off-team recruiters.

  • Where to find it: On a job's Interview Plan, each stage row has a lightning-bolt icon and an "N Activities" count pill — click it to open the automation builder.

Build an automation

  1. On the job's Interview Plan, click the lightning-bolt icon on a stage.

  2. In the full-screen builder, add activities and drag to reorder them. The picker won't let you add the same activity twice.

  3. For each activity, set its timing: the first activity runs Immediately (on stage entry) or After a delay; every activity after that runs immediately after, or with a delay after, the previous activity (the wording adapts to name the previous activity's type). Delays are 1–720 if set in hours, or 1–30 if set in days. Invalid entries auto-correct when you click away — 0 becomes 1, anything over the max clamps to the ceiling, decimals are stripped, and letters revert to the last valid value. Save is never blocked by a bad delay entry.

  4. For Interview, Review, and Assessment activities, assign the interviewer or reviewer directly in the builder. For interviews, also choose the mode: Schedule with AI coordinator, Self-schedule, or Request availability.

  5. Save. From the stage's kebab menu, you can later Edit automation, Remove automation, Edit stage, or Delete stage.

Activity types

  • Email — sends the email configured at the activity level in the Interview Plan (not the org-wide template from Settings → Templates).

  • Interview — Schedule with AI coordinator, Self-schedule, or Request availability.

  • Review — sends a review to the reviewers configured in the Interview Plan.

  • Assessment — Kula-native or a third-party provider (HackerRank, HackerEarth, Criteria, CodeInterview).

  • Survey — sends a survey to the candidate or the hiring manager.

When automations fire

  • Move a candidate into an automated stage: a "Move to stage with automation?" modal appears, with Cancel, Move without automation, and Move.

  • Add a candidate directly into an automated stage: the automation fires with an inline heads-up — no modal.

  • Transfer to another job: the destination stage's automation fires; the source stage's automation is cancelled.

  • Add to an additional job: the destination fires; the candidate stays active (and unaffected) on the source job.

  • Quick-review Y-press: fires the entry-stage automation.

  • A candidate applies for the job (inbound or careers portal): the entry-stage automation fires on submission — after a fraud check if fraud detection is enabled (apply → fraud check → automation; the automation only fires once the applicant clears and isn't flagged as suspicious).

  • Move a candidate out of a stage, or reject them: any pending automation for that stage cancels immediately.

  • Close a job: a modal warns that active automations for N candidates will be stopped, then cancels them.

Watching it run

An "Activities underway" widget shows live progress for single moves, transfers, and adds, with merge tokens (candidate, job, stage, activity, interviewer/reviewer names) resolved in real time. There's a roughly 15-second window before the first activity sends — hover the widget to reveal a Stop button that cancels the pending activities (the stage move itself still goes through). Closing the widget does not stop the automation; only Stop does.

The candidate's Recent Activities feed is the actual audit trail — every automation activity, and every failure, shows up there. If an activity fails, a red icon appears on the candidate's application page, with the failure reason on hover, so you can see exactly what went wrong.

Good to know

  • Removing an automation is forward-only. Candidates already sitting in the stage stay on the automation they started with; only new entrants skip the removed automation.

  • Bulk moves show one combined progress widget with no per-candidate Stop — single moves get an individual Stop button, bulk moves don't.

  • Moving a candidate out of a stage cancels its pending automation silently, with no warning modal — the confirmation prompt only appears on the way in, not the way out.

  • Rejecting a candidate cancels their pending automations, even though the reject flow itself doesn't mention automations anywhere in its UI.

  • Careers-portal applications only trigger automations on jobs that are Listed on the public page.

  • A completed automation won't re-run if the candidate re-enters the same stage later.

  • If an activity has no interviewer, or an interviewer with no timezone set, you can fix that directly from the builder rather than being blocked with an unclear error.

  • If a review or assessment is set to "recruiter on job" but no recruiter is actually assigned, you can pick a reviewer right there in the builder.

  • Assessment emails can take 10–45 minutes to arrive — that's the assessment provider's own processing time, not a delay on Kula's side.

  • This is a fresh V1. A dedicated help-centre walkthrough with screenshots, AI-assisted automation authoring ("describe the automation"), automations on the Rejection stage, a scorecard-submitted trigger, and a standalone schedule-interview activity are all still to come — this article covers what's live today.

FAQ

No customer questions yet — this feature only reached production the day this article was written, so there's no Pylon-sourced FAQ available. Revisit once real questions start coming in.

Need help?

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