The Auto Change Priority column in Recruiting Setup > Candidate Status allows you to define which candidate status Recruiting ultimately assigns candidates after they complete more than one screening question in a job application configured to trigger a candidate status.
For example, a question in a job application asks candidates if they are legally entitled to work in Canada, assigning them to the “Declined” status if they answer “no.” Another question of the same application asks if they ever worked with the organization, moving them ahead to the “In Progress” status if they answer “yes.” A candidate answers “no” to the first question and “yes” to the second questions. As a result, there are two potential status changes, “In Progress” and “Declined”. However, the candidate can only end up in one status.
In this case the candidate should be declined, regardless of how they answered the second question. To configure this to occur, in the Auto Change Priority column, type “1” for the “Declined” status and “2” for the “In Progress” status. This way, because the system can only choose one status to update to, it chooses the one with the highest priority. In the case of this example, it updates the candidate's status to “Declined” and omits “In Progress” status.
Leave the Auto Change Priority column blank for a status, and it has equal priority to other blank columns. In this case, the system updates status based on which status triggering question comes first in the job application. For example, if an “In Progress” triggering question comes before a “Decline” triggering question and priority wasn’t configured for either status, the candidate would move to the “In Progress” status.
Note: Status updates that are triggered by screening questions, for all candidate statuses, are only supported for external candidates and not for internal candidates. For example, if an internal candidate answered one of these questions, their status wouldn’t be automatically updated.