Pipeline stages

Stages are the columns of your kanban. Every applicant lives in exactly one stage at any time. Stages are workspace-level, not per-hire-page — every page in the workspace shares the same pipeline.

The default pipeline

When you create a workspace, we pre-build a five-stage pipeline that works for most teams:

1. New — fresh applications land here. Every form submission goes to New by default.
2. Reviewing — your team has started looking but hasn't made a call.
3. Interview — moved forward, time to talk.
4. Offer — extended an offer or final-round equivalent.
5. Rejected — done with this candidate.

This pipeline is available on every plan, including Free.

Customizing stages (Growth+)

On the Growth and Scale plans you can:

• Rename any stage
• Reorder stages by drag-and-drop
• Add new stages anywhere in the pipeline
• Delete stages (applicants in the deleted stage are moved to a stage of your choice — we ask before destroying anything)
• Change a stage's color (pure visual, helps the kanban scan faster)

These edits live on Settings → Pipeline inside the workspace. They apply to every hire page in this workspace — there is no per-page pipeline.

Stage colors are picked from a fixed palette of 8 muted tones — we don't allow custom hex on stages because it keeps the kanban readable.

What happens when you move an applicant

1. The applicant's stage updates immediately
2. The activity log records the transition with timestamp, old stage, new stage, and who moved them
3. If the destination stage has a stage-triggered email template, the email is queued
4. The card's position on the kanban updates in real time for every team member viewing the workspace

Designing a pipeline that works

A few patterns from teams using hire.page:

• Keep it short. Five stages is the right ceiling for most roles. Each additional stage adds review overhead.
• Add a "Take-home" or "Sample" stage if your hiring process includes async work review. The stage-triggered email does the asking ("here's the sample, due by X").
• Add a "Hired" stage as the final terminal stage. It makes your win-rate visible on analytics.
• Don't add per-team stages. "Eng review" and "Design review" sound like stages but are actually internal-review tasks — use comments or reviews instead.

Frequently asked

Can I have different stages for different hire pages?

Not in v2. The pipeline is workspace-wide. If you need different pipelines, use separate workspaces (Scale plan).

Can I delete a stage that has applicants in it?

Yes, but we'll ask which stage to move them to first. Applicants are never deleted as a side effect of a stage delete.

Are stages connected to email templates 1:1?

A stage can have an email template attached, but it doesn't have to. A single stage has one template, not multiple. See Email templates.

What's the maximum number of stages?

No hard cap. The kanban gets unwieldy past ~10 columns — we recommend keeping it under 8.