Within Natural HR, Templates can be used to automatically generate a document that can be sent digitally to an employee or candidate, or recorded on their file.  

The templates feature can be found by navigating to:

Documents > Templates

The following links can be used to navigate to different sections of this article:

• Creating a Template File
• Adding a Template
• Using Employee Templates
• Using Letter of Offer Templates
• Templates and Workflows
• Workflow Tags
• Additional Resources
  
  

Creating a Template File

In order to use a template, you must first create the template file as either a Rich Text Format (RTF) or Plain Text (TXT) file.

Template files can be created in any application that can create a document in either in either RTF or TXT format.  However, please note that the document you upload must be a totally clean document.  Many word processors (including Microsoft Word) add additional data and formatting information to documents which are not visible to the eye, but which can cause issues when those documents are used as Templates in Natural HR.  We would, therefore, recommend using a basic editor such as Wordpad or Notepad to create templates files for use in Natural HR. If your template letter requires a letter head you can create the template in an application such as Microsoft Word but the file must then be saved in either RTF or TXT format.

When creating templates you can also use placeholders, in much the same way you would when creating an email within a workflow. 

The available placeholders, or tags, are listed in the system on the Templates page and can be found by  expanding the "Guidance on Templates" section at the bottom of the page.  They are also listed in the Workflow Tags section at the bottom of this article for your convenience.

They are used as part of the template text so, for example, the opening lines of a letter to an employee might read:

And, when used, the result might look like:

Adding a Template

To add your template file to Natural HR, navigate to:

Documents > Templates

Click on the "Add" button at the bottom of the page to add your template, which will take you to the following screen:


Enter a name for your template and (optionally) a description.  Next, choose the category for your document.  This is either:

• Employee - A template to be populated with employee information and stored in an employee's documents.
• Letter of offer - An offer letter to be populated with candidate information and used in the recruitment module.

If you intend to use the template in a workflow, please choose the mandatory document category that the resulting document should be associated with, and the sites that the template should be available for.

Finally, click the "Browse" button to locate your TXT or RTF file and upload it to the system and click "Submit".

Using Employee Templates

Once you have created an Employee template, you can create a document based on that template by selecting 'Create template letter' in the Actions column next to the template you want to use:

On the next screen you can choose the employee(s) to create document(s) for:

First, choose your Selection method:

• Current Employees - Create a document for a current employee or employees.
• Archived Employees - Create a document for all archived employees.
• Metadata - Use metadata to determine which employee(s) to create a document for.  You can choose here, for example, all employees with a given Job Role or Department.

If you choose the Current Employee option you can further choose whether to create the document for all current employees or selected employees by name.

Next you can choose the Action you want to run on the template.  Your options are:

• Download - Simply download the created document to your device.
• Attach to employee file - Attach the created document to the Employee's Documents.
• Download and attach to employee file - Both download the document to your device, and add it to the employee's documents.

If you choose either of the options to attach the document to the employee file, you will be presented with a new set of fields to determine the name of the document that will be created, alongside whether it requires an electronic signature, whether it should be placed in an Employee Document Category (folder) and the visibility of the created document:

Finally, click on the Create button to create the document and either download or attach it, depending on your chosen options.  A document will be created based on your template for each employee in your criteria.

Using Letter of Offer Templates

Letter of Offer templates are used within the Recruitment module to generate an offer letter for a Candidate.  Once you have created an Offer for a candidate, either using the Offer button on their Candidate Record or by navigating to Recruitment > Job Offers, you can generate the offer letter for the candidate by clicking on the "Create letter of offer" button in the actions column:

You will be asked to choose the template to use (this should be a template of category "Letter of offer") and the offer you want to use:

Click the Submit button to download the created offer letter document.

Templates and Workflows

When building a workflow in Workflow Builder the "Create template" workflow step can be used to create a document from a template.  For more information on this feature please refer to the following article: Template Letters with Workflows.

Workflow Tags

The workflow tags currently available in the system are listed here for your convenience:

Additional Resources

• A customer webinar on the topic of "Using Templates For Employee Communication" is available to customers here.
• Guidance on using templates with workflows can be found here.
• A sample template file can be downloaded here.