When creating a workflow step you will be given the option to denote when the workflow step is triggered in relation to your employee, other workflow steps or specific calendar dates. 

It is important to know that when a workflow fires its steps it does not do this sequentially, all steps fire simultaneously based on their trigger conditions. 

The 'When should this happen?'  statement is made from a combination of 4 fields which are detailed below. 

• Number which is associated to field 2 to create a time statement. 
• A time denotation which is used alongside fields 1 to create the time statement.
• A selection of Before/After which ties the time statement created using fields 1&2 together into the trigger date. 
• The trigger date of which there are several options detailed further below.

When creating these statements if you wish for a step to go on a specified day you can set the statement to "0 Days After" which will trigger the workflow step immediately on the specified trigger. 

Trigger date options

There are many options as to when you would like a workflow step to trigger. These options are listed below:

1. Start date - The employees start date.
2. Leave date - The employees leave date.
3. Contract end date - The date an employees contract expires/ends.
4. Resignation date - The date an employee resigned. 
5. Last working day - The employees last working day.
6. Probationary period end date - The last day of an employees probation. 
7. Birthday - The date of the employees birth in the current year.
8. Anniversary Date - The yearly anniversary of the employees start date in this current year. 
9. Submission Date - The day that a form or change is submitted. 
10. Creation Date - The day the form is assigned or published to the employee. 
11. Last workflow action - Immediately after the previous step is performed. Please note that the order of your workflow steps are critical when using this trigger or your workflow may trigger in the wrong order.
12. Interview Date - The scheduled interview date for a candidate on the system.
13. Timeoff start date - The first day of an employees time off.
14. Timeoff end date - The last day of an employees time off.  
15. Training expiry date - The day an employees completed training expires. 
16. Start of current holiday year - The first day of your holiday year.
17. Start of current financial year - The first day of your financial year. 
18. None - This workflow step does not fire. 

One of the more commonly used of these is "Creation Date" as this will trigger based around the date that the workflow is published or triggered via its associated actions. This is the best option to select if your workflow is designed to give actions that you want the associated user to address as soon as the workflow is activated as setting this to "0 Days After Creation Date" will cause the workflow to fire immediately upon publishing.