Functional Role

Functional roles are used in the Dynamic Approval Routing (DAR) feature. A role is used to choose users that will be assigned to approve a requisition or an offer based on contextualization (OLF).

Functional roles are created and configured via the Functional Roles feature (Configuration > Roles > Functional Roles).

Each functional role must be assigned a single default user. When requesting an approval, if no other users are selected for the role, the default assignee will be called upon for an approval using this role.

Each role may also have users assigned for specific Organization-Location-Job Field (OLF) structure and from there are called into play in approval workflows when objects are created for their structure. For example, you are creating an HR Leader role. You select John Smith as an assignee and associate him to the Canadian Operations organization. As a result, John is now the HR Leader for the Canadian Operations. When a functional role is invoked in an approval process, the employee matching the requisition's OLF will be used. If there is no matching employee for the OLF context, then the default assignee will be used.

It is possible to have multiple assignees have the same functional role in the exact same context. When this is the case, all people having that functional role will be included in the approval path, with the same sequence number, and will have to approve the requisition or offer.

Users can be associated to more than one role in the approval path. By default, the system will:

  • Create the list of roles based on the approval path inclusion rules.

  • Filter roles out based on exclusion rules.

  • Resolve users from roles.

  • Remove duplicated users.

For example, if an approval path looks like Hiring Manager, Role-1, Role-2 and an exclusion rule is created for Hiring Manager, the final approval path will look like Role-1, Role-2. However, if one specific user was both the Hiring Manager on the requisition and was also associated to the Role-1, then this user will still be part of the final approval path as it still includes Role-1.