March 27th 2024, Release Note: WFM UK | ATS: New Option to Create Casual Employees in HR

Release date: March 27th 2024

• Enabled by default? - No
• Set up by customer admin? - No
• Enable via support ticket? - No
• Affects configuration or data? - Yes

What's Changing?

For new employees who are paid by rota, the option to create them as either 'Casual' or 'Flexible' within HR is now available.

Reason for the Change

With the introduction of new holiday calculations for Irregular Hour or Part-Year Workers, a new employment type option is available within HR associated with the new calculation. It has been necessary to update ATS so that the correct employment type is used when employee records are created for successful candidates.

Customers Affected

All UK ATS customers.

Release Note Info/Steps

Background

Flexible employees have a holiday calculation based on an average of 52 weeks worked over 104 weeks, which automatically calculates from the employee's first shift.

A new employment type has been created in the HR module, which can be assigned to irregular hour and part-year workers whose holiday year starts on or after 1st April 2024.  

Casual employees will have a new holiday accrual calculation based on 12.07% of each hour worked, instead of the 52-week average.

Currently, if a role is set to be paid by rota in ATS, then the employment type for the employee when created in HR defaults to be Flexible.

With this ATS release, employees who are paid by rota can be created either as Flexible or Casual within HR, depending on the business requirements.

ATS Configuration

To have this configuration applied, please contact your Fourth representative.

• When at the Proceed to Position offered step, the Employment Type can now be selected - see Fig.2

Fig.1 - 'Proceed to Position offered'

• Select either Casual or Flexible for the Employment Type and then Progress Application

Fig.2 - Employment Type in offer modal

Without this configuration, all vacancies that are paid by rota will default to be Flexible.

Advertising Vacancies as Casual

Displaying the employment type (Casual, Flexible, etc) within the vacancy can help to attract more applicants.

When creating a vacancy, the available options for Employment type (see Fig.3) are configured via a common feature, controlled by Fourth. The options are not limited to the four default employment types - Full-Time, Part-Time, Flexible, Casual - and can be tailored to specific business needs. For example: 'Seasonal', 'Work when you want to', etc.

How a vacancy is advertised does not directly impact the information sent to HR, so if a vacancy is paid by rota, and the vacancy employment type is 'Seasonal', the hiring manager will need to choose between Flexible and Casual when sending the offer to the candidate.

• To set the employment type within a vacancy, go to ATS > Vacancies > Create New
• Make a selection from the Employment type drop-down

Fig.3 - 'Employment type' drop-down, Create New Vacancy page

The selected employment type will then be displayed in the vacancy details within the candidate portal.

Fig.4 - ATS Candidate Portal

Regardless of the employment type selected in the vacancy, as long as the role is paid by rota, the only employment types available to select for the job offer will be Flexible or Casual.

Considerations

Turning on the employment type visibility will mean that, for roles that are not paid by the rota, the hiring manager will choose between Full-Time and Part-Time when sending an offer to a candidate.

For customers wishing to utilise the Part-Time option, further configuration may be required.

Please contact your Fourth representative to discuss the Part-Time option further.