Three presets, and a switch on every role

Autonomy is not one property of a product

Most tools that automate anything ask a single question: is this on. It is a tidy question and it does not fit recruiting, because the amount of independence you are willing to grant is not a fact about the software. It is a fact about the role.

A confidential search for a managing director, where three wrong approaches would end the mandate, and a support role you are hiring twelve of before the quarter closes, are not the same risk wearing different titles. Giving them the same leash means one of the two is being run badly, and which one depends on where you set the single switch.

Three presets, chosen per role

So the choice on EmployLabs is not on or off. You choose how far the system runs on its own, on each role, from three presets.

• Source only. It finds and assembles the pool on its own, and stops at the point where somebody would be contacted. This preset requires a sourcing limit.
• Source + Outreach. It sources and it reaches candidates, and hands the conversation back at the stage beyond that.
• Full pipeline. It runs the search end to end, and comes to you when it genuinely needs a person.

The natural reading of that list is a ladder, and it usually is one: a team starts at the bottom on everything, moves a familiar role up a step, and leaves the delicate ones where they are. Nothing requires you to climb it, and there is no preset that counts as the correct one.

Under each preset sit per-stage settings. Outreach, scheduling and advancing can each run automatically, ask first (confirm), or stay off, and the interview can be run by Naira or by you. The preset sets the outer edge; the stage settings decide how much of it you hand over.

A switch on every role

Every role has an on/off switch of its own, and it replaced the old fully manual setting. Turn automation off on that role and it stops acting, whatever preset it was set to. Manual is no longer a preset; it is simply the switch in the off position.

It exists for the situation nobody plans for. A client pulls a mandate. A merger is announced and nothing should go out under your name this week. Something looks wrong on one search and you do not yet know what. In that moment you want one control, on the role in question, that you can reach without asking anybody.

A stop should sit on the thing it stops, within reach of the person worried about it.

Why the control is per role and not per account

An account-level setting forces the whole desk to move at the pace of its most sensitive search. That is how automation ends up switched off everywhere: one role genuinely cannot be run unattended, so nothing is, and the volume work that would have benefited most keeps being done by hand.

Setting it per role lets the two coexist. The executive search stays switched off, or stops at sourcing, while the support hiring runs the full pipeline — on the same desk, in the same week, with the same person supervising both at the level each deserves.

Changing your mind is ordinary

A preset is a setting on a role, not a commitment about it. Move a role up when it has earned it and down when circumstances change, and the role’s switch is there throughout. Autonomy on this platform is a dial you set, revisit and reset, rather than a property you bought.

The stop belongs to you

It matters who holds a control like this. The version of a stop that does not count is the one where you email somebody, explain the situation, and wait for a person at a vendor to act on your behalf during their working hours. That is not a switch. It is a request, and a request has a queue in front of it.

The switch is part of the product, on the role, operated by you. There is no case in which stopping a role requires our participation, because a stop that depends on us is a stop that is unavailable at precisely the moment it is wanted — late in the evening, over a weekend, in the twenty minutes between a phone call and a board meeting.

The same reasoning applies to the presets themselves. They are settings you own rather than a tier we configure for you, which is why moving a role down a step needs no conversation with anybody and leaves no trace beyond the change itself.

How to use it

1. Set the preset when you open the role, while you are still thinking about what the role is. Chosen later, it tends to be chosen in a hurry.
2. Ask what a wrong action would cost on this particular search, not on average. That question picks the preset almost by itself.
3. Move one role up a step at a time rather than the whole desk at once, so you learn something from each change.
4. Know where a role’s on/off switch is before you need it. It is the control you will want to reach for without looking.