Overview
For some time, we've featured Placeholders as a method of staffing your projects with future hires that have not been made yet. While we're not making any changes to the core functionality of how this process works, our October 5th release revamps the way these future hires are organized and updates our terminology to better reflect how you're using them. With this change, Placeholders have now become Requisitions!
What are Requisitions?
To a large degree, this update is about terminology. Think of the Placeholder term as itself a placeholder - it gets the point across, but doesn't really tell you how you're going to use it. We felt the term Requisition more accurately reflects the purpose of this feature; they represent hires you need to requisition in order to fill Roles on projects.
In terms of how you use Requisitions, they function exactly the same as Placeholders - they are Profiles you create to be occupied by a future hire, that can be assigned to Projects and allocated time. When you're ready to make a hire, they can be converted into an Employee or Contractor carrying along with them all of the assignments and allocations that you've made.
What has changed?
If Requisitions are used the same way as Placeholders, then what has changed besides terminology?
The answer is this; only the way they are organized and created is changing. Historically Placeholders were considered People; they were organized in the same place (Settings > People) and when you converted them into Employees or Contractors, you lost all history of the Provision process. With Requisitions, the Profiles belonging to future hires have been moved to a new page (Settings > Requisitions) in order to make managing them easier.
When it comes time to make a hire, you'll create a Person separately in Settings > People, then link the two using the instructions that can be found here: Settings > Requisitions
In addition to this, we've made some quality of life changes - such as the ability to create a new Requisition straight from the Shaper or Assignments View and quick access from a Requisition's Profile to their Assignments. Be sure to check out this article for the full breakdown of how things have been updated:
What is staying the same?
While method by which you'll add/convert future hires and what we call them has been revamped, how you'll actually use them is the same. You'll continue to add them to Projects in place of future workers, allocate them hours, then convert them upon hiring.
If you're already using Placeholders, think of this as a cosmetic and layout change that we hope to use to support future enhancements.
Bonus Update: Notes Visual
As a bonus, unrelated update with this release we've added a visual indicator within the Shaper and Assignments View to indicate People and Projects that contain Notes. You'll find this in upper-right corner of the appropriate Person/Project in the left-side section in the Assignments View/Shaper. You can continue to hover over the Person/Project to see the Notes Icon for viewing/editing - this change just gives you a persistent call-out that one or more Notes exist for you to check.