Recruitment – K8 Mead

Things are really heating up in the world of Recruit as we approach the final deadline to move the remaining Recruiting pages over to Redwood in 26B. This release is your last opportunity to make the switch. With the 25C deadline behind us, you should already be managing requisitions, job applications and candidates in Redwood. The next phase brings exciting updates around offers, interviews, campaigns, events and agency hiring. So, let’s dive in and see what’s new…

The AI Career Coach, first introduced in 25D to help candidates find roles that match their skills, has already been enhanced in 26A. The Career Coach now uses the Supervisor model, which brings all agents together under one umbrella, streamlining information sharing and removing redundancies. The agent is pre-seeded and ready to run, so there’s no need to create agents from templates. You can also choose to display the widget as an overlay, ideal for highly customised sites, rather than the default side panel, ensuring it doesn’t interfere with your design. For one-page application flows, the widget now displays correctly, and when shown as a side panel, the navigation menu is replaced with a horizontal progress bar. The fixer button appears on the page instead of the left-hand side, and a clickable Terms and Conditions link pulls content from the job application legal disclaimer in the Recruiting Content Library. If you’ve enabled CV parsing, candidate CVs will be parsed into the application flow when uploaded via the widget. From this release, any CV uploaded into the recommended jobs widget in the candidate experience will also be available to the agent.

As many of you know, I’m a big fan of AI, anything that makes life easier. The next update introduces an AI assistant for job requisition creation, working like a smart, on-page helper that answers both general and field-specific questions as you build a requisition. Because its guidance is driven entirely by the documents you upload and the prompt you configure, it’s easy to tailor to your organisation’s policies and practices. The agent helps users get it right first time, capturing the correct data, minimising downstream issues and boosting overall efficiency without interrupting the flow.

By 26B, the Job Offer process must be fully transitioned to Redwood, and Oracle has introduced a new AI agent to make this easier. Acting as an FAQ-style assistant, the agent helps users by answering both general and field-specific questions during job offer creation. Its guidance is based entirely on the documents you upload and the prompt you configure, making it simple to align with your organisation’s policies and practices. This smart assistant ensures job offers are created smoothly, reduces downstream issues by capturing accurate data, and boosts overall efficiency without disrupting the process.

Another useful Redwood Offer feature is the Initiate Job Offer Creation for Hiring Managers functionality. Hiring managers with the Initiate Job Offer privilege can now start the process and share notes with the recruiting team using the Create Job Offer action from the Redwood job applications list or details page. On the Create Job Offer page, they can add comments in the Notes to Recruiter field to provide context or instructions. Once they click Save and Close, the candidate’s application moves to Offer – Draft status and appears on the Redwood Job Offers list page. The recruiter receives a notification to complete the offer details using the Edit Offer action, with the manager’s notes displayed in a banner above the Details and Offer tabs. When ready, the recruiter can submit the job offer for approval or save it for further editing later.

The final feature worth mentioning is the new Redwood Interview Details page, which brings several improvements over the previous responsive version. A new Basic Info section now displays key interview details at a glance. In the Interviewers section, you can easily resend the Interview Scheduled notification, handy if someone says they haven’t received it. The Scheduled Candidates section allows you to click candidate and job requisition links to open a drawer with more information, and the Actions menu lets you manage candidates scheduled for the interview. Under Interview Resources, you’ll find interviewer guidelines, attachments and candidate notes added to the interview. If you’re an interviewer, you can respond directly to the invitation, accept, tentatively accept, decline or propose a new time. When proposing a new time, the drawer can even display your availability if calendar integration (Microsoft 365 or Google) is enabled.

Oracle often slip in new features during the month, so it’s worth keeping an eye out. If anything truly game-changing appears, I’ll share another blog post to keep you updated and make sure you don’t miss out. In the meantime, why not check out my latest write-up on the new Core HR features in Release 26A? You can find it here.

Please note all screenshots are the property of Oracle and are used according to their Copyright Guidelines

Have you seen the new Oracle HCM Cloud Activity Centres? They’re a fundamental part of the new Redwood pages and I love them! When they first came out, they were called ‘Spotlights’, but they’ve since been rebranded and now there are 4 Activity Centres.

The original Activity Centres were for Employees and Line Managers. All Activity Centres are ‘One Stop Shops’ for the relevant user. Focusing first on the Employee Activity Centre, this is where an employee can view / update their personal details; view their payslips; book annual leave and absences and many other things. If there is information that need to be shared with employees in bulk, they can be posted on there too. Any activity the employee is likely to carry out can be linked from the activity centre. If there are tasks that aren’t needed, they can be easily hidden via VBS.

In the Manager Activity Centre, Line Managers can easily access all of their team members records in one place. From here you can view employment and compensation details and also monitor talent and performance. Again important communications for line manager can be posted in here. Additionally bulk actions can be carried out for team members, such as creating communications, adding Journeys and creating surveys for feedback.

The Recruiting Activity Centre was the first one that was launched as an ‘Activity Centre’ and I regularly talk about it to my customers. It’s a great landing site for the Recruitment team to use. Originally it was only available to Recruiters and Hiring Managers, but last year it was extended to Collaborators too, so the whole team has access to this great tool. It summarises key data like high priority tasks and the number of new applicants that need reviewing. It’s easy to view the status of requisitions and offers and, my personal favourite, communication history between the Recruitment team and the candidate in conversation format. This is something that a lot of my customers have enquired about in the past.

The final, and most recent, Activity Centre is the Payroll one. It allows the Payroll team to view all payrolls in one location, easily view notifications that might indicate their has been an error or significant disparity in a payroll run and investigate the root cause. All the usual actions that the team would need to carry out are easily accessible, such as calculation cards, element entries, costing etc as well as to be able to submit payroll flows. It speeds up the time to run processes and investigate issues.

The Activity Centres are all designed to improve the user’s experience and reduce the number of menus / clicks they need to make. It has all the information that you need at your fingertips and in my personal opinion, is a massive improvement! I’m sure this won’t be the last of the Activity Centres that we see and Oracle are constantly improving the existing ones, so keep an eye out on those quarterly release updates for more news.

Please note all screenshots are the property of Oracle and are used according to their Copyright Guidelines

Tag: Recruitment

Oracle HCM Cloud Recruit 26A

Discover Oracle HCM Cloud’s Activity Centres