Hiring on a small team is mostly admin. Applications arrive in an inbox and someone copies each one into a sheet. Someone reads a CV before every call and jots down what to ask. Someone swaps eight emails to find an interview time, fills in the offer letter, chases the signature and tells the team who's starting on Monday. Meanwhile the candidates you most want are waiting to hear back.
All of that admin can be handed to a workflow. The decisions can't, and shouldn't be. Here's how to split the two using ready-made templates from Lodol's library, and where to draw the line.
The line: AI prepares, a person decides
Lodol's recruiting templates are built around a few rules. AI extracts and summarizes, but doesn't judge: the screening notes template is told not to recommend hiring, rejecting or ranking anyone. Details a candidate didn't give are left blank, never guessed. The templates that read CVs are told to leave out personal details such as age and gender. And none of them sends a candidate a decision. That stays with a person.
Keep to those rules in the workflows you build, too. A workflow is very good at getting a person what they need to decide quickly. It's no substitute for the decision.
1. Every application, in one sheet
The chore: copying each emailed application, and the CV attached to it, into your candidate tracker.
The workflow: when an application lands in Gmail, Add every emailed job application to your candidate sheet reads the email and the attached CV, whether it's a PDF, a Word document or a photo, and adds the candidate to your Google Sheet: name, contact details, the role they applied for, current title and employer, years of experience, key skills, education, availability and a two-sentence summary. A short card in Slack tells the team who applied, with links to the email and the sheet.
What it won't do: judge, or guess. It extracts what the candidate wrote and nothing more. A detail neither the email nor the CV gives is left empty and listed in the Notes column. Emails that aren't applications are skipped, with the reason in the run history. If your sheet is missing a heading, nothing is written and the run is marked as failed, so no application goes quietly missing.
2. Walk into every screening call prepared
The chore: reading each application against the role before the call, and working out what to ask.
The workflow: once a day, Prepare screening notes for applicants reads new applications in your sheet and writes short notes on each against your role brief: what lines up with the role, what the application doesn't evidence either way, and two questions worth asking. The notes go on a separate Screening notes tab, one row per applicant.
What it won't do: make the call. The AI is told not to recommend hiring, rejecting or ranking anyone, and to say when something isn't evidenced rather than infer it. Nothing is written over the applications themselves, and each applicant is prepared only once.
3. Present candidates on your own template
The workflow: for agencies and in-house teams that send candidates to a hiring manager in a standard format, Put a CV onto your own template reads a CV PDF and writes each section onto a fresh copy of your Google Docs template, named after the candidate.
What it won't do: embellish. The AI is told to copy each section word for word, and an absent section reads "Not stated in the CV". A date of birth, age, nationality, gender or marital status is left out even if the CV includes it, and a photo never comes across. As with any AI step, check the copy against the CV before you send it on.
4. Let candidates book their own interview
The workflow: when a candidate messages your Telegram bot with your booking code, Let candidates book their own interview in Telegram shows them the weekday interview times you actually have free in Google Calendar. They reply with a time, their name and their email, and the interview is booked on your calendar with an invitation on its way to them.
What it won't do: double-book. Only the times you allow can be taken, and each slot is checked again at the moment of booking, so two candidates reading the same list can't take the same time. Messages without your code are ignored. If candidates book through Calendly instead, its New Event trigger can start the next step, such as sending the interviewer their screening notes.
5. Offer paperwork, approved before it's sent
There's no offer template in the library, because every offer letter is different, but it's a short workflow to build:
- Prepare the letter. Keep your offer letter as a template in your e-signature app. DocuSeal, for one, can send a template to a signer with fields such as salary and start date already filled in from your tracker.
- Ask before it goes. A Request approval step puts the details in front of the hiring manager, for example "Send Priya Shah's offer for Senior Designer at $118,000, starting January 4?", and the run waits for their answer.
- Send it for signature. Only once it's approved does the workflow send the letter to the candidate. Lodol also connects to DocuSign, Dropbox Sign and Adobe Acrobat Sign.
Every approval records who decided and when. To keep anyone from signing off their own request, turn on Require a different approver.
6. Welcome new starters before they arrive
The workflow: every Monday at 7:00, Welcome next week's new starters reads your new starter roster, emails anyone starting in the next seven days a short welcome with their role and start date, and tells your team channel in Slack who's joining and when.
What it won't do: improvise. The welcome is written from the roster, not by AI, so there's nothing to review and nothing to get confidently wrong. Nobody is welcomed or announced twice, and a start date it can't read fails the run and names the person. From there, our guide to automating onboarding and offboarding takes over.
Keeping candidates in the loop
The update candidates value most is the one nobody gets around to sending. The safe way to automate it is to let a person's decision start it. A workflow that checks your applicant tracking system on a schedule can spot a candidate someone has just moved to a new stage, draft the email that goes with it, such as "we'd like to invite you to a second interview" or "we've decided not to move forward", and leave it in Gmail as a draft for the recruiter to read and send. Lodol works with Workable, Recruitee, Zoho Recruit and Ashby, and Lever joins today.
Candidate data is personal, so two settings are worth a look. On Pro and Enterprise, you can limit a folder of hiring workflows to the hiring team, and its runs and approvals follow, though admins and owners can still reach everything. And on any paid plan, you can keep run history for as little as a day.
What it costs
Lodol charges per run, however many steps a run takes, and nothing per candidate, job or seat, so every interviewer can have a seat. For a hiring inbox that gets about 15 emails a day:
| Workflow | When it runs | Runs a month |
|---|---|---|
| Applications to your sheet | Once per email to the hiring inbox | About 450 |
| Screening notes | Once a day | 30 |
| New starter welcomes | Once a week | 4 or 5 |
| All three | About 485 |
That fits Builder's smallest tier, 2,500 runs for $18 a month, with room to spare for interview bookings and offers. The application workflow runs once for every email that arrives, so point it at the inbox applications come to, or limit it to your job board's address. The AI steps run on your own Anthropic or OpenAI account, billed at its own rates; Lodol adds nothing.
Start with the applications inbox.
Add Add every emailed job application to your candidate sheet to your workspace and point it at the inbox where applications land. Or browse all of the recruiting workflows, and see how Lodol fits a people team on the people ops page.