Automations

Where to find them

Open Settings → Automations. Owners, admins and recruiters can create, edit and switch automations on or off; everyone else can view them and their run log. Every automation reads like a sentence:

When a candidate is moved to Interview, only if the job is in Engineering, wait 1 working hour, then notify the hiring manager and create a task for the owner.

1 · Triggers — when this happens

• Candidate applied — to any job, a specific job, or from a source (careers page, emailed resume, referral…).
• Moved to a stage — e.g. Interview, matched by stage name across all jobs.
• Candidate rejected — after a person on your team rejects someone (e.g. send your rejection email a day later).
• Waiting in a stage too long — more than N days, or longer than the stage’s time target from Settings → Pipeline.
• Interview scheduled and Scorecard overdue — N hours after an interview, for each interviewer who hasn’t submitted feedback.
• Email received from candidate — replies to your team’s emails, or any email.
• Tag added — a specific tag (like “referral”) or any tag.
• Offer recorded — extended, accepted or declined; and Candidate hired.

Each trigger in the editor has a one-line “Use this when…” explanation.

2 · Conditions — only if… (optional)

Narrow it down by job, department, current stage, source, tag (has / doesn’t have) or whether the candidate has an email address. All conditions must be true.

3 · Wait (optional)

Wait a number of hours or days first. Tick working hours only to count Monday–Friday, 9:00–18:00 in your workspace time zone — an application at 17:30 on Friday with a 1-hour wait is handled at 9:30 on Monday. When the wait is over, Otter checks the conditions again and skips the run if the candidate has moved on.

4 · Steps — do this

• Send an email from a template — from your workspace sending address, with the usual safeguards (below).
• Move to a stage — within the same job; never to Rejected or Hired.
• Add a tag, assign an owner, add to a talent pool, add a note.
• Create a task for the owner, the hiring manager, the interviewer or a named teammate, with a due date.
• Notify teammates — in the notifications bell, and optionally by email.

Notes, tasks and messages can use placeholders such as {{full_name}}, {{job_title}} and {{stage_name}}.

Safety built in

• No automatic rejections. There is no reject step, and automations can’t move anyone to Rejected or Hired. Rejection decisions stay with people (important under rules such as the EU AI Act and New York City’s automated hiring rules).
• Email rules apply. Automated emails follow your sending limits and respect unsubscribes, do-not-email, bounces and spam complaints. Candidates without an email address are skipped.
• No loops. Changes made by an automation never set off the same automation again, and chains of automations stop after three.
• Limits. Each automation has a maximum number of runs per candidate and per day; the workspace has 1,000 automated runs a day in total. Runs over a daily limit are skipped and logged.
• Off until you say so. Recipes and new automations start switched off. Each automation has its own on/off switch.

Test on a candidate

In the editor, pick a candidate and click Run test. Otter shows whether it would run, which conditions pass, the limits, when it would happen, and each step — including a preview of any email. Nothing is changed and nothing is sent.

Run log

Every run is recorded with the time, the candidate, the result — Done, Done with warnings, Failed, Skipped (with the reason) or Waiting — and the outcome of each step. Each automation shows its own log, and Recent runs on the Automations page covers all of them. Emails sent by an automation are labelled in the email log and on the candidate’s timeline. Temporary problems are retried automatically after 1, 4 and 16 minutes; anything still failing is shown in the log. Switching automations on or off, edits and deletes are written to the audit log.

Recipes

• Acknowledge new applicants — a thank-you email one working hour after someone applies (pick your template).
• Nudge when someone waits too long — notifies the owner and creates a follow-up task.
• Notify hiring manager when a candidate reaches Interview.
• Remind interviewers of overdue scorecards — 24 hours after the interview.
• Welcome referrals and Start onboarding on hire.

Built-in automations

Three rules Otter has always applied now appear at the top of the page, so you can see and adjust them:

• Add emailed resumes to the job — a resume sent to a job’s address joins that job’s Applied stage. Switch it off and emailed resumes still become candidates, but your team adds them to jobs.
• Flag candidates waiting too long — lists people past a stage’s time target in Needs attention on Home.
• Close the application on hire — always on, so hire dates and time-to-hire stay correct.

You can add your own steps to any of them, for example a notification when someone is hired.

API & MCP

With an API key (Growth and Scale): GET /api/v1/automations, PATCH /api/v1/automations/{id} with { "enabled": true }, and GET /api/v1/automations/{id}/runs. Built-ins can be addressed by key, e.g. sla_needs_attention. The MCP server offers the same as list_automations, set_automation_enabled and list_automation_runs. See the API reference.