Your whole hiring funnel inside Nextcloud — private, automated where it's boring, human where it matters.
Applications arrive by email and become candidates on a pipeline board by themselves. The hiring team screens with unbiased votes, interviews are booked against real calendars with the candidate picking a slot on a public page, and offers run through a proper four-eyes approval before they go out. Rejections, retention, anonymization — the compliance chores run on autopilot. Everything stays on your own server; nothing about your candidates is ever replicated to a third party.
- 📥 Zero-touch intake — a mail to
jobs+backend-engineer@…becomes a candidate card with CV attached, an AI summary, and an automatic confirmation to the applicant. When the candidate replies to any of your mails, the answer (attachments included) lands on their timeline — not in the inbox as a duplicate application. Nobody copies data around, ever. - 🗳️ Unbiased screening — screeners vote 👍/🤔/👎 with a comment, and nobody sees the other votes until they cast their own. A "no" always needs a written reason.
- 📅 Self-scheduling interviews — the app reads the interviewers' calendars, proposes free slots, and the candidate picks one on a public page in their own timezone. Calendar event, invitations and (with Talk) the video room appear by themselves.
- 🤝 Offers with four eyes — salary data is invisible to interviewers, every offer needs a designated approver (never yourself), and expiring offers warn you three days ahead.
- 🔒 GDPR on autopilot — documents live in app storage (never in Files), rejected candidates are anonymized automatically after the retention period, exports for data-access requests are one click, and the talent pool is strictly consent-based.
- 🪄 AI where it removes busywork (optional, via Nextcloud Assistant) — summaries, screening hints, mail drafts, interview questions. Always labeled, always human-reviewed, never a decision.
- 🚦 A board that thinks along — stuck candidates get a
⚠️ chip and a one-click filter (no votes? no interview booked? offer expiring?), the time-in-stage turns amber and then red as people wait, and the screener avatars on each card show who has voted — never what. - 📊 Honest reporting — funnel, time-in-stage and time-to-hire are reconstructed from what actually happened, and keep working even after anonymization.
- 📖 A real handbook — a beautifully typeset PDF for non-technical HR people, linked right in the app's navigation.
| Screening without anchoring | The candidate picks their own slot |
|---|---|
 |
 |
The user handbook — a beautiful PDF for HR people and hiring managers with
no technical background — is linked at the bottom of the app navigation
("Handbook (PDF)"). Its source lives in docs/handbook.html;
make handbook re-renders the PDF via headless Chrome after UI changes.
There is no second org chart. Recruiters are the members of one Nextcloud
group (default recruiting) and can do everything. Per opening you pick a
hiring team: hiring managers run the process for that opening,
interviewers only ever see the candidates assigned to them (and never any
salary data), observers may watch but not act. Being a Nextcloud admin
grants no candidate access at all.
| Entry | Who sees it | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| New opening | recruiters | Creates a job opening (see below) |
| Triage inbox | recruiters | Mail applications that matched no opening; the counter shows how many wait |
| My reviews | everyone | Candidates you were asked to screen — badge shows whether you still owe a vote |
| My interviews | everyone | Your interview panel appointments, incl. "pending" ones the candidate hasn't confirmed yet |
| Mail templates | recruiters | Manage the invitation/rejection/offer/confirmation mail templates |
| Reports | team members & recruiters | Funnel, time-to-hire, rejection reasons — scoped to what you may see |
| Talent pool | recruiters | Candidates who consented to be kept for future openings |
| Openings | team members & recruiters | One entry per opening with the count of active candidates; closed openings collapse at the bottom |
| Handbook (PDF) | everyone | The illustrated user handbook, at the bottom of the navigation |
The board shows the four active stages — New → Screening → Interview →
Offer, each with its own accent color. Column headers show the real totals;
busy stages load 100 cards and offer Show more. The filter box narrows the
loaded cards by name or email, and the
The same candidates as a sortable table (click a column header) — including everyone who is already hired, rejected or withdrawn. Managers can select several candidates and move or reject them in bulk; the rejection mail preview still appears per candidate, so nothing goes out unreviewed:
Header actions (managers and recruiters):
- Add candidate — manual entry with drag-and-drop CV upload. The candidate starts in "New" and the hiring managers are notified.
- Board/table toggle — same data, two views.
- 💬 Team chat / Create team chat — one click creates a Talk conversation with the current hiring team. (Talk's API fixes the member list at creation, so if the team changes, delete and recreate the room.)
- ⋮ → Edit opening & team — title, description, requirements (these feed the AI features), the auto-confirmation toggle, and the hiring team with roles.
- ⋮ → Put on hold / Reopen / Close — closing warns you if candidates are still active; they keep their stage and can still be rejected (with mail) afterwards.
The header also shows the opening's mail tag (e.g.
[backend-engineer]): applications sent to jobs+backend-engineer@… or with
the tag in the subject skip triage and land directly on this board.
Click any card and the sidebar opens with five tabs:
-
Profile — contact details (editable by managers), source, an optional AI summary (labeled, regenerable), duplicate warning with a link to the earlier application, and — in triage — the "Assign to opening" control. At the bottom, Documents: CVs and attachments, previewable in the browser. Stored in app storage: never visible in Files, never accessible to people without access to this candidate.
-
Votes — cast or update your vote (👍/🤔/👎 + comment; a "no" requires a reason). Votes of others stay hidden until you've voted. Managers assign screeners here — each assignee is notified and gets the candidate in "My reviews". Optional AI screening hint against the opening's requirements ("verify yourself — the humans decide").
-
Interviews — every round with its status. Awaiting candidate means the public link is out; copy it from here if you want to resend it yourself. Cancelling notifies all interviewers and cancels the calendar event. Optional AI interview-question suggestions.
-
Offer — visible only to recruiters, this opening's managers and the offer's approver. The whole offer lifecycle happens here (see below).
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Log — the complete timeline (every stage move, mail with full text, vote, interview, offer step) merged with the team discussion thread. Candidate replies appear here too ("The candidate replied: …"). @-mention a teammate to notify them.
Reject … is the red button at the bottom of the profile tab. The header menu carries Book interview, Move to …, and for recruiters Export data (GDPR) (ZIP with everything about this person — without reviewer identities) and Delete permanently (GDPR) (removes the candidate with all documents, votes, comments, interviews and notifications — irreversible, confirmation required).
- Pick interviewers and duration; choose whether a Talk video room should be created (if Talk is installed) — turned off, you can note a location or a video link from another tool instead.
- Find free slots reads the interviewers' calendars (working days, 9–17) and proposes times; deselect any, or add slots manually.
- Create & write invitation creates the interview and prefills the invitation mail including the personal scheduling link. Edit freely — if the link gets lost, the app re-attaches it. Send, or copy the link and deliver it yourself.
- The candidate opens the public page (times shown in their timezone, no account needed) and confirms one slot. That books the calendar event with all interviewers invited, creates the Talk room for video interviews, moves the card to "Interview", and notifies the panel. The confirmation page offers the appointment as an .ics download for the candidate's own calendar.
| Picking a slot — no account required | After confirming: details + calendar file |
|---|---|
|
 |
Reject … asks for an internal reason (feeds the reports), shows the rejection mail prefilled from your template for review — nothing ever goes out unreviewed — and optionally adds the talent-pool consent link. If sending fails, the candidate is not marked rejected; nobody ends up silently rejected-but-uninformed. Rejecting without an email is possible for candidates without an address.
- Draft — job title, salary (amount/currency/period), start date, validity date, internal notes. Editable only while a draft.
- Request approval — pick any Nextcloud user as approver (never yourself). They're notified and get scoped access to exactly this candidate and offer; they approve or send back to draft with a note.
- Send — only approved offers can go out: review the offer mail and send it, or "mark as sent" if it went out another way. The card moves to "Offer" and the validity clock starts.
- Track the response — Accepted moves the candidate to "Hired" 🎉 (and reminds you to close the opening); Negotiating and Declined are recorded. Offers past their validity date expire automatically; the creator is warned three days ahead.
- Withdraw is possible at any point before a final answer.
Mail applications that matched no opening. Open one and assign it to an opening in its profile tab (moves it into that board's "New" column and notifies the managers), or delete spam permanently from the row's ⋮ menu. A heartbeat line shows when the mailbox was last checked — and warns when the last check failed. Pro tip: put the mail tag into your job postings and triage stays empty.
The two personal to-do lists: what you still owe a vote on, and where you are on the interview panel. "My reviews" sorts candidates you have not voted on to the top; "My interviews" also shows rounds the candidate has not confirmed yet.
| My reviews | My interviews |
|---|---|
 |
 |
Only candidates who clicked the consent link from their rejection mail appear here — consent is never assumed. Add to opening creates a fresh copy (documents included) in the target opening's "New" column; the pool entry stays for further openings. Membership expires automatically after the configured period, after which the candidate is anonymized like everyone else.
Headline tiles (candidates, hired, average days to hire, open offers), an applications-per-week chart, and per opening: the funnel with average time-in-stage, open offers, and the rejection-reason breakdown. All numbers are reconstructed from each candidate's actual history and survive anonymization. You only see openings you have access to.
Per mail type (confirmation of receipt, interview invitation, rejection, offer) the built-in template is always available; Customize copies it into an editable one and Make default activates it. The editor offers each type's placeholders as chips — click to insert — and validates them when you save, so typos can't reach a candidate. Every send shows a resolved preview first, and every sent mail lands on the candidate's timeline.
Administration → Recruiting (admins): the HR group, the sender identity for candidate mail, the application mailbox (IMAP host/user/password with a Test connection button; fetched every 5 minutes), the GDPR retention period (0 disables the automation) and the talent-pool membership duration.
Personal settings → Groupware (everyone): the email digest — off, daily or weekly. It bundles new applications in your openings, your pending reviews, your upcoming interviews and offers awaiting your approval, and is only sent when there is something to report.
Bell notifications for everything that concerns you (assignments, interview confirmations, candidate replies, offer approvals, @-mentions, expiring offers), Activity stream entries per candidate, unified search over candidates and openings (permission-scoped), and deep links from every notification straight to the right candidate. The interface ships in English and German.
- Enable the app:
occ app:enable recruiting. - In Administration settings → Recruiting: pick the HR group, set the sender identity, configure the application mailbox and enable fetching.
- Create your first opening, add the hiring team — done.
Interview scheduling uses the interviewers' Nextcloud calendars. Optional integrations light up automatically when available: Talk (video interview rooms, team chats) and Nextcloud Assistant with an AI provider (summaries, hints, drafts). Without them, the corresponding buttons simply don't appear.
| Command | Purpose |
|---|---|
recruiting:fetch-mail |
Fetch the applications mailbox now |
recruiting:retention:run [--dry-run] |
Anonymize candidates whose retention period is over |
npm ci && npm run build # frontend (Vue 3 + @nextcloud/vue 9, Vite)Backend unit tests live in tests/Unit (plain PHPUnit, no server bootstrap
required). The complete behaviour, data model, permission matrix and design
decisions are documented in the specification; §10 of the
spec records how the implementation turned out, including the confidentiality
rules the code enforces and the known deviations.