Creating & Using Email Templates

In an earlier article, we spoke about how you can quickly and easily communicate with your employees in HR Partner.  But did you know that you can also save even more time by using Email Templates for messages that are repetitive?

For example, you might have a standard "Welcome" email that you send out to all New Hires that have accepted roles within your organization and now are preparing to start as a part of the team.  Or you might have a standard email that you send out to certain team members for weekly meetings.  Well, now you can create those repetitive emails as Templates within HR Partner, and reuse them over and over again!

The best part? You can also embed mail merge fields within those templates to personalize the emails going out to your employees.  You can embed Names, Locations, Department and many other fields into the Email Template, and then they will be converted to actual data when the email is sent over.

Creating and Editing Email Templates

Start by going to  Setup -> Configure -> Email Templates from the left hand menu to go to the section where you can create, edit and delete standard Templates.  Please note that when creating Templates, you can create different Template Categories for the different messaging areas in HR Partner, including:

• General/Employee Email Messages
• Recruitment Email Messages
• Custom Forms Email Messages
• Checklist Email Messages
• eSignature Email Messages

Each Email Template category will have different fields (called "Onboarding Fields") that you can choose to embed within the email.  At any point while creating the Email Template, you can click on the button towards the center called 'Onboarding Fields' to open the list of fields you can embed into the Template. There are so many options to choose from!

These embedded fields will appear surrounded by double curly braces {{like.this}}.  Please do not change the field names within the curly braces or remove the braces.  Doing so will affect the final rendering of the email.  If you need to remove a field, you need to remove the whole thing from the first bracket to the last.

If you have experience using HTML, there is also a fully compliant HTML editor that can be used for Email Templates, which means that you can change the fots sizes, colors, images and even embed tables into your Email Template for extra pizzaz!

Onboarding Fields You Can Embed

The types of fields you can embed are dictated by the Template type (e.g. General, Recruitment etc.), but generally, you can embed critical details about the Employee or job applicant, as well as other company specific fields and even special date fields.  Some examples of fields, which are fairly self explanatory, are:

• employee.first_names
• employee.last_name
• employee.date_of_birth
• employee.department
• company.name

There are also a series of special date fields, which will be replaced by the appropriate dates at the time the email goes out, including:

• date.today
• date.tomorrow
• date.yesterday
• date.next_week
• date.end_of_month
• date.start_of_month

Using Email Templates

Actually using these Email Templates is pretty easy.  Almost any area in HR Partner where you can send a message out, you will see a button that says ' Use Template' next to the Message header:

Just pick the predefined Template from the options given to you, and the Email Template that you've previously created will automatically populate in the fields. You will still have the opportunity to make edits and refine the Email Template further before sending it out.

Here is an example of using a predefined Template when sending out a checklist to an employee:

There are no limits to the number of Email Templates that you can create or  to the number of times you can reuse them.  Please feel free to build up a library of commonly used Email Templates to save as much time as you can. This will not only create consistency within your HR Partner system, but will also allow for other Admin Users to use Emails with similar language and messaging to Employees and Applicants!