Getting Started for Owners

Welcome to Lavalier! As an account owner, a little setup up front gets your whole team recording, transcribing, and giving structured feedback from day one. This guide walks through the five steps to stand up your account—each links to a full guide if you want more detail. You can come back here anytime.

Before you start: These steps are for an account Owner setting Lavalier up for the team. Once your account is ready, point your recruiters to Getting Started for Recruiters and let them enable your hiring managers from there.

Step 1: Set Up Your Company OS

Your Company OS defines who your company is and how you hire. It flows throughout Lavalier, so it's the foundation everything builds on—your default interview stages, hiring rubrics, intake questions, company values, and candidate consent all live here.

1. Open Company OS from the left navigation.
2. Search for your company to auto-fill your logo and basic details.
3. Work through the sections, clicking Edit on each. Changes save automatically.
   
   

Give Company Values a few extra minutes while you're in here. Lavalier probes every value you list during interviews and scores candidates against them on your comparisons, so the values you set now shape the signal you get back later.

Full Company OS guide →

Step 2: Set Your Hiring Defaults

Three Company OS sections shape every role your team creates, so they're worth a few minutes before anyone starts hiring. All three arrive pre-configured—you're just adjusting them to match how your team already works.

Interview Stages

Your default stages are the steps candidates move through, and every new role inherits them automatically. Setting them here means your recruiters never have to rebuild the same pipeline twice.

Your account starts with four stages: Recruiter Screen, Hiring Manager Screen, Tech Screen, and Interview Loop.

1. Open Company OS → Interview Stages.
2. Shape the pipeline to match your process:
   • Add Stage — pick a stage type, give it a custom name if you want one, and set the default duration
   • Edit Stage — update a stage's name or duration
   • Drag and drop to reorder your stages
   • Reset to Defaults — start over with the standard pipeline
3. Open your Interview Loopstage to set up your onsite:
   • Interview Types — the catalog your team picks from, pre-loaded with General, Technical, Behavioral, Leadership, Case Study, Working Session, Lunch, Wrap Up, Welcome, and Executive. Rename or delete any of them, or add your own. General stays put, since every interview slot needs a fallback option.
   • Default Interview Structure — the slots included by default whenever a role builds out its Loop. Out of the box that's Welcome (15 minutes), Behavioral (60), Technical (60), Leadership (60), and Wrap Up (30).
     
     

Recruiters can still customize stages on an individual role without changing these defaults.

Full interview stages guide →

Hiring Rubrics

Your hiring rubric is the rating scale interviewers choose from when they submit feedback, and it's what powers your side-by-side candidate comparisons. Matching it to the language your team already uses makes that feedback far easier to read at a glance.

Your account comes with four levels:

1. Open Company OS → Hiring Rubrics.
2. Click Edit.
3. Update the Rating Label and Description for any level. Changes save automatically.

The scale stays at four levels, so you can rename and redefine them to match your existing rubric, but you can't add or remove one.

Role Intake Questions

Every role kicks off with an intake meeting between a recruiter and the hiring manager, and these are the questions Lavalier brings to it. Setting them here keeps every kickoff covering the same ground.

Your account starts with a 30-minute meeting and four questions:

• What are the key responsibilities and day-to-day activities for this role?
• What skills, experience, and qualifications are must-haves versus nice-to-haves?
• What does success look like in this role after 30, 60, and 90 days?
• What is the team structure and who will this person work with most closely?

1. Open Company OS → Role Intake.
2. Set your Default Meeting Duration.
3. Under Default Questions, shape the list:
   • Add Question — pick one of Lavalier's suggestions, or Type a Question Manually
   • Use the edit and delete icons on any question to reword or remove it
     
     

Changes save automatically. You can keep up to 15 questions, and Lavalier flags any that could expose you to legal risk or don't look relevant to a role intake.

Full Company OS guide →

Step 3: Invite Your Team

Add the people who'll use Lavalier and set what each can access.

1. Go to Settings → Users & Invites.
2. Click Invite People, enter email addresses (up to 50 at once), and choose a permission level:
   • Owner — Full account control, including billing, integrations, and user management.
   • Recruiter — Manage users and access all roles, candidates, and interviews.
   • Team Member — Access only the interviews they're part of.
3. Click Send Invitation.

Full user management guide →

Step 4: (Optional) Set Up Single Sign-On

If your company uses an identity provider, you can let your team sign in with SSO and provision accounts automatically.

• Single sign-on (SAML 2.0) — Owners configure it under Settings → SSO & Provisioning. New users are created automatically the first time they sign in. SSO guide →
• SCIM provisioning — On the same page, connect SCIM so your identity provider creates, updates, and deactivates users for you. SCIM guide →

Note: SSO is part of your plan. If you're an owner and don't see SSO & Provisioning in Settings, contact Lavalier support.

Step 5: Connect Your ATS

Connect your applicant tracking system so your open roles, candidates, and resumes sync into Lavalier automatically. You can connect one ATS at a time.

• Greenhouse — Greenhouse setup guide →
• Ashby — Ashby setup guide →

Interview feedback is always entered and stored in Lavalier; from a synced interview, you can deep-link out to the matching record in your ATS.

Tip: Even with an ATS connected, have your team connect their calendars too (a quick per-user step). Your ATS syncs the interviews it knows about, but a connected calendar lets Lavalier also join and record interviews that aren't scheduled through your ATS—like an early phone screen. See Connecting Your Calendar.

What's next?

Your account is ready—now get your team going:

• Getting Started for Recruiters — Share this with your recruiting team so they can create roles, add candidates, and run interviews
• Connect your calendar — A per-user step your team does themselves so scheduled interviews show up automatically
  
  

Questions? Reach out to Lavalier support anytime, or explore the knowledge base for detailed guides on every feature.