Before adding or importing your team members into ClayHR, it is highly recommended to define the core organizational attributes that describe how your people are structured. These attributes—Org Units, Locations, and Job Profiles—serve as foundational building blocks that power permissions, visibility, workflows, reporting, and overall usability across the system.

While not mandatory, setting these up early creates a clean, scalable foundation that every employee record can inherit.

IN THIS ARTICLE:

1. Org Units (or Departments)
2. Location
3. Job Profile
4. Why these Building Blocks Matter
5. When Should Set Them Up

1. Organization Units (Departments)

Organization Units (often referred to as Departments) represent the functional or business groups within your organization, such as:

• Sales
• Engineering
• HR
• Customer Support
• Operations
• Finance

Assigning employees to Org Units helps you reflect the real-world team structure of your company. You may create as many Org Units as needed, and they can be updated anytime as your organizational structure evolves.

2. Locations

Locations describe the physical or operational sites where your employees work. These may include:

• Corporate offices
• Regional branches
• International hubs
• Retail locations
• Remote / work-from-home groupings

Defining Locations is especially important for multi-site or globally distributed organizations. They are frequently used for region-based controls, scheduling, holiday calendars, and compliance-related workflows.

3. Job Profiles

Job Profiles describe the job category, designation, or level of an employee—examples include:

• Software Engineer
• Senior Accountant
• Sales Manager
• HR Coordinator
• Director of Operations

Job Profiles help standardize role definitions across your organization and ensure consistent classification for talent management, workflows, and analytics.

4. Why These Building Blocks Matter

Org Units, Locations, and Job Profiles are essential because they:

• Organize employees into meaningful groups that mirror your organizational structure.
• Enable clean filtering and segmentation for views, analytics, dashboards, and reports.
• Support permissions and role-based access control, ensuring appropriate visibility across the system.
• Allow efficient bulk actions, such as updating groups of employees based on department, location, or profile.
• Power approval workflows, which often rely on departmental or location contexts to route requests correctly.
• Enable targeted communication, such as sending announcements to specific offices, departments, or job groups.

Together, these three attributes provide the backbone for managing your workforce data effectively in ClayHR.

5. When You Should Set This Up

You should define Org Units, Locations, and Job Profiles:

• Before importing or adding employees (best practice).
• Before configuring permissions, workflows, or approval chains that depend on these attributes.
• During your initial ClayHR onboarding, ensuring a strong structural foundation.
• Whenever your organizational structure changes, since all three are fully editable and adaptable.

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To learn more about the difference between "User Profile" | "User Role" | "User Group" , please, click here.If you prefer to go ahead and create user's records right away, please, go here.