The automatic review creation feature ensures that new employees are automatically included in ongoing or scheduled review cycles when they join a team — without any manual intervention from an admin.
🔐 This article is intended for Customer Admins and HR Admins.
⚠️ Important: Automatic review creation and review automations (onboarding, offboarding, etc.) are two completely independent features that are often confused. This article covers automatic review creation only.
🔍 What is automatic review creation?
Automatic review creation monitors structural changes in the organisation — for example when a new person joins a team. When the feature is enabled, flowit automatically checks whether an active or scheduled review cycle exists for that team. If it does, a review is automatically created for the new person and the responsible team lead within the existing cycle.
No new review cycle is created — the new person is simply integrated into the existing cycle.
⚙️ How is the feature activated?
Automatic review creation is a global setting and applies to all active review cycles in the organisation.
Prerequisite: For automatic review creation to work, at least one active review group must exist in flowit. Without an ongoing or scheduled review group, the setting has no effect — there is no existing cycle into which new people could be integrated.
Where to find the setting: Admin > Settings > Reviews > "Activate automatic creation of reviews globally"
Important — the setting applies to all active review groups: Once the setting is activated, it automatically applies to all active review groups in the organisation — not just one. For example, if an organisation has an active group for annual employee appraisals, one for probation reviews, and one for exit interviews, new employees joining a team will automatically be integrated into all three groups — provided the relevant team is part of the cycle. The setting cannot be controlled separately per review group.
✅ What does automatic review creation cover?
The feature applies in the following situations:
Existing team-based group reviews that are active or scheduled
Other grouped review cycles linked to that team
Company-wide review cycles, if that team is part of the cycle
The newly created review automatically inherits:
The same schedule as the existing cycle
The same template
The same team context
The current team lead as reviewer — if there are multiple team leads, one is assigned as the main reviewer and the others can be added as additional reviewers
❌ What does automatic review creation not cover?
The feature does not apply in the following situations:
Standalone, manual reviews (not group reviews)
When automatic creation is disabled
When a team lead joins a team as a team lead — only employees are automatically included
When someone is simply granted the Review User permission within a team
When new teams are created
For old or inactive review cycles
When the team has no active team lead to assign as reviewer
🛡️ Duplicate protection
flowit has built-in duplicate protection: if a matching review already exists for a person within the relevant cycle, no second review will be created.
📋 Difference from review automations
These two features are frequently confused — here is a direct comparison:
| Automatic Review Creation | Review Automations |
What does it do? | Adds new people to existing review cycles | Creates reviews based on defined rules (e.g. onboarding, offboarding) |
Trigger | Structural change (person joins team) | Schedule or defined event |
Control | Global on/off setting | Configurable per automation |
Creates new cycle? | No — integrates into existing cycle | Yes — creates standalone reviews |
→ Article: Review Automations in flowit