hr_applicant_state_selection

On an applicant card or form in Odoo Recruitment, the small colored bullet next to the title is this widget. It renders kanban_state on hr.applicant and opens a dropdown with the four states the model defines: In Progress, Ready for Next Stage, Waiting and Blocked.

The widget is a 25-line subclass of the generic state_selection widget. Its one change is the color map it installs in setup(): blocked red, done green, and waiting orange. The base widget only knows red and green, because the standard kanban_state selection on other models has three values. Recruitment redeclares the field with a fourth value, waiting, and this widget exists to give that value a color.

Everything else is inherited: the dropdown, the label substitution from stage legends, the autosave behavior, and the command palette entries in form views.

The four states are a lightweight triage layer that lives across stage columns. A recruiter can keep an applicant in the Interview stage while flagging whether the file is moving (In Progress), stalled on the candidate (Waiting), stalled internally (Blocked), or ready to advance (Ready for Next Stage).

The orange Waiting state is the one recruitment teams actually use most, and it is the reason this widget exists: waiting on candidate feedback, references, or a signed offer is the default condition of a hiring pipeline, and it is different from Blocked, which signals your side owes an action.

Because the labels come from the stage's legend fields, each recruitment stage can rename what the states mean. On the Contract Proposal stage, Ready for Next Stage can read as Offer accepted; the bullet colors stay consistent while the words adapt to the stage, which is how the standard Odoo data set uses it.

How core applies it on the applicant form

<field name="legend_normal" invisible="1"/>
<field name="legend_blocked" invisible="1"/>
<field name="legend_waiting" invisible="1"/>
<field name="legend_done" invisible="1"
<field name="kanban_state" widget="hr_applicant_state_selection" class="o_field_state_selection"/>

The invisible legend fields are not decoration. The inherited dropdown builds its labels from record.data['legend_' + state], so the four related fields must be loaded in the view or the dropdown falls back to the raw selection labels.

Showing the label next to the bullet

<field name="kanban_state" widget="hr_applicant_state_selection"
       options="{'hide_label': False}"/>

Turning off the immediate save

<field name="kanban_state" widget="hr_applicant_state_selection"
       options="{'autosave': False}"/>

By default a state change saves the whole record immediately, including any other unsaved edits on the form.

The interesting engineering is in what the subclass inherits, and one place where the inheritance shows a seam.

The fourth state outruns the hotkeys. The base widget registers one command palette entry per selection value in form views, assigning hotkeys from a hardcoded three-letter list: Alt+D, Alt+F, Alt+G. On a three-value model that covers everything. On hr.applicant's four-value selection, the entries register in selection order, so In Progress, Ready for Next Stage and Waiting get the three hotkeys and the fourth entry, Blocked, registers with no hotkey at all. It is still reachable by typing in the command palette, just not by key combination. We verified this against the base setup() in Odoo 19.0.

The state also drives dates. On the server side, any write to kanban_state stamps date_last_stage_update, and moving the applicant to a new stage resets the state to normal. So the bullet quietly participates in the recruitment KPIs that measure time in stage.

Server-set values, not widget magic. The widget never computes anything; it displays and writes the selection. Automated flows such as interview forms or refuse reasons set waiting or blocked from Python, and the widget simply shows the result.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026, and until release the development branch can still change.

As of this writing, hr_applicant_state_selection.js is byte-identical between Odoo 19.0 and the development branch: same color map, same registration, same inheritance. Note that the generic parent widget is losing its autosave option upstream in the same cycle, which would change the immediate-save behavior this subclass inherits. We re-verify both files against the shipped release.