60% Faster HR Approvals with Make.com Conditional Logic: How Sarah Eliminated the Bottleneck

Make.com conditional logic eliminated Sarah’s four-tier HR approval bottleneck at a regional healthcare organization. After an OpsMap™ discovery session mapped routing rules that lived only in her head, a Router + Filter scenario cut approval cycle time by 60% and reclaimed 6 hours per week — with zero routing errors post-launch.

Multi-level HR approval workflows are where good processes go to die. A hiring request hits the wrong inbox. A budget exception waits three days for an approver who was CC’d instead of addressed directly. An offer letter routes to a department head when the salary threshold required CFO sign-off. These aren’t rare failures — they’re the default outcome when routing logic lives in someone’s head instead of a system.

This case study documents how Sarah, HR Director at a regional healthcare organization with approximately 400 employees, used Make.com conditional logic to automate a four-tier approval chain, eliminate manual routing errors, and recover 6 hours per week that had been consumed by approval triage. For context on why small HR teams reach this breaking point, see The Real Reason Small HR Teams Burn Out.

Snapshot

Context: A Four-Tier Process Running on Email

Sarah’s organization ran hiring approvals across four tiers depending on role level, department, and offer salary. A clinical staff hire at standard pay required department head sign-off only. A senior clinical hire above a salary threshold required department head, HR Director, CFO, and CEO approval — in sequence, not in parallel.

None of this logic existed anywhere except in Sarah’s mental model and a process document that hadn’t been updated in two years. Every new hiring request required her to manually read the requisition, determine the appropriate routing path, and email the right approver. If the requisition was incomplete or ambiguous, she spent additional time clarifying before routing could begin.

The downstream costs were measurable. SHRM data shows the average cost-per-hire exceeds $4,100, with a significant portion driven by time-to-fill delays that compound when approval routing is manual. Sarah’s average time from requisition submission to final approval was 11 days. Streamlined organizations benchmark at 3–5 days. That gap — 6 to 8 days of routing lag — represented a direct competitive disadvantage every time Sarah’s team competed for a qualified candidate.

The 12 hours per week Sarah spent on approval triage broke down into three categories: routing new requests (4 hrs), chasing approvers on stalled items (5 hrs), and correcting misrouted requests after the fact (3 hrs). None of that work required her judgment. All of it required her time.

What OpsMap Found

Before a single Make.com module was built, the engagement started with an OpsMap session — a structured discovery step that maps the existing process, identifies the conditional logic driving routing decisions, and surfaces edge cases that derail automation builds if they surface after launch instead of before.

In Sarah’s case, OpsMap produced three findings that shaped the entire build.

The routing logic had five variables, not two. Sarah believed the triggers were role level and salary. OpsMap identified three additional variables: department (clinical vs. administrative), whether the hire was backfill or new headcount, and whether the offer included a signing bonus. Each combination produced a different routing path.

Two of the four approval tiers had undocumented backup approver rules. When the CFO was unavailable, the COO approved. When the CEO was unavailable, the board chair approved. Neither rule was written anywhere — both existed only in Sarah’s memory. Discovering these during OpsMap meant they were built into the scenario from day one instead of discovered as exceptions during week two of live operation.

The ATS submission form collected only three of the five routing variables. The backfill-vs.-new-headcount flag and the signing bonus flag were determined by Sarah after reading the full requisition. That manual read step was unavoidable without a form change — which meant the form had to be updated before any Make.com build made sense.

Finding three required a form update as a prerequisite. The team added two dropdown fields to the ATS submission form. That single change — two dropdowns — made complete automation possible. Without it, two variables still required human judgment on every request, and the scenario would have been a partial solution dressed up as a complete one.

The Make.com Build: Router Logic Across Four Tiers

The Make.com scenario used three structural components: a webhook trigger that fired when a new hiring request was submitted, a Router module with four branches, and Filter conditions on each branch to evaluate the five routing variables. Here is how each tier worked.

Tier 1: Department Head Only

Branch 1 filtered for: administrative role + standard salary + backfill + no signing bonus. When all four conditions matched, the scenario sent a single approval request to the department head via Gmail and logged the request to a Google Sheet. No human routing decision required at any point.

Tier 2: Department Head + HR Director

Branch 2 filtered for: clinical role + standard salary range + backfill + no signing bonus. The scenario sent sequential approval emails — department head first, then HR Director only after department head approval was confirmed via webhook response. A second webhook inside the scenario waited for the department head’s approval click before triggering the HR Director email. Sequential order enforced automatically.

Tier 3: Department Head + HR Director + CFO

Branch 3 filtered for: any new headcount hire regardless of salary, or any hire with salary above the defined threshold. This branch included the backup approver logic: if the CFO webhook response was not received within 48 hours, the scenario automatically re-routed to the COO. No manual follow-up from Sarah required.

Tier 4: Full Four-Tier Chain

Branch 4 filtered for: senior clinical role + salary above the executive threshold + signing bonus present. This was the full chain: department head → HR Director → CFO → CEO, each in sequence, each with a 48-hour timeout and automatic backup approver escalation built in. The CEO tier included the board chair backup rule surfaced during OpsMap.

Every tier logged the request status, approver name, timestamp, and approval or rejection reason to a shared Google Sheet. Sarah had a live dashboard view of every open approval across all four tiers — something that never existed when routing ran through email threads.

Phased Rollout by Department

Rather than going organization-wide at once, the team rolled out the new system by department over four weeks. Clinical nursing launched first — the highest-volume hiring department and the one with the most complex routing. Administrative departments followed in weeks two and three. Executive-level hiring (Tier 4 cases) went live in week four after Sarah confirmed the lower-tier logic was stable under real volume.

Mixed approver tech comfort was the main rollout risk. Some department heads responded to approval emails quickly. Others needed a brief walkthrough of what the email looked like and what clicking Approve or Reject actually triggered downstream. That training took approximately 20 minutes per approver and was handled asynchronously with a two-minute Loom recording sent before the first approval request arrived.

Zero routing errors occurred after go-live across all departments. In the three months before the build, Sarah had logged 14 misrouted requests. In the 90 days after launch: zero.

Results After 90 Days

The 60% reduction in cycle time came from two sources: eliminating the manual routing queue that delayed initial request handoff, and automating the approver follow-up that had previously required Sarah to personally chase stalled items. The combination removed the two largest sources of lag without changing how approvers experienced the process.

Three Decisions That Made This Work

Most automation projects that handle multi-variable conditional logic stall in week three when edge cases appear that weren’t accounted for in the build. Three decisions kept this one clean from launch forward.

OpsMap before build. The five-variable routing logic and the undocumented backup approver rules would have surfaced as production bugs without the discovery session. Finding them before the build meant the Make.com scenario handled every real-world case on day one. See OpsMap vs. Skipping Discovery for a direct comparison of what that difference costs in practice.

Form change before automation. Automating a process that still required human judgment on two input variables was a partial solution, not a complete one. Adding the two ATS fields was the unglamorous prerequisite that made full automation possible. Teams that skip this step end up with scenarios that look complete but still require manual intervention on every exception.

Sequential routing built with internal webhooks. Parallel approval emails would have created a compliance problem. Tier 3 and Tier 4 approvals require sequential sign-off — CFO approval can’t happen until HR Director has approved. Building the sequential routing inside a single Make.com scenario rather than across multiple independent automations kept the audit trail clean and the logic maintainable in one place.

For more on how non-technical HR teams have approached this type of build, see How a Non-Technical HR Team Started Building Their Own Automations With Make + AI.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Make.com modules handle conditional routing?

The Router module creates multiple branches inside a single scenario. Each branch carries Filter conditions that evaluate field values and direct the scenario down the correct path. For sequential approval chains, a second webhook inside the scenario waits for an incoming response — the approver’s click — before triggering the next step in the chain.

Do approvers need a Make.com account?

No. Approvers receive a standard email with approve and reject links. Clicking a link sends a webhook response back to the Make.com scenario. The approver never sees the automation layer — they get an email that looks like any other approval request.

What happens if an approver doesn’t respond?

The scenario includes a timeout filter. If no webhook response arrives within the defined window (48 hours in Sarah’s build), the scenario automatically re-routes to the designated backup approver. A log entry is written and Sarah receives a notification, but no manual action is required on her end.

Can this structure handle more than four tiers?

Yes. The Router + Filter structure scales to as many branches and sequential steps as the process requires. The practical limiting factor is conditional variable complexity — which is exactly what an OpsMap session is designed to surface and document before the build begins.

Does this require IT support or developer access?

Sarah’s build required no IT support. The ATS form change required one email to her ATS vendor’s support team. The Make.com scenario was built and managed entirely within her HR team using existing Google Workspace connections and no custom code.

How does this compare to other HR automation approaches?

For a direct look at how Make.com fits into broader HR workflow automation, see 6 Ways the Make MCP Changes Automation Work for HR Teams and How HR Can Fix Broken Hiring Processes.

Related Reading

• What Is OpsMap? The Discovery Step That Prevents Automation Mistakes
• How Sarah Compressed a 45-Minute Onboarding Process to Under 4 Minutes
• How a Non-Technical HR Team Started Building Their Own Automations With Make + AI
• The Real Reason Small HR Teams Burn Out: It’s Not the Workload
• How HR Can Fix Broken Hiring Processes: Reducing Candidate Frustration Without Slowing Down the Business
• 6 Ways the Make MCP Changes Automation Work for HR Teams
• OpsMap vs. Skipping Discovery: What Happens When You Automate Without a Map