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Requirements & installation

How to install and activate the free Vakanssi plugin on a WordPress site, from the two requirements to what activation sets up and the moment the setup wizard opens.

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This page takes you from a blank WordPress site to a working Vakanssi installation. It assumes someone handed you a WordPress login and nothing else.

If WordPress is new to you

WordPress is the software that runs your company’s website. You manage it from a private area called wp-admin, usually at https://yoursite.com/wp-admin, where you sign in with a username and password. After signing in you see a dark sidebar on the left (Posts, Pages, Plugins, and so on). Everything in these docs starts from that sidebar.

A plugin is an add-on you install to give the site new abilities. Vakanssi is a plugin. Once it is active, it adds a Hiring menu to that sidebar, and that menu is where all your hiring work happens.

Requirements

RequirementMinimum
WordPress6.6 or newer
PHP7.4 or newer
Your accountAdministrator

PHP is the programming language WordPress runs on, and your hosting company controls which version your site uses. You can check both versions yourself under Tools, then Site Health, then Info in the sidebar. If either is too old, your hosting company can update it for you.

You also need an administrator account, the WordPress role that is allowed to install plugins. If Plugins does not appear in your sidebar, your account has a lesser role. Ask whoever manages the site to upgrade it, or to install the plugin for you.

Too old? Nothing breaks.

If your site is below these minimums, Vakanssi refuses to activate and shows a clear message instead. Your site keeps working exactly as before. Update WordPress or PHP, then try again.

Installing from the plugin directory

The free plugin lives in the WordPress.org plugin directory, the built-in library you can search from inside wp-admin. This is the easiest way to install it. Its listing, with the full description and the support forum, is at wordpress.org/plugins/vakanssi.

  1. Sign in to your WordPress admin area (usually https://yoursite.com/wp-admin).

  2. In the left sidebar, click Plugins, then Add Plugin. (On WordPress 6.6 and 6.7 the link is called Add New Plugin.)

  3. In the search box at the top right, type Vakanssi. Its card appears in the results.

  4. Click Install Now on the Vakanssi card, and wait for the button to change to Activate.

  5. Click Activate.

    The moment activation finishes, Vakanssi opens its setup wizard, a short guided setup covered on the next page.

Installing from a zip file

If your site cannot install from the directory, download the .zip from the Download button on the plugin’s listing and upload it by hand instead. (Vakanssi Pro, the premium build of the same plugin, is not on sale yet; see How you will get Pro.)

  1. In the left sidebar, click Plugins, then Add Plugin (Add New Plugin on WordPress 6.6 and 6.7).

  2. Click the Upload Plugin button at the top of the page. A file box appears.

  3. Click Choose File, pick the Vakanssi .zip you downloaded, then click Install Now.

    WordPress uploads and unpacks the file, then reports “Plugin installed successfully.”

  4. Click Activate Plugin.

What activation sets up

Behind the scenes, activating Vakanssi prepares everything at once:

  • Its own database tables. Your candidates, applications, and CVs get dedicated storage, kept separate from your site’s pages and posts and built to stay fast even at tens of thousands of applications. The free plugin creates ten tables; the Pro build creates four more for its own features.
  • Three hiring roles. Recruiter, Hiring Manager, and HR / Compliance, roles you can assign to colleagues so they can work on hiring without control over the rest of the website. Your administrator account automatically gets every hiring permission. See Roles & permissions.
  • The default hiring stages. Every job starts with New, In Review, Interview, Offer, Hired, Rejected.
  • Protected CV storage. Uploaded CVs are stored in a locked-down vakanssi folder inside your uploads directory, and Vakanssi checks that the web cannot reach it directly. They can only be downloaded by signed-in team members with permission, never by strangers guessing a link.
  • The Hiring menu. A new Hiring item appears in the left sidebar, your home for everything hiring. The tour walks through every screen in it.
  • The setup wizard. You are taken straight to it, as long as the site has not been set up before. Only the person who clicked Activate is redirected. If you activated several plugins at once, activated from the network admin of a multisite, or activated from the command line, Vakanssi stays out of the way, and you will find a Setup item under the Hiring menu instead.

On a multisite network

Each site in a network gets its own Vakanssi: its own tables, settings, hiring roles, setup wizard, and CV folder. You can network-activate Vakanssi or activate it on single sites. A site added after network activation is set up the first time someone loads one of its pages.

A site’s administrator can use Vakanssi only on their own site. A network super admin can use it on every site.

Your data survives the plugin

Deactivating, or even deleting, Vakanssi later never removes your hiring data, unless you deliberately switch on Delete all data on uninstall in the settings. See Backups & data.

What you will see

Activation opens the setup wizard first, not the dashboard. Once you finish or exit the wizard, Hiring, then Hiring HQ becomes your home base: what needs your attention right now, your pipeline by stage, and your latest applications and upcoming interviews.

Hiring, then Hiring HQ, shown with demo data on a Pro site. Exit setup in the wizard brings you here.

Where to go next