Forms and the Jira Work Management Recruitment template

[robin_trudel]

I'm part of a small group looking at the Jira Work Management Recruitment Template to track information like people's skill sets.

We have a requirement to capture, store, and report on about 20 fields related to the people and none of them map to existing Jira fields.

We've tested creating a form to capture the information, but we can only review the form within the issue or export the forms one at a time.

We know creating custom Jira fields and linking them to the form fields will display them on the issue itself and are included if we export multiple issues, but there is a lot of information saying that creating custom Jira fields should be discouraged.

We've also considered linking the form fields to unrelated Jira fields in order to export them, but that is not ideal and seems hard to maintain.

Is there a native Jira way to look across forms that are attached to different issues? For example, if we captured a person's technology expertise on a form, how could we report a list of the people who have a certain kind of technology expertise?

Are forms the wrong approach entirely?

I can't help but think we aren't the first people to try this.

[John Funk]

Hi Robin - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

In my opinion, the guidance is there so that you will not go overboard with custom fields. My thought is that if you are not going to report on the information, then you don't capture the information. But if you ARE going to report on it, then you need a unique field for that. 

So, I would say to go ahead and create your 20 fields and add them to the form and screen. 

One caveat - only do this with a Company-managed Jira Work Management project and not the Team-managed. The reason is that Team-managed projects are completely independent of each other and you would have to create all of those custom fields separate on every project. With Company-managed, you create them one time and share them across the other Company-managed projects.