Workspace owner

Overview⁠

Every workspace has exactly one owner. On the Enterprise plan the owner is a workspace admin with three extra powers: deleting the workspace, changing security settings, and handing the workspace to someone else. On the Free, Basic and Business plans any workspace admin can also delete the workspace and change the workspace management settings. Of the three, only handing the workspace over stays with the owner on those plans.

Everything else an administrator does, such as managing teams, jobs, members, career sites, labels, billing and the audit log, is available to any workspace admin.

The owner role is given to the first person who sets up the workspace. There is no way to have two owners at once; ownership moves rather than multiplies.

Owner and admin at a glance⁠

Two entries above are worth reading twice.

Cancelling a deletion is deliberately not owner-only. A scheduled deletion is exactly the situation where the person who scheduled it may have left, so any workspace admin can stop the clock.

Any admin can read the security settings, and the plan decides who can change them. An admin can open Settings → Security and see how the workspace is configured. On the Enterprise plan every control on the page is disabled for them except the invite links, which any workspace admin can manage. On the Free, Basic and Business plans the Workspace management rows are active for every admin as well.

On the Free plan every member who is not a guest counts as a workspace admin. So on that plan any member who is not a guest can start a workspace deletion and change the workspace management settings.

The owner's three powers⁠

On the Enterprise plan only the owner can do the three things below. On the Free, Basic and Business plans any workspace admin can do the first two, which are deleting the workspace and changing the workspace management settings. Transferring ownership stays with the owner on every plan.

Delete the workspace⁠

Settings → Workspace → Danger zone → Delete workspace, confirmed by typing the workspace name. On the Enterprise plan an admin who is not the owner sees the button disabled with Only the workspace owner can delete this workspace. On the Free, Basic and Business plans the button is active for every workspace admin.

This starts a 30-day window during which nothing changes, except that candidate profile access is revoked straight away, and any admin can cancel. The Workspaces article covers the window in full.

Change security settings⁠

Settings → Security is readable by any admin. Who can change a setting depends on the setting and on the plan:

• Workspace management: who may use each of these, set to Only admins or All members: New user invitations, Team creation, Manage workspace labels, Manage workspace questions, Manage workspace templates, Manage loops, API key creation, Modify agent guidance and Edit career sites. Admins create teams by default; set Team creation to All members to let every member create one. On the Enterprise plan only the owner changes these rows. On the Free, Basic and Business plans any workspace admin can.
• File uploads: Restrict file uploads and Allowed file types. This is an Enterprise feature, and only the owner changes it.
• Restricted IPs: the Restrict access to allowed IPs toggle, and adding, editing or removing approved IP addresses. This is an Enterprise feature, and only the owner changes it.
• Approved email domains, under Workspace login and restrictions, and SAML & SCIM, under Authentication methods. Only the owner changes these.

Invite links are the exception. Any workspace admin can create, copy, rotate and revoke them. The owner gate does not apply to them.

Transfer ownership⁠

Open the workspace Members page, use the row menu on the person taking over, and choose Transfer ownership…. The action is on that page only, not on Settings → Members. Only the sitting owner sees it, and it is not offered for guests or for the current owner's own row.

Confirming does two things at once: the new person becomes the owner, and you become an admin. You keep full administrative access and lose only the owner's powers. After that, only the new owner can transfer it back.

If the transfer fails and Attia can confirm that nothing changed, you see Ownership was not transferred. and can try again. If Attia cannot confirm the result either way, you are told not to retry and to contact support, because retrying a transfer that already succeeded makes things worse.

Owner-only access to private teams⁠

A workspace admin who is not a member of a private team cannot see that team, its jobs or its members. This applies on every plan and is not a plan feature. It is a control over candidate personal data.

The owner keeps access to private teams on every plan. Team leads and members of the team are unaffected either way.

If your organization genuinely needs central administrators inside every private team, that is available as a per-workspace exception; contact support rather than changing anyone's role.

Getting back in when a control locks you out⁠

If the workspace restricts access to an allowed IP list and you are outside it, the owner is still let in, everywhere. An admin is let in on Settings → Security only, so they can correct the list, and nowhere else. A member is not let in at all.

This is the reason to keep the owner role with someone who can be reached. An IP allowlist with nobody able to bypass it is an outage.

When a workspace loses every administrator⁠

If the last owner and admin are removed from the workspace at the identity provider, Attia locks administration down entirely rather than promoting someone automatically. While that state is active, no one has admin rights, including the owner, and admin-only surfaces disappear.

Recovery is done by Attia support, which gives the workspace a new admin through an Attia admin invitation. There is no in-product way out, on purpose: any escape hatch would be a way for a non-admin to grant themselves admin, and the people who could reach it are exactly the people who just lost access.

Contact support if this happens. Attia will not show an explanation on the affected screens today; see below.

Not available yet⁠

• A second owner. Ownership can be transferred but not shared. If you need cover while the owner is away, transfer it and transfer it back.
• Owner-only billing. Billing and plan changes are available to any workspace admin. If you need billing restricted to the owner, tell us. It is not the current behaviour.
• An explanation when administration locks down. When a workspace loses every administrator, admin surfaces vanish with no message saying why. Contact support if administration disappears unexpectedly.
• Owner-only workspace name and URL. Any workspace admin can rename the workspace and change its URL. Old URLs redirect, so links survive the change.