How does a job enter/leave the pool?

Firstly you can decide for each workflow system whether the pool should be active or not, discussed here.

Jobs entering the pool:

You decide if/when jobs should enter the pool. This is done by adding the workflow action 'set job sub-system holder' to the workflow step that you would like to put the job into the pool, so this can either be job creation or any blue progress button. The workflow action includes an option to set to Pool. Detailed guidance on how to do this are here. Remember for maximum flexibility you can have multiple progress buttons, e.g.one that enter the pool and one that doesn't and you can also differentiate this by having different workflow routes.

Any jobs with a current holder of the pool will show on the pool report along with any comments made on the job, they will be listed in the order they arrived into the pool.

Jobs leaving the pool:

There are three ways in which a job may leave the pool:

1. Users can click on the Take button on the pool screen. This might be handy where you have a policy of asking staff to work on whatever is in the office without needing a manager to decide which job to allocate, jobs in the pool are ordered based on the date they arrived into the pool and show comments so it helps ensure a sensible order of allocation. If you are using the Take button you need to have configured what it will do, see notes here.
2. Another progress button on  the job card may be pressed which can trigger a workflow action to set the job holder to someone else.
3. You can manually change the job holder on the job card. If you don't have a job field showing your job holder, setting one up is covered here.