"Use for all?" function - what's a good UI?

Question

Background: Recruitment software... Users can select multiple jobs and set the end date of those jobs all at once... Often, users will set all of the jobs to have the same end date...

To prevent users from having to go to each job and set the end date, we have a "Use for all" function. When actioned, it will take the end date of the first job and use this for all jobs in the list:

However, we want to tidy this up. The CTA itself eats up a lot of space - and is fact in use in other columns within that table, eating up even more space.

Any best practice advice? Could we use an icon on the CTA instead?

Answer 1

Have a look at bulk actions. A common pattern is to use checkboxes for each row, which you may already have and then show a bar with buttons above the table, the options in the bar change depending on the selection.

Deleting a bunch of emails is an example where this is used in almost any email application.

You can apply this easily for your function without having any additional width in the table.