Sequential Approval in Enterprise Service Management

I’m trying to implement sequential approvals on Enterprise Service Management forms/tickets. I attempted to use Business Rules, but as soon as I add an additional criterion—such as Description → Contains, alongside Approval → Granted—the rule fails to trigger.

My requirement is to have different approvers for different types of service requests (e.g., recruitment requests, termination requests, leave requests). At any stage, if an approval is refused, the approval flow should stop and the ticket should close.

The challenge is that I cannot add additional criteria in the Business Rule to differentiate request types; as a result, the rule would apply globally to all tickets where approval is granted, forcing me to configure only one user or one group as the second-level approver—which defeats the purpose. ESM forms require different approvers depending on the request type.

Has anyone managed to solve this using Business Rules?

My other option is to explore configuring Entities, which in theory should work—but so should the rules, at least on paper. :(