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The Employee Lifecycle

The employee lifecycle is how HR people organise their own work, and it is the reason HR software is sold in the modules it is sold in. The usual sequence is attract, hire, onboard, develop, reward, retain, exit, and every HR practitioner you meet will already be thinking in it whether or not they name it.

You will find it drawn as a circle on a hundred vendor websites, which has made it look like decoration. It is not. Read properly it is the most useful map we have of our own product, because the interesting part is not the stages. It is the arrows between them.

The stages, and what actually changes hands#

Attract. Employer brand, job posts, sourcing. No employee exists yet, only a job that does.

Hire. Applications, screening, interviews, offer, acceptance. The person now exists as a candidate record with a name, a contact, a salary agreed, and a start date.

Onboard. Contract, statutory registrations, bank account, tax status, equipment, first day. The candidate becomes an employee, and this is where the largest single burst of data entry in the whole lifecycle happens.

Develop. Goals, reviews, training, promotion. Changes to level and title.

Reward. Salary, allowances, benefits, and the monthly payroll run. This is the only stage that repeats on a fixed schedule regardless of what else is happening.

Retain. Engagement, absence patterns, the reasons people leave before they leave.

Exit. Resignation or termination, final settlement, statutory deregistration, and the records that must survive the person by years.

The arrows are the product#

Look at what has to move across each boundary and you find the same data crossing again and again: name, identity number, salary, start date, tax status, bank account.

In most companies each of those crossings is a person retyping. The salary agreed in the offer letter is typed again into the HR system, and again into the payroll spreadsheet, and again into the bank’s template. Nobody planned that. It accumulated, one reasonable system at a time.

Two things go wrong at a handover, and only one of them is obvious. The obvious one is effort. The dangerous one is divergence: the moment the same fact exists in two places, they can disagree, and nothing will tell you which one is right. A salary raised in the HR system but not in payroll does not produce an error. It produces a payslip.

hire onboard payroll entered once, carried hire onboard payroll ↻ ↻ retyped at each handover
Same three stages, same person, one variable changed: whether the record crosses the boundary or is entered again. The second row does not produce an error message when the numbers drift apart. It produces a payslip.

Where the value is unevenly distributed#

The stages are not equally important to us, and pretending otherwise is how a payroll company ends up building a mediocre learning module.

Reward is the only stage on a clock. Everything else can slip a week. Payroll cannot, which is why it is the stage that earns the right to be trusted, and why it is where we start.

Onboard is where the data burden is. One person’s arrival generates identity documents, a tax status, a bank account, statutory registrations, a contract, and a compensation structure. Every downstream stage reads what was captured here, so an error at onboarding propagates for years.

Exit is where the compliance risk is. Final settlement, correct tax treatment of severance, statutory deregistration, and record retention that outlives the employment. It is the least glamorous stage and the one most likely to produce a legal problem.

Hire to onboard is the seam we are building across. A candidate who accepts an offer already has a name, a salary, a start date, and usually a bank account and identity document. Every one of those is re-entered by hand in most companies on day one. See Hiring & the ATS.

Why this matters to our strategy#

Our north star counts payroll periods run end to end with zero manual intervention, and the lifecycle explains where the manual interventions come from. They are almost never inside the payroll calculation. They are upstream, at the handovers, where something arrived in the wrong format or did not arrive at all and somebody fixed it by hand before the run.

That reframes the ATS from a second product into a defence of the first one. Hiring is not us expanding into recruitment because the market looks attractive. It is us removing the largest remaining source of manual entry immediately upstream of payroll, so that the number on the payslip traces back to a figure a hiring manager agreed rather than to a figure somebody typed twice.

It also sharpens what we mean by trust. A customer re-checks payroll in a spreadsheet partly because they do not trust the arithmetic, but mostly because they do not trust the inputs, and they are right not to when those inputs were retyped three times. Closing the seams removes the reason for the spreadsheet more thoroughly than any amount of explaining the arithmetic.

What this means for what we build#

  • Enter once. Any field captured at hiring must flow to employment and payroll without a human retyping it. If we ask for an identity number twice anywhere in the product, that is a defect.
  • One record, many stages. The same person should not have a candidate identity and a separate employee identity that must be reconciled. The stage changes; the person does not.
  • Instrument the handovers, not the stages. If we want to know where the process leaks, measure how often a field is edited immediately after it crosses a boundary. That edit is somebody correcting a bad handover.
  • Build exit properly even though nobody demos it. Final settlement and record retention are where a customer gets hurt, and getting them right is invisible until the month it is the only thing that matters.
  • Do not build the middle of the lifecycle just because the diagram has boxes there. Develop and retain are real stages that we are not the right product for yet, and a shallow module in each would cost us the credibility the payroll stage earned.