HR automation
Three weeks between an offer accepted and a new joiner actually working. Nothing went wrong: contract, identity documents, bank details, equipment, accounts and training, each waiting on somebody, and the company's first impression is a fortnight of reminders. That is the work HR automation should be taking, and it is not the work it usually gets sold for.
Where the week goes
- Onboarding is a chase, not a process. Contract, identity documents, bank details, equipment, accounts, training. Each one waits on someone, and the first impression of the company is a fortnight of reminders.
- The same questions, forever. Holiday balance, policy on this, how to claim that. All answerable from documents that already exist, all currently answered by a person interrupting other work.
- Records live in four places. Payroll, the HR system, a shared drive and someone's spreadsheet. When they disagree, the argument is with a person about their money, which is the worst possible argument to have.
- Nothing is watching the dates. Probation ends, right-to-work documents expire, certifications lapse. Every one of them is a date somebody was supposed to remember.
What must not be automated
- Screening or scoring candidates. Beyond the legal exposure in the EU, it encodes yesterday's hiring patterns and calls it objectivity. I will not build it.
- Anything in a disciplinary or grievance process. The system may hold documents; it takes no part in the judgement.
- Performance conclusions. It can assemble what was recorded. Deciding what it means about a person is a manager's job and a manager's accountability.
- Termination decisions, or anything that reads as one. Including the polite automated version.
The build, in the order people feel it
- Onboarding as a tracked sequence: every document, account and step with an owner and a deadline, chased automatically, with one short list of what is stuck.
- An answering layer over your actual policies, so people get the current answer with a link to the source — and anything it cannot answer from a document goes to a named person.
- One record per employee assembled from the systems you already run, with disagreements surfaced rather than silently overwritten.
- A date watch: probation, visas, right to work, certifications, reviews. Notice in advance, to the person who has to act.
Leave it alone if
- Your policies are not written down or are out of date. An answering layer over stale documents confidently tells people the wrong thing.
- Fewer than about twenty people and low turnover. The admin is real but a build will not beat a good spreadsheet yet.
- HR data lives entirely inside a system with no way in or out. That constraint is the finding, and it is worth knowing before spending anything.
The same work, already automated elsewhere
- Text factory — documents produced end to end by machine, with a human approval step kept deliberately in the loop — the same arrangement any policy answer or contract pack needs.
- Personal AI assistant — the daily-admin half in real use: speech turned into structured notes, things chased, records filed where they can be found. Onboarding is that, repeated on a schedule with names attached.
What HR teams ask
What does HR automation cover?
Onboarding sequences and the chasing they generate, an answering layer over your real policies, one reliable employee record assembled from the systems you run, and a watch on the dates that matter. Recruitment screening is deliberately not on that list.
Why not automate candidate screening?
Because it learns from who you hired before and presents that as neutral, and because in the EU automated decisions about people carry real obligations. It is the one request in this area I turn down, and I would rather say that here than in a proposal.
Will people trust a machine with their holiday balance?
They trust an answer that cites the policy and the current figure, and they stop trusting it the first time it is confidently wrong. That is why it answers only from documents that are current and hands over anything it cannot source.
Does this replace an HR system?
No. It sits over the systems you have and fills the gaps between them, which is usually where the chasing lives. Replacing a working HR system is rarely the cheapest way to fix onboarding.
What do companies start with?
Onboarding, almost always, because it is visible, it is measurable in days-to-productive, and getting it right changes what a new joiner thinks of the company in their first week.
Time your last three onboardings
From offer accepted to fully set up and working. If it is more than a week, most of the gap is chasing, and chasing is the part a machine does without getting bored or embarrassed. Bring those three timelines to the free hour and I will show you where the days went.
Book that hour →