Last year we moved our joiner process forward. Accounts used to be created the day before someone started, because that is when HR finished the paperwork, and new starters spent their first days waiting. Now, when a contract is signed, the automation builds everything a week ahead in a disabled state: the account, the licences, the system roles, an order for a laptop or a handheld. On the morning of the start date it switches the account on and emails a first sign in link to the personal address the candidate gave us.
It worked. Most new starters can now do their job on the first morning. What we had not designed was what happens when a start date never arrives.
Offers are withdrawn more often than I had known. A reference falls through, a right to work check fails, a candidate takes a better offer the week before, a depot's recruitment is frozen. In HR's system the record is marked withdrawn. That change produced no message, because the integration had only been built to listen for new contracts and new start dates, and nobody had asked what the opposite of a hire looked like.
So the account waited, disabled, and on the morning of the start date the automation switched it on as planned and sent the link. In September a warehouse manager told us that a man whose offer had been withdrawn after a failed reference check had emailed him from his new company address to ask what had gone wrong. When we looked back over the year, the same thing had happened to thirty four people. Twenty had never opened the link. Fourteen had signed in, and most looked at the intranet and the payslip page and went no further. One could see a depot's shift planning screen for six weeks. Eleven laptops and nine handhelds had been built and delivered to sites for people who never came.
The integration now listens for every change to a hire, and a withdrawal or a moved start date removes or reschedules everything already built. Switching an account on is no longer just a timer. On the morning, the automation checks that HR still shows the person as starting that day, and a manager confirms the person has arrived before the account can reach anything beyond the basics. A weekly report lists any account switched on in the last month with a withdrawn record behind it, and it has been empty since we introduced it.
When automation acts in advance, it acts on a decision that can still change. If you schedule something to happen later, decide at the same time what cancels it, and check that the decision still stands at the moment it runs.
– Serguey Shinder
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