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Modern organizations are hiring and terminating employees faster than ever. However, their hire to retire processes are struggling to keep pace with these dynamic changes in the workforce. According to a report by Gartner, more than 60% of organizations rely on manual processes, wasting an average of 10-15 hours per employee for any changes in their employment lifecycle.
Furthermore, research also shows that 1 in 5 security incidents are linked to mismanaged identities and access caused due to manual workflows. In this blog we will discuss how organizations can tackle these challenges with their hire to retire processes and how automation can be their ideal solution.
The hire to retire process, or the workforce lifecycle management process, is a strategic pillar that helps enterprises navigate their critical business operations related to employees. It involves everything from recruitment to onboarding and role-change to offboarding of your employees.
While often considered a part of HR business operations, the H2R process encompasses multiple organizational operations. This cross functional process impacts IT, security, finance, compliance, and business units simultaneously. Starting from defining the need for recruitment to the process of hiring, performance management, learning and development of the employees, their compensation and benefits, to their departure, every step requires an oversight and structured process. The hire to retire process, or the workforce lifecycle management process, is a strategic pillar that helps enterprises navigate their critical business operations related to employees. It involves everything from recruitment to onboarding and role-change to offboarding of your employees.
With organizations navigating rapid workforce expansion, hybrid work models, contractor engagements, and increasing compliance demands, the hire to retire has become one of the most important business processes today. It helps in maintaining the access and compliance requirements that must be met for an organization to work efficiently. A unified hire to retire framework helps in governance of these changing dynamics, keeping enterprise security intact and reducing financial risks.
The hire to retire process begins by identifying the need to hire new employees. Once that is established, the hiring teams starts on these key milestones of this process, which include;
Recruitment is the first stage of any hire to retire process. Here, the hiring teams identify the talent needs and start looking for suitable candidates. This process mainly involves job postings, sourcing candidates, screening them, setting up interviews, and managing the hiring pipeline. Most organizations use ATS systems like Workday, BambooHR, Greenhouse, and others to manage large volumes of applications and efficiently capture their identity data for later requirements.
Once the candidate is finalized, HR teams start working on onboarding them into the organization’s directory. They work on sharing the offer letters, completing required documentation, and triggering the set onboarding workflows for a smooth hiring process. It is a crucial process that allows the new employee to get accustomed to the company culture and your internal teams to set up the required systems for their welcome. Herein, companies add the data of the employee to their existing HR systems like ADP, Paycor, Ceridian, or Oracle HCM so that their identities can be created. Furthermore, the next step is to update it across multiple systems whose access would be required by the candidate to get their work started on their first day.
Managing compensation, payroll and benefits is another crucial part of the hire to retire process. Creating employee identity on the payroll and benefits systems used by the enterprise is essential for their lifecycle with the organization. Adding employee data to payroll systems like Gusto, Rippling, Paychex and Zoho helps the finance team keep track of salary adjustments, bonuses, incentives, benefits, hikes and more. Furthermore, they also help the HR team and employees to keep track of employee benefits, leaves, and more.
As employees progress within the enterprise, their roles, responsibilities, income and access requirements evolve with it. Without a proper process, it leaves employees as well as the management with information and access gaps. Changing roles is one of the leading causes of identity mismanagement within an organization when done manually. Furthermore, with multiple systems for identity and access management, managing role change information across all systems becomes critical for the HR and IT departments.
As the conclusion of an employee’s lifecycle with your organization, it is imperative for security reasons to formalize offboarding. It includes ensuring revoking access, recovering assets, exit formalities, knowledge transfer, and ensuring that the complete process is in compliance with the HR-IT requirements. Furthermore, a good offboarding process also ensures that the employee receives all the benefits they are entitled to when moving away from the organization.
Enterprises today use an average of over 100-150 applications and platforms for identity, access, and workforce lifecycle management. With these numbers, it becomes a challenge for the HR-IT teams to maintain consistent information of the employees on all these applications manually. Research shows that only 28% of the systems used by organizations are fully in sync with each other, which results in information silos that directly impact employee experience, enterprise security, and costs. Below are some key problems that organizations struggle with when they manage the hire to retire process manually.
Employee information is often inconsistent across HR systems, IdPs, CRMs, ITSMs, and other applications when updated manually. A Gartner study suggests that over 35% of employee records are either duplicate or inconsistent. Furthermore, missing information, duplicate entries, and identity errors lead to access challenges.
For example, HR has updated the role of employees in the HR system, but the payroll team has not been notified of the change. This leaves employees with a pay gap challenge.
Manual workflows need HR intervention for updates. Only when HR sends email or notifies other teams can they start with identity, resource and access provisioning for the employees. Furthermore, if the provisioning requires managerial approval, it further creates delays in the whole process, leaving employees with the required resources to start their work. Statistics suggest that enterprises lose an average of 25-40 hours of productivity per employee during onboarding due to manual provisioning delays.
Updating and tracking access, privileges and entitlements manually often lead to gaps in identity management. When the roles of the employees are not defined or updated properly, they can retain access to systems and resources that they are not entitled to. According to a recent study by IBM, 19% of data breaches are a result of mismanaged or undocumented user access which is often linked to manual access management. With compliance guidelines getting stricter and more advanced, this can lead to compliance failure.
Manual management of the workforce lifecycle or the hire to retire process requires HR, IT, and managers to co-ordinate through emails, spreadsheets, shared drives and ticketing systems. This creates repetitive tasks and slows down lifecycle transitions and processes. It wastes valuable time of highly paid staff and leads to their inability to do productive work.
Manual workflows make it difficult to see which employees have access to what resources. It does not give an insight into when changes were made and where approvals are getting stuck. During audits, this lack of visibility can lead to slow decision making and reduce control of valuable company resources. The auditors need to scramble through spreadsheets and email logs to find out more about the workforce lifecycle. According to Deloitte, 62% of organizations struggle to produce complete audit trails of their hire to retire processes due to manual workflows.
While enterprises spend a significant amount of time streamlining the onboarding process for their employees, they don’t have a similar structure for offboarding their employees. This can often leave a business vulnerable to serious risks that impact security and operations. In addition, many times employees retain access to critical company resources months after exiting the company. According to research by Forbes, 59% of organizations report a data breach due to badly managed offboarding and ex-employees still having access to their systems.
Manual data entry, spreadsheet management, and multi-step approvals are prone to mistakes. This increases ten-times when the HR and IT teams are managing this for hundreds or thousands of employees.
For example, a single typing error in an email can lead to incorrect account creation, access provisioning, and resource assignment. Furthermore, a study suggests that human errors account for 82% of system challenges and access roadblocks.
Manual data entry, spreadsheet management, and multi-step approvals are prone to mistakes. This increases ten-times when the HR and IT teams are managing this for hundreds or thousands of employees.
For example, a single typing error in an email can lead to incorrect account creation, access provisioning, and resource assignment. Furthermore, a study suggests that human errors account for 82% of system challenges and access roadblocks.
Automation helps organizations remove repetitive, administrative tasks that HR and IT teams handle across the employee lifecycle. Instead of updating multiple systems, running around for approvals and maintaining employee data, it allows them to focus on more valuable and growth focused tasks. Automated workflows instantly sync identity information updates across connected systems, making it consistent and reliable. This allows faster onboarding, smoother role transitions and reduced security threats at the time of offboarding.
While manual updates increase the risk of incorrect information, automated workflows ensure that employee payroll and compensation changes are reflected accurately across systems. Since this happens in real time, it is always compliant and audit ready. Furthermore, due to automated audit trails and rule-based governance, enterprises can ensure that they are ISO and SOC2 compliant.
When new hires receive timely access, and system credentials, they can start their first day with an ideal experience. It ensures that they are productive from Day 1 and increases their chances of retention. Automation also makes sure that employees get the required access when they are going through role changes, transfers, or promotions. In addition, during termination or offboarding, these workflows remove ex-employees access immediately, reducing the chances of security risks and offering the employee a good departing experience.
Automated workflows in hire to retire systems help you sync workforce data across systems. They also provide a centralized repository and offer visibility into access, lifecycle, and identity data. It enables you to create accurate reports in real time without having to dig through long email chains, spreadsheets, and outdated systems.
RoboMQ’s Hire2Retire is a niche no-code Identity, Governance and Administration (IGA) SaaS product for Workforce Identity Lifecycle Management. It automates your entire hire to retire process starting from the JML lifecycle (Joiner-Mover-Leaver). It integrates with HR systems as the source of truth receiving employee profile changes in near real-time to perform identity, privilege, access, and resource provisioning.
As a solution, Hire2Retire synchronizes identity data from HR systems to IdPs, ITSMs and all other downstream applications. It ensures that employees receive the right access when they start; their privileges change as per their roles, and access is removed when the employment ends. The business impact of this can be seen with 170+ active customers that currently use Hire2Retire as their go to solution for workforce lifecycle management. They report upto 60% faster onboarding, and 40-70% less incidents related to access, significant reduction in their audit findings or compliance challenges that are related to ghost or over privileged accounts.
Here’s how Hire2Retire helps you in solving your employee journey challenges:
Hire2Retire integrates with 26+ HR systems, identity providers (AD, Entra ID, Okta Global Directory and Google Workspace) and leading ITSM platforms like (ServiceNow, Salesforce, Jira, SolarWinds and Fresh Service). It ensures that every employee’s identity record is synchronized across these connected systems in real time, removing data fragmentation, payroll errors, compliance risks, and operational delays. In addition, it also has a pool of 500+ access connectors (HubSpot, Adobe, Hootsuite, NetSuite, Snowflake, Zoom) that allows pushing updates from a single source of truth (HR systems).
Hire2Retire automatically creates user accounts and provisions role-based access, licenses, permissions and physical resources before the employees first day. So even if your employee is sitting 1000 miles away from the office, Hire2Retire can help ensure that they get the required resources before their first day. Your new hires will join the first day with their emails ready, access to collaboration tools and core applications active, allowing them to be productive from Day 1. This streamlined onboarding experience will significantly improve the chances of your employee retention.
Hire2Retire is built on the concept of zero trust policy and least privilege access. As delayed deprovisioning of ex-employees becomes a looming threat and security risk for enterprises, Hire2Retire solves it in real time. It eliminates the risks by removing access as soon as the employee is marked as terminated in the HR system. Organizations can even choose to configure the access removal on an immediate, scheduled or conditional basis. This helps in strengthening the zero trust security protocols of the company and protects their sensitive data from insider threats.
With its advanced access control processes, Hire2Retire provides permissions that are updated only based on the roles and attributes of the employees. By syncing information on the basis of security groups, Hire2Retire ensures that employees receive access to applications and entitlements when they join, move or leave the organization. It helps in preventing privilege creeps that ensure clean, compliant, and audit ready access throughout the employee lifecycle.
Hire2Retire is purpose-engineered as a full-fledged IGA product. Its ease of use, low total cost of ownership, zero-touch automation, and strong governance and compliance features make it an ideal platform for your company. It is also a full-built, easy-to-use, ready-to-configure solution, and does not require security architects or IAM specialists for use. The platform is built around an intuitive and guided UX where real-time API-driven insights help customers configure their identity process with clarity and confidence.
In addition, using Hire2Retire also helps in reducing direct costs of your employee lifecycle management by upto 70%. This makes it an ideal choice for enterprises looking for a powerful automation solution with low to no complexity.
A streamlined hire to retire process has moved from ‘nice to have’ to a pressing need for organizations trying to operate efficiently and provide a superior employee experience. With the workforce getting more diverse and distributed, the cost of managing this process manually will only increase in the coming future. Each delay will lead to slow provisioning and deprovisioning, leading to inconsistent data and compliance risks. The only way forward will be to start treating the hire to retire process as an essential part of workforce management than an administrative checklist.
With Hire2Retire organizations will be able to unlock the full potential of automated hire to retire process, eliminate manual work, provide superior employee experience and stay compliant while reducing operational costs. To find out how Hire2Retire can help you with your hire to retire process challenges, book a call with our seasoned experts today.
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Managing hire to retire process manually leads to fragmented employee data, inconsistent profile information, and access errors. It also causes compliance challenges with lack of audit visibility and varying information.
A structured hire to retire process leads to faster onboarding, smoother role changes and seamless offboarding. It allows employees to get started on their work on the first day without having to run from people to post for access and accounts. It also ensures that after offboarding, employees do not leave with lingering access to accounts and follows a least privilege policy making their exit smoother.
A good hire to retire platform should offer end-to-end automation of workforce lifecycle. It should keep your company SOC2, ISO, and HIPAA compliant, reducing the chances of security threats. It should offer real-time data sync, faster provisioning and deprovisioning, and should be scalable.
The Hire-to-Retire (H2R) life cycle is a process that contains every stage of an employee’s journey within an organization. From workforce planning and hiring to onboarding, role changes, performance management, and offboarding, it connects HR, IT, security, and business processes for a smoother employee lifecycle management.
Abhishek Surtanya is a Marketing Manager at RoboMQ with 6+ years of experience. He is a B2B and SaaS content strategist specializing in content writing that drives engagement, lead generation, and SEO growth. He specializes in data-driven, conversion-focused content that establishes thought leadership and enhances brand visibility.
Abhishek Surtanya is a Marketing Manager at RoboMQ with 6+ years of experience. He is a B2B and SaaS content strategist specializing in content writing that drives engagement, lead generation, and SEO growth. He specializes in data-driven, conversion-focused content that establishes thought leadership and enhances brand visibility.
