Employee Onboarding Workflow
Overview
When a company transitions to a new HR platform, ensuring a smooth and automated employee onboarding process is crucial. Our client was migrating to MHR’s PeopleFirst HR platform and required a tailored employee onboarding workflow that would seamlessly integrate with their existing systems.
The goal was to create an automated process that would trigger upon the creation of a new employee in PeopleFirst. This workflow needed to:
Provision the new employee in both on-premise Active Directory and Business Centrals.
Return to PeopleFirst after successful provisioning to invite the user to the platform.
Ensure a real-time, event-driven approach without unnecessary system polling.
Maintain a reliable and traceable log of all events.
The Solution
To achieve this, we implemented an event-driven architecture that reacts to system changes instead of continuously checking for updates. By leveraging Azure Queues, we ensured that each step of the workflow would trigger based on real-time events, making the process more efficient and reducing unnecessary resource usage.
How It Works (Simplified)
Employee Added to PeopleFirst
When a new employee is created within PeopleFirst, an event is triggered, signaling the start of the onboarding process.
Active Directory and Business Centrals Provisioning
The system automatically provisions the employee in both on-premise Active Directory (for internal network access) and Business Centrals (for finance and operations management).
No manual intervention is required, reducing administrative workload and minimizing errors.
Returning to PeopleFirst
Once provisioning is complete, the system returns to PeopleFirst, inviting the user to access the platform and begin their employee journey.
Event Tracking with Cosmos DB
Every step of the process is recorded in Cosmos DB, ensuring a single source of truth and providing full traceability for compliance and auditing purposes.
Why an Event-Driven Approach?
Traditional systems often rely on polling, which means continuously checking for updates, leading to unnecessary processing and inefficiencies. Instead, our event-driven approach ensures:
Instant reactions to changes without delays.
Efficient resource usage, as actions are only taken when needed.
Scalability, allowing future expansion without increasing processing overhead.
Technology Stack
Our solution was built using:
PeopleFirst – The core HR platform managing employee data.
Active Directory – On-premise user management and authentication.
Business Centrals – Finance and operations management system.
Azure Queues – Handling event-based workflow processing.
Cosmos DB – Storing event logs and providing a source of truth.
Final Thoughts
This automated onboarding workflow not only streamlined employee integration into the company’s systems but also enhanced efficiency, accuracy, and security. By leveraging an event-driven process with Azure Queues and Cosmos DB, we created a scalable, reliable, and fully automated onboarding experience.
Looking to implement a custom workflow for your HR system? Let's talk!