The Problem: HR Work Has a Lot of Moving Parts

The HR team at a professional services company was good at their jobs. They had experienced staff, solid relationships with managers across the organization, and a genuine commitment to supporting employees well. What they didn’t have was a system.

Onboarding a new employee, for example, involves a long chain of coordinated steps. Before day one, IT needs to set up accounts and equipment. Facilities needs to assign a desk and access card. Payroll needs to collect tax forms and set up direct deposit. Benefits needs to send enrollment information. The hiring manager needs to be briefed. A buddy or mentor may need to be assigned. None of these steps is complicated on its own, but when you’re running five or ten new hires through the process at the same time, managing all of those parallel threads by email is a recipe for something getting missed.

And things did get missed. A new employee showed up on their first day to find that IT hadn’t received the request to create their accounts. Another waited three weeks to gain access to a system they needed because someone had assumed someone else was handling it. These weren’t failures of effort; they were failures of coordination. Nobody had a clear, shared view of where each onboarding stood.

Offboarding was, if anything, worse. When an employee left, there were compliance requirements: access to systems needed to be revoked in a timely and documented way, company equipment had to be returned, final pay and benefits needed to be processed correctly. Missing any of these steps wasn’t just an inconvenience; in some cases it created legal or security risk. Yet the HR team was tracking all of this in a shared spreadsheet that everyone updated inconsistently and that offered no visibility to the people outside HR who needed to take action.

Beyond onboarding and offboarding, employees had no consistent way to submit HR requests: questions about benefits, requests for letters of employment, accommodations requests, policy questions. Some emailed the general HR inbox. Some emailed directly to whoever they knew. Some walked down the hall and caught someone in a hallway conversation that promptly got forgotten. The result was uneven response times and no record of what had been asked or answered.

“A new hire showed up on their first day and their laptop wasn’t ready. We’d sent the IT request and it just got buried. That moment made it very clear that we needed a different system.” — HR Director

Building a Process That Actually Holds

The HR team implemented Request Tracker and configured it around the processes they already knew well. Onboarding was the first priority. They mapped out every step in the process, including which tasks went to which departments, in what order and with what dependencies, and built that map into RT. When a new hire was confirmed, a single action kicked off the entire workflow automatically. Every department received their tasks. Deadlines were set. If a step was approaching its deadline without being completed, a reminder went out. If something was missed entirely, it was visible to the HR team right away, not on the new employee’s first day.

The offboarding workflow followed the same logic. A clear checklist of required steps, each assigned to the right person, with documentation of completion. When HR needed to demonstrate to an auditor that access had been revoked within the required timeframe, the record was right there.

For ongoing employee requests, the team set up a simple submission process. Employees could email the HR team or use a web form, and every request was automatically captured in RT as a ticket with a unique reference number. Requests were assigned to the appropriate HR staff member, tracked to resolution, and the employee received an acknowledgment automatically so they knew their request hadn’t disappeared into a void.

The Difference in Day-to-Day Work

The most immediate change was confidence. Before, HR staff started each day with a version of the same anxiety: what have we forgotten? What’s slipping? Who was supposed to do what? After implementing RT, the answer to those questions was always a click away. Open requests were visible. Overdue tasks were flagged. Each staff member could see their own queue without sorting through a shared inbox.

For the HR director, the change provided something that had previously been impossible: a real-time picture of the department’s workload. How many open onboardings were in progress? How many requests had been received this month compared to last? What was the average time to resolve a benefits question? These numbers had simply not existed before. Now they were available any time, without any additional effort to gather them.

Managers in other departments noticed the change too. When they needed to follow up on an IT access request for a new hire, they could reference a ticket number rather than trying to track down the right person by email. When they had a question about an accommodation request, HR could pull up the full history of the conversation instantly rather than piecing it together from scattered emails.

The compliance benefits became apparent during the company’s first audit after the implementation. Demonstrating that offboarding procedures had been followed correctly, including specific access revocations with timestamps, took minutes rather than a stressful scramble through old emails. The documentation was already there, organized exactly the way it needed to be.

“Audits used to be stressful because we’d have to dig through emails and spreadsheets to reconstruct what happened. Now we just pull up the ticket. Everything is already documented.” — HR Manager