Bulk import employees

What this achieves

Bulk import creates employee records from a spreadsheet rather than one at a time. It validates the whole file and shows you what it will do before anything is written.

Required role: Administrator.

Before you start

Create the departments, positions, and managers the file will reference. Import resolves those references, so a row pointing at a department that does not exist has nothing to attach to.

This is the fastest way to do damage in Humavera. Read the validation results properly rather than clicking through them.

Steps

Go to Settings → Import / Export.
Choose Employees as the entity.
Select Download CSV template or Download XLSX template.
Fill in the template.
Upload your file.
Review the validation results.
Select Confirm import.

Start from the template

The header row must match the template. The template ships with example and description rows — remove them before uploading, or they fail validation and are flagged as errors.

Files are CSV or XLSX, up to 10 MB.

Example: HC Corp UK Ltd downloads the template, deletes the example rows, fills in its joiners, and uploads. Building a file from scratch to match the headers by hand is how a column ends up misaligned.

Import creates; it does not update

Employee import is a create path. It bulk-creates employees with their department, position, and manager references.

It is not a way to update people you already hold. Do not use it to apply a pay rise across a team or to correct existing records — those are changes made on the records themselves.

Example: importing a file containing HC Corp UK Ltd people who already exist is not a way to amend them. Treat import as a tool for loading people you do not yet have.

Read the validation results

Nothing is written until you confirm. The review step reports total rows, valid rows, and error rows, lists each validation error with its row, field, value, and message, and previews the first valid rows showing the resolved values that will be saved.

Option	Description
Total rows	How many rows were read.
Valid rows	How many passed validation.
Error rows	How many failed and will not be imported.
Outcome	What each row will do.

Read the preview rather than the counts. It shows resolved values — the department and manager the text in your file actually matched — which is where a plausible-looking file turns out to be pointing at the wrong records.

Example: a row naming a department that resolves to a different one than intended looks valid in the counts and wrong in the preview.

Validation expires

The validated batch is held against a token that expires, and the screen shows when. If you leave the review open and come back later, validate the file again rather than confirming a stale batch.

Fix and re-upload

Where rows fail, correct the file and upload again rather than importing the valid ones and patching the rest by hand. Fix & re-upload exists for that.

If you do import with errors, the results screen reports what was created and what failed and offers an error report to download — work from that rather than guessing.

Start small

Import a handful of rows first and check the resulting records before running the full file. A misaligned column is far cheaper to discover on five people than on a whole department.

What happens next

Imported employees appear in the directory immediately, with the department, position, and manager references resolved. They have no user account unless one is created separately, and no leave balances until those are initialised. Onboarding checklists are created per employee rather than by the import.