Hire to first payslip

What this achieves

Hiring somebody crosses four parts of Humavera, and the handovers between them are where new starters get lost. This guide walks the journey from an open role to a first payslip and names the step that does not happen on its own.

The shape of it

Recruiting fills a vacancy. The employee directory holds the person. Payroll pays them. Those are three different records, and moving between them is deliberate rather than automatic — which is the single most useful thing to know before you start.

1. The role is authorised

Most hires begin with a manager asking for one. A line manager requests a new role or a backfill, and an approved request becomes a draft requisition rather than an open advert.

Where the role already exists in your structure, link the requisition to its position and job profile. That link is what lets you screen candidates against the role later, so it is worth doing at the start rather than retrofitting.

2. The requisition is created and the pipeline is designed

Create a requisition records the role, its headcount, and its terms. Nothing is visible to candidates until it is published, so this is the moment to settle how you will assess people.

Design the interview pipeline now. Stages are painful to rearrange once candidates are sitting in them — Setup Considerations: pipeline stage design sets out why, and Setup Considerations: what you ask candidates for covers what you require at application time.

3. The role is published and candidates arrive

Publish a requisition puts it in front of applicants. Candidates who come from elsewhere — a referral, an agency, a direct approach — are added by hand against the same requisition, so the pipeline holds everyone regardless of how they arrived.

4. Candidates move through the pipeline

Work the candidate pipeline is the day-to-day of the hire: moving people between stages, scheduling, and recording what interviewers thought.

Where the requisition uses one, a candidate’s assessment measures the applicant against the job profile and lists the gaps behind the figure. Read it as evidence for a hiring conversation rather than as a decision — the score is input to a judgement a person makes.

5. The offer is drafted, approved, and sent

Draft and approve an offer carries the job details and the compensation, and it goes through approval before anybody sees it. That is the point at which the terms are checked while they are still internal, and it is cheaper to correct here than anywhere downstream.

Then send the offer and track the response. Reusable wording lives in an offer template.

Get the offer right rather than approximately right. The employee record is created from it, so a wrong grade or salary here becomes a wrong grade or salary on somebody’s employment.

6. The offer is accepted — and nothing happens yet

This is the join to watch. An accepted offer does not create an employee. Somebody has to convert the accepted offer into an employee record, and until they do, the new starter exists in recruiting and nowhere else: not in the directory, not in a pay group, not on any report.

Conversion happens once, and it is where you decide the hire date, the employee number, and whether the person gets an account to sign in with. Not everyone needs one — somebody who is paid but never signs in is an employee record without a user account, and that is a normal setup rather than an oversight.

Make conversion part of the acceptance routine. A hiring team that treats acceptance as the end of its work is a hiring team that discovers the gap on pay day.

7. Onboarding begins

With a record in the directory, run an onboarding checklist for the paperwork, equipment, access, and introductions. Signed documents belong on the employee’s documents rather than in somebody’s inbox.

This stage runs in parallel with the next one. Onboarding is about the person’s first weeks; pay setup is about their first payment, and neither waits for the other.

8. The new joiner is set up for pay

Payroll pays a pay group, so a new employee is paid when they belong to one — see Set up a pay group for how membership is decided. Anything beyond base pay reaches them through pay elements and eligibility rules rather than through a manual line on the run.

Their leave position needs a starting point too. Where balances are managed rather than accrued from zero, initialize leave balances so the new joiner can request time off in their first month.

9. The first payslip

The new starter is picked up when the next payroll run gathers its inputs — see The monthly payroll cycle for the full sequence, including the second-person approval that a run cannot skip.

Check the first run for a new joiner more carefully than the rest. A mid-month start date, a missing pay-group membership, or an allowance nobody set up all show as an odd first net figure, and the payslip is what the person actually reads.

Once finalised, the employee sees the result under their own payslips.

What happens next

The hire is complete when the person is in the directory, in a pay group, and paid. From there they join every other journey in the product: leave, performance, learning, and eventually growing internally. Close the requisition when its headcount is filled — see Track and close a requisition.