Manage a secondment placement

What this achieves

A secondment places an employee in another part of the company for a defined period, with a planned return. This is where you watch the return date approaching, extend the placement, or bring somebody back.

Required role: Administrator or Manager.

Steps

Go to Opportunities → Secondments.
Select the All Secondments tab.
Read the list, which shows each placement’s Host Dept, Host Manager, Status, Start, End, and Return In.
Select Extend to move the end date, set the New end date, and confirm.
Select Return Now to bring the employee back before the end date, and confirm.

A secondment moves the person

This is what separates a secondment from a gig or a project. The employee takes up a position in the host department for the placement, rather than doing extra work alongside their existing role.

The product says so at both ends of the placement: returning and cancelling both state that the employee reverts to their original position. That reversion is the whole design — a secondment is a loan, and the return path is what makes it one.

Example: Tom Hargreaves is seconded from Operations to another department at HC Corp UK Ltd for four months. For those months he sits with the host department and its manager, and at the end he goes back to the position he left.

The return happens on its own

A placement carries an end date, and the return is scheduled against it. Return In shows how long is left, and flags a placement as overdue when the date has passed.

Watch the overdue ones. A placement past its end date usually means a conversation nobody has had rather than a system problem.

Secondment status

Option	Description
Active	Under way.
Extended	The end date has been moved out.
Returned	Finished, and the employee is back in their original position.
Ended Early	Brought to an end before the planned date.
Cancelled	Reversed, with the employee returned immediately.

Extending

Extend asks for a new end date. The scheduled return moves with it, so extending a placement does not leave a return sitting against the old date.

Extend before the end date rather than after. An extension agreed late still works, but the person has spent time not knowing where they will be.

Returning early and cancelling are different

Both bring the employee back immediately, and they mean different things on the record.

Option	Description
Return Now	Ends the placement early. The employee reverts to their original position. Use it when the secondment ran its course sooner than planned.
Cancel secondment	Reverses the placement. The employee reverts immediately and the placement is marked cancelled. The product describes this as the option for a secondment that should not have happened, such as the wrong applicant.

The distinction matters because these records are read later. A secondment that ended early because the work finished should not look like one that was a mistake.

What the employee sees

An employee follows their own placements under Opportunities → Secondments on the My Secondments tab. They see the same dates and the same return timing.

What happens next

A returned employee is back in their original position with the placement recorded against them. Where a secondment has shown that a move should be permanent, that is a separate decision made through a mobility request, which routes through the current manager, the target manager, and HR, and carries its own effective date.