With a combination of SweetHawk apps, you will be able to make the most of your Zendesk and add HR onboarding & offboarding employee workflows directly into your tickets, as outlined in our HR solution. The workflows can be requested by anyone and they don't need to be a Zendesk agent to start.

This article will focus on the onboarding employee workflow, but the very same steps will be used to setup offboarding as well.

Apps recommended for HR Onboarding workflow

Tasks & Subtickets	Reminders	Field Rules	Approve (optional)	Notify (optional)

 

HR Onboarding Workflow Recipe

Steps covered in this recipe:

• 1. Create Zendesk custom fields & form
• 2. Optional - Create automatic approval flow
  • 2a. Create a new approval definition
  • 2b. Automating the approval flow
• 3. Create task lists for your teams
  
  • 3a. Create parent ticket task list
  • 3b. Create ticket templates
  • 3c. Optional - Create subtickets task lists
  • 3d. Automating the task lists
• 4. Remind staff to take action at a certain date
  • 4a. Create Reminder workflow
  • 4b. Setup automated webhook
• 5. Optional - Notify staff on required action
• 6. Additional workflow options

 

1. Create Zendesk custom fields & form

The first thing we will need to create for this workflow are the Zendesk fields that your teams will need to perform their tasks and onboard the new employee. These fields can be anything you like, including drop downs, number, text boxes or multi line fields.

Create the fields in the Zendesk admin area, and also if required create a form to contain these new fields for your HR workflow.

Some example fields you could create, but not limited to, are:

Text box - Employee Name
Date - Date of Employment
Drop down - Employee Department
Numeric - Employee ID
Multi-select - Access Level

Now that you have a form and fields ready to start the onboarding process, these can be filled out by an agent within Zendesk directly or by anyone in your business from your Guide Help Center by selecting the Onboarding form you just created when submitting a request.

 

2. Optional - Create automatic approval flow

If you require the request to be approved by one or many people during the onboarding process, we will now setup an approval flow. If this is not required, please skip this step.

With the ticket created with the information required, we can now automatically request approval from the right manager or team instantly as the ticket is created or later on if other tasks need to be complete first. Saving a lot of time and paperwork!

 

2a. Create a new approval definition

In the Approve app, click Approval definitions and then Add approval definition top right.

In the new approval definition, at minimum, define the following:

• Approval definition name
  
  
• Recipients who will receive this approval request.
  • This can be a Zendesk group, user or a custom field on a ticket/user/organization such as a manager.
  • You can also define a multi-step approval process by clicking the + on the top right, each step will be reached only once the previous step has been fully granted.
  • Ensure each step has the correct required approvers to complete the step from the Required drop down.
• Approval Message is where you will need to enter all the information that the approver needs so they can proceed with their approval. As approvers do not need to be users in Zendesk, provide as much information as you can here.
  Click the + on the top right of the message box to provide you with access to your ticket field placeholders and easily add all the field information we created above.
  
  
• In Ticket updates, select 'Approval granted' from the Add event drop down and define an update on the ticket to automate the next step where we will be adding a task list.
  For this example, I have added a tag 'hr_onboard_granted' and ticked a checkbox.
  
  
• Click Create approval definition

 

2b. Automating the approval flow

With our approval definition ready to go, we can now automatically add this to our HR Onboarding ticket as soon as it's created.

Under Approval definitions in the app, click Create trigger on the new definition we just created.

The app will create the trigger for you and provide you with a link on a pop up on the top right. Click this link to open the trigger.

In the new trigger, define your conditions on when the approval should fire. Please define here what suits your Zendesk and workflows, but it can be as simple as:

• 'Ticket' Is 'Created'
• 'Ticket Form' Is 'HR Onboarding'

Once the conditions are set, you will see an action we have added at the bottom so please keep this, and then define any other actions you would like, such as a nullifying condition if this is being fired on ticket update instead of ticket create.

Click Save.

 

3. Create task lists for your teams

Now we can get down to business! Our Tasks & Subtickets app will now be used to automatically spin up all the different subtickets for each of your teams (or even a single assignee) to do their work, which are all linked back to the parent (onboarding) ticket.

This step is mainly up to you and what tasks you need to complete for the onboarding process and which teams are involved. Each team or separate assignee will need their own subticket.

 

3a. Create parent ticket task list

First we will create the task list you would like on the onboarding request or parent ticket. The tasks can be all on the parent ticket, only subtickets, or a combination of both. This setup is entirely up to you and your requirements.

In the Tasks & Subtickets app, click Add task list top right.

Under Settings, define the following:

• Name the Task list, such as 'HR Onboarding'.
• Toggle Required if you need all tasks to be completed before the ticket can be solved.
• Then click Create task list.

Now, click Add task on the top right and define:

• Name of the task.
• Any notes or links to help the agent complete the task.
• Click Create task.

Repeat the add task steps until you have all the tasks you need for the parent ticket.

 

3b. Create ticket templates

Next, we will setup ticket templates that will create the subtickets for each of your teams or staff to work on.

In the Tasks & Subtickets app, click Ticket templates from the left side menu and then Add ticket template on the top right.

Here we need to define what information you would like to copy over from the parent ticket and also which information should be unique for this ticket.

Such as copying over our fields we created above; Employee Name, Date of Employment, etc. And then assigning the ticket by group and/or assignee to the people who will be working on this task.

At this point is also important to copy the ticket form as we are using this in our triggers, and also to add a tag in this template if you would like a task list to also be added to the subticket, we will cover more on this on the next step.

Create a ticket template for every subticket you need on your task list.

Once these have been created, navigate to Task lists in the left side menu and open the parent task list you created in step 3a. Here, click Define subticket on the right of the task where you want to add a subticket.

Then select the template you have just created from the drop down at the top of the screen.

Click Define subticket.

Repeat this step for each task that will need a subticket.

 

3c. Optional - Create subtickets task lists

If you want your separate teams to have their own task list within their subticket, then read on. Otherwise if an assigned ticket is enough, then you can skip this part.

Follow the instructions in step 3.a, to create a task list for each subticket that you want a task list to also be applied.

 

3d. Automating the task lists

Lastly on Tasks & Subtickets app, we will take advantage of the automation features and create triggers to fire off our task lists the tickets when we need them.

In the Tasks & Subtickets app, click Task lists on the menu and then Create trigger to the right of the parent task list we created in step 3a.

The app will create the trigger for you and provide you with a link on a pop up on the top right.

In the new trigger, define your conditions on when the parent task list should be added. For example, if you followed our guide on doing an approval first in step 2, then you can use the tag that is added once the approval is granted, such as:

• 'Ticket' Is 'Updated'
• 'Ticket Tags' contains 'hr_onboard_granted'

Or if you do not require approvals and want to start the task list right away, whether the request has come from the Guide form or directly in Zendesk, your conditions should cover your workflow, such as:

• 'Ticket' Is 'Created'
• 'Ticket Form' Is 'HR Onboarding'

Once the conditions are set, you will see an action we have added at the bottom so please keep this, and then define any other actions you would like, such as a nullifying condition if this is being fired on ticket update instead of ticket create.

Click Save.

Repeat the steps above to create the trigger for the subtickets task list, and in these triggers we will need to define a unique condition so it will only fire on the subticket only. This is easy to achieve since when we created our ticket template, we also defined a unique tag. This means only that subticket will have that tag, so your trigger will look something like this:

• 'Ticket' Is 'Created'
• 'Ticket Tags' Contains 'start_onboarding_hr_task'

Create a trigger for each task list you would like on each ticket/subticket and change the tags/conditions to suit.

 

4. Remind staff to take action at a certain date

For HR workflows, it's important that certain tasks are done at the right time and our Reminders app will be able to achieve this for you.

A reminder can be created manually within the app when the agent creates the ticket, but in this step we will be automating the reminders. Since in step 1 we collected a date field, we can use this field to trigger off a reminder relative to this date.

 

4a. Create Reminder workflow

We will first define a workflow for the app which will determine when the app will remind the group or assignee to take action by email and popup notifications.

In the Reminders app, click Workflows from the left side menu and then Add workflow on the top right.

In the new workflow, at minimum define the following:

• Name of the workflow.
  
  
• Under Reminder ended ticket update, add a tag that we can use when the date hits, such as 'employee_started'.
  
  
• Optional - Under Relative event ticket updates, select a time before the date that will be on the form to start the onboarding process. In this example I will start the process 2 days before the employee starts.
  
  
• In this relative ticket update, define a tag which we can use as a reminder. This update can also be used to start the HR process at this time instead of straight away, please see below Additional workflow options.
  
  
• Click Create workflow

With the tags in the above workflow, create triggers in your Zendesk to email users or groups when the tag is added to alert them of action that needs to be taken. By default, our Reminders app will already email the assignee at the time of the reminder.

 

4b. Setup automated webhook

To automate the reminder we will be using a Zendesk webhook, please follow the guide on How to use Reminders webhook functionality with the following trigger:

Conditions:

• 'Ticket Assignee' Is not '-'
• 'Ticket Form' Is 'HR Onboarding'

URL Parameters:

• name - label of the reminder.
• date - this will be the date on the ticket form, so this will be the Zendesk placeholder for the field. {{ticket.ticket_field_XXXXXXX}}
• time - decide when is best for the reminder to be sent (or when a process should start). We will use 8am.
• timezone - an IANA timezone value. If you have several offices in different timezones, you can ask for this as part of the flow and put the ticket field for that timezone here, or setup a different webhook for each office.
• workflow_id - navigate to the workflow we have created in the last step and its ID will be at the bottom of the page. Enter that here.

Click Save.

 

5. Optional - Notify staff on required action

In additional to the reminders above, our Notify app can also provide browser & popup alerts in Zendesk such as when a team has a new HR onboarding task to start or to a manager when the task list hasn't been completed by a required time.

In the Notify app, click Notification templates and then Add template on the top right.

In the new notification, define the following:

• Select a Trigger to determine when the popup will appear for the agent/s. A good example here is when a task list is added to a ticket so you can use the existing trigger there.
  
  Or you can create a new trigger to define the conditions manually. Such as when a ticket contains the tag 'onboard_reminder' which we defined in the last step to be reminded 2 days before the start date.
  
  
• Enter a Message that will be shown to the agent/s in the popup. Zendesk placeholders can be used here.
• Select the Recipients of the message. This can be relative to the ticket and/or certain people in your Zendesk.

Select your banner type and icon, and whether the popup is sticky.

Click Save.

Repeat the above steps to add as many notifications as you need throughout your HR onboarding workflow.

 

Additional workflow options

You are free to swap and change the recipe as you need to suit your business and requirements. Here are some other optional steps that you can change in this workflow:

Start workflow closer to the date

A reminder can be used to add the task list at a certain time like 1 week before or on the chosen date on the ticket, which is beneficial for offboarding workflows.

During the workflow step on 4a. the tag added during the Reminded ended ticket update (or any relative update) can be used in the trigger in step 3d. as part of the condition to fire. This means the task list and any subtickets wont be created until the reminder hits the date on the ticket or relative to that date.

Time your departments work

Our Timers app can start timing once a ticket or subticket has been created and alert anyone by notification or email if the time has breached. This is an important step in any workflow to ensure that tasks are done by a certain time, particularly for offboarding. Please see our Setting up timers guide on how to get started with tracking your departments and tickets.

Add task lists only when a previous task is complete

Your HR workflow could require different departments to do their work at a certain time and usually after one department has finished their work. Such as you can't add employees to a CRM or other systems without their email address being created first. Please see our Perform actions once a task is completed guide to achieve this as part of your workflow.

• 1. Create Zendesk custom fields & form
• 2. Optional - Create automatic approval flow
• 2a. Create a new approval definition
• 2b. Automating the approval flow
• 3. Create task lists for your teams
• 3a. Create parent ticket task list
• 3b. Create ticket templates
• 3c. Optional - Create subtickets task lists
• 3d. Automating the task lists
• 4. Remind staff to take action at a certain date
• 4a. Create Reminder workflow
• 4b. Setup automated webhook
• 5. Optional - Notify staff on required action
• 6. Additional workflow options