What Are the 7 Stages of Employee Life Cycle Management?

Employee life cycle management encompasses the entire employee journey, from attraction to alumni status. Employers need to know how to successfully engage employees at every stage to retain happy and productive employees. Each stage has specific issues that require strategies, tools, optimization, and compliance.

Employee experience is the perception that employees have of their entire journey with the company. Every experience that employees have every day affects their views of the company. Prospective employees begin forming their perception before they even apply for a job. How a company handles the needs of employees at each stage has a lasting impact.

“In this climate, smart leaders think of employees more like customers whose ‘business’ they need to earn. And to win employees’ interest, you need a competitive employee experience.”  – Gallup

Managing the employee life cycle is a critical human resources (HR) function. As you successfully manage the employee life cycle, you can boost employee satisfaction, wellness, engagement, retention, and productivity. By gathering feedback throughout every stage and monitoring HR metrics, you will know where to focus your improvement efforts.

Here is what employers need to know about each of the seven stages of the employee life cycle and how to use them to improve the employee experience.

1. Attraction

The first stage of the employee life cycle happens before a candidate applies for a job. The goal is to attract potential talent to your company. This is where an employer focuses on promoting a brand and culture that potential talent will find desirable.

Employers can create custom content tailored to the types of candidates they want to attract. Social media posts, blog posts, branded career pages, newsletters, employee advocacy, job boards, and reviews all impact how your company is perceived. From how you convey company culture to how you treat your employees, your words and actions impact attraction.

The experiences of former employees also impact the attraction stage. When alumni have negative experiences at your company and post about it online, it affects your reputation and your ability to attract new employees. On the other hand, online posts from happy alumni strengthen your brand’s attraction. As you move through each stage of the life cycle, it is essential to prioritize the employee experience.

2. Recruitment

During the recruitment, the second stage, employees focus on finding talent and providing a positive candidate experience. This is where employers write job descriptions, advertise jobs, review resumes, schedule and conduct interviews, and make informed hiring decisions. In addition to actively seeking candidates, employers often look for passive candidates to expand their talent pool. Employee referral programs allow employers to motivate employees to refer high-quality talent through incentives.

An essential recruitment task is complying with labor laws, such as pay transparency laws. With the use of recruiting software, employers can streamline the entire hiring process, including automatically posting job listings, resume parsing, increasing compliance, and reducing bias. Employers should always be honest and transparent when describing their company culture and explaining the job description during recruitment.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategies need to be incorporated in the recruitment process. From inclusive language in job descriptions to utilizing an applicant tracking system (ATS), employers can use a variety of tools and techniques to encourage a diverse, fair, and inclusive hiring process. Candidates should be evaluated through a transparent and unbiased process that includes standardized interview questions and candidate scorecards.

3. Onboarding 

Onboarding is the process used to integrate new hires into your organization. Employees learn about your company, leadership, co-workers, roles, responsibilities, policies, procedures, and how to do their job. The first phase of onboarding is called preboarding, which begins as soon as an employee accepts a job offer and continues until the first day of work.

The employee experience during the early stages of onboarding creates first impressions that stick and impact the likelihood of turnover or retention. In fact, 20% of employees quit during their first 45 days, which means employers must have a smooth onboarding experience, and there is little room for error. Devlin Peck reports that “69% of employees who have an exceptional onboarding experience are likely to stick around for at least three years.”

BambooHR found that “70% of new hires decide whether a job is the right fit within the first month—including 29% who know within the first week.” Furthermore, many employees already have regrets during the first week. More than half of employees are frustrated by these onboarding challenges: no clear points of contact for questions, insufficient training, lack of access to essential tools, and technology issues.

Onboarding software streamlines the entire process, thus enhancing the employee experience and automating many tasks. The software can help employers to prepare new employees before their first day, provide welcome packets, establish points of contact, complete electronic forms, create onboarding checklists, schedule meetings, issue technology, establish social connections, and integrate training.

4. Development

This fourth stage of the employee life cycle focuses on learning, development, performance, and growth. Employees are more likely to stay longer at a company when their future growth and career development are supported. When the future looks bleak for employees, turnover increases. In fact, “lack of career development has been the primary reason for employee turnover for 13 consecutive years,” according to the Work Institute.

Performance management is the system that employers use to conduct employee reviews, set and track goals, engage in continuous feedback, regularly monitor progress, and manage individual development plans. The focus is a continuous, collaborative process where employers and employees engage in meaningful conversations throughout the year for ongoing development.

Employers gain a well-rounded view of an employee by using 360-degree feedback tools to gather feedback from multiple sources, including self-assessments, peers, direct reports, and supervisors. Managers provide continuous feedback during regular one-on-one meetings. They also collaboratively set and track goals, identify clear career paths, and support learning and development based on identifying strengths, weaknesses, and skill gaps.

Learning and development (L&D) is the strategic process used to increase the skills, knowledge, and capabilities of employees to improve job performance. Training is the actual activity used to teach the skills. Learning can be conducted through online training modules, workshops, and on-the-job training. Development supports an employee’s long-term career goals and can be conducted with mentorships, coaching, and leadership training. With upskilling and leadership development, employees will be better prepared for career advancements.

5. Retention and Engagement

The fifth stage of the employee life cycle is retention and engagement. High employee engagement results in higher employee retention. Turnover results from low employee engagement. With approximately half of U.S. workers intending to look for new jobs this year, employee retention should be a top priority for businesses. The following elements can increase retention:

• Benefits and pay: Employers that offer a competitive compensation package are better able to attract and retain top talent. With extensive benefits packages, including a strong PTO policy, employers can support employee wellness, engagement, and retention.
• Company culture: In a healthy company culture, employees feel valued, respected, supported, and proud. Communication is timely and transparent, leaders show empathy, and employees are engaged.
• Internal communication: Effective internal communication practices are essential for enhancing employee engagement, fostering trust, aligning teams, maintaining stability, and increasing employee retention.
• Learning and development: When employers offer learning and development opportunities, employees feel that the company is invested in their future.
• Career advancement: Employees are more likely to stay at a company that offers them opportunities for career advancement.
• Performance management: Employee engagement and retention are boosted by performance management, which is a process that involves ongoing feedback, goals, and development.
• Recognition: Employees enjoy receiving praise, recognition, and gratitude from peers and managers. This helps them to feel valued, engaged, and invested in outcomes.
• Rewards: Employers can offer rewards and incentives to motivate and engage employees.
• Managers: When managers are properly trained and supported, it facilitates a positive relationship with employees. This is especially important since working for a bad manager causes employee stress and excessive turnover.
• Surveys: Employees feel more engaged when employers ask for their feedback in surveys and act on the data to make changes.

6. Offboarding

When an employee is departing from a company, offboarding is the structured process to manage the exit. The offboarding process is used for both voluntary departures (resignations and retirements) and involuntary departures (layoffs and firings). Regardless of the departure reason, employers should try to end the working relationship on a positive note, obtain feedback, and take the necessary steps to prevent lawsuits.

Offboarding contains many aspects, including notifying co-workers, transferring projects and knowledge, retrieving company property, handling benefits, providing separation notices, and conducting exit interviews. From making sure you are not using illegal reasons to fire someone to how to apply for unemployment compensation, there are many issues to address during offboarding.

Some often overlooked areas are the importance of showing gratitude to departing employees, quickly protecting data security and confidentiality, and conducting exit interviews. When employers take the time to actively listen during exit interviews and ask meaningful questions, they can obtain valuable information to improve the employee experience for other employees.

7. Alumni

Alumni comprise the final stage of the employee life cycle. Your handling of offboarding and the earlier stages of the employee life cycle determines if you will have happy former employees. At every stage of the life cycle, employees should be treated with respect and empathy. Even during stressful involuntary separations, how employers treat employees matters. Empathy, respect, planning, and following proper procedures can de-escalate situations.

Employee advocacy happens throughout the entire employee life cycle, but it can be the most impactful after an employee departs from the company. When you do a good job of managing the employee experience throughout the employee life cycle, you can expect positive online posts from alumni that will result in more referrals for new talent. This also decreases your hiring time and costs.

As new talent first discovers your company during the attraction stage, the employee life cycle begins again for prospective talent. However, if you did a poor job with employee life cycle management, alumni may post negatively, which will not only damage your reputation but also make it harder to attract talent.

Happy alumni may also become boomerang employees, which is when former employees return to work for you in the future. With boomerang hires skyrocketing, employers have even more motivation to maintain positive relationships.