Moving an employee from one legal entity to another — say US Inc to UK Ltd — is operationally a termination and a new hire happening at the same time, to the same person, with none of the safety of either.
The brief was open: pick a problem inside “Employee Transitions,” decide for whom, and take it to a prototype. “Transitions” spans five distinct problem types; I scoped down to permanent entity & country transfers because it scores highest on pain, frequency, and compliance exposure for the ICP: multi-national mid-market companies (150–3,000 people, multiple entities, lean HR). The prototype below is a working exploration of the workflow I proposed.
Most HR systems treat a transfer as two disconnected actions.
Payroll, benefits, equity, tax jurisdiction, and compliance all have to move together and in the right order — but there's no structured workflow to carry them. So teams improvise, and the same failure repeats with every transfer.
- Email chain → spreadsheet — the “process” lives in someone's inbox and a shared sheet
- Manual payroll update — hand-keyed across two entities, in two currencies, under a deadline
- Wrong first payslip — the employee's welcome to the new entity is a payroll error
- Fire drill — lapsed benefits, a compliance gap, and history at risk from a terminate-and-rehire hack
One missed handoff means the wrong tax jurisdiction, a delayed payslip, or a broken audit trail. The pain isn't one missing field — it's orchestration, timing, and continuity.
A transfer is one event made of two mirrored flows.
Every transfer is an employee leaving one entity and joining another. Model it as two halves — an outgoing flow and an incoming flow — and the chaos becomes a sequence you can design, reuse, and audit. That reframe is the whole feature.
One structured start
Pick the employee, the source and destination entities, and the effective date. The system knows this is a transfer, not a fresh hire — so nothing starts from a blank slate.
Conflicts surfaced early
What can't migrate automatically — equity, benefits eligibility, jurisdiction rules — is flagged before execution, not discovered after the payslip is wrong.
Two flows, one plan
The matching outgoing and incoming flows merge into a single sequenced set of tasks, with due dates anchored to the effective date.
Continuity, not a rehire
The employee's record and history carry across intact. A live status view shows every stakeholder exactly where the transfer stands.
Build the flow once, run it on every transfer.
The prototype has two halves. First, a workflow builder: HR composes reusable flows — one direction each — and assigns them to entities, so the offboarding side and the onboarding side are defined ahead of time rather than reinvented per transfer. Second, an orchestrator: when a real transfer is initiated, the system picks the matching outgoing and incoming flows and merges them into one sequenced plan of tasks, each with an owner and a due date pinned to the effective date.
The result is a guided path through what used to be an inbox and a spreadsheet — conflicts flagged up front, tasks sequenced automatically, and a single status view that replaces the fire drill.
A transfer isn't a hire and a fire. It's one person, moving without breaking.