Trendyol Employee Onboarding and Offboarding Automation

The most important obstacle was the manual process of the employee onboarding process.

What was the obstacle? Both of HR and IT team’s perspective, it might have been a painful process because of the following steps:

1. HR must have filled the onboarding form for IT to prepare the new employee’s equipment, etc.
2. IT must have performed the following tasks for each new employees:
3. user creation
4. password assignment
5. group membership operations
6. email creation
7. allowing the approved apps

These were really time wasted. They were risky because of the possibility of human error. They were not reportable and non-recoverable in case of either emergencies or human error. They were bringing on an incredible workload.

Haven’t you automated it yet?

What was the solution and how could the onboarding process be executed easier? Let’s review the solution with an agile approach.

Trendyol has switched to using an IT service management platform that is able to run employee onboarding and offboarding as well as rotation processes. This article will explain how the employee onboarding process is operated in Trendyol. The next part might consist of the rest.

How do you manage the secure employee onboarding and offboarding process?

There are two major applications to automate our employee onboarding process. We can say that the first application is the sender (employee management system is used by the HR) of the new employee’s information. I feel that I should explain our employee onboarding workflow detailed more:

1. HR staff types the necessary information of the new employee. This information is sent to the receiver application.
2. A ticket is created on the second application (our second application is the IT service management platform).
3. The information that was sent includes some Active Directory fields specified by us before.
4. One of the most important tasks of the ITSM application is matching the information incoming from the employee management system for Active Directory to create users and their all property automatically (display name, name, surname, email, password, company, manager, title, etc.).

In the last phase, email synchronization is performed between Active Directory and our email service provider. The user’s email address is also created automatically. Login information of the users is sent via SMS one day before the start.

PowerShell scripting was used in the Active Directory site to automate user, group, and email operations.

What challenges have been overcome?

After we had automated the employee onboarding process, neither HR staff nor the IT department was exposed to workload while Trendyol is growing rapidly. Despite the system’s errors, we can fix them quickly. We are agile and started to work with DevOps processes. Both of our workflow results can be reported and viewed by anyone.

Consequently, are we ready to be agile with ITSM? Definitely Yes!