People Operations: The Employee Lifecycle Hire to Exit

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Most HR functions are a collection of processes that each work reasonably well and were designed by different people at different times who never spoke to each other.

The candidate is treated beautifully until the offer, then handed to an onboarding process that starts on day one and knows nothing about the conversation that got them here.

What the disconnection costs

Onboarding runs for two weeks and the probation review happens at 90 days, with nothing in between. Engagement gets measured every year and the results go to managers who were never told what to do with a score of 3.2. The performance review produces a rating and the rating produces nothing, because the decisions it should drive sit with someone who was not in the meeting. And people leave, and the exit interview is conducted by the manager they are leaving, which is the one arrangement guaranteed to produce no information.

Three quarters of companies collect exit interview data. Almost none of them act on it. That is not a data problem.

The lifecycle as one system

Forty-three lessons following a person from before they apply to after they leave. Employee experience first, as the frame: the three environments that shape it, the journey map, and the audit that tells you where yours actually breaks.

Then candidate experience, which most companies treat as a recruiting metric and is in fact the first two months of the employment relationship. Journey mapping, communication cadence, rejection letters, interviewer training, and the metrics that predict drop-off.

Then onboarding as a designed programme rather than a paperwork day: preboarding ten days ahead, the first day, the first thirty, the first ninety, with checklists and questionnaires at each point.

Measurement, performance and the exit

Eight lessons on engagement, including the part that is usually missing — what a manager does on Monday with their own score. Then performance management as a full cycle: OKR and cascading, check-ins, competence assessment through 180 and 360 degrees, the review meeting itself, and every decision that comes out of it from a pay rise to a performance improvement plan.

Then retention, taught as a project: the cost-of-turnover calculation, the business case, the survey, the programme, the rollout against resistance. And the exit interview playbook — thirty-eight questions across eight categories, the script, the analytics, and the three-month roadmap from pilot to system.

Who is teaching this

Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. I have built every process in this course at least once, and rebuilt several of them after they failed the first time.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all course materials

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments and real business cases

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

Where to start

Draw your own employee journey before lesson two, from careers page to alumni, and mark every point where the person is handed from one process to another. Those handovers are where the experience breaks in nearly every company I have seen. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.