Maintained by:

Introduction

The People Group Engineering team aims to reduce as much manual work as possible. One of the areas we have done this, is everything related to the employment automation flow.

Offboarding

Note: this section only discusses items in the offboarding where People Engineering was involved. You can read more about offboarding at GitLab on this handbook page

Timeline Flow

graph TD A[Offboarding is logged into the tracker] --> |All offboardings| B A --> |When the offboarding is voluntary| G B[Offboarding issue is created, manager is assigned] --> C C[Offboarding merge request is created] --> D D[Team member is removed from gitlab-com and gitlab-org] --> E E[1 day after: removed from Guardian] --> F F[5 Days after: Issue reminder] G[Informational email is sent to the departing team member] --> |2 days before departure| H H[Slack message is sent to the departing team member]

Automations

Voluntary offboarding email

When a team member voluntarily leaves GitLab, an email going over the offboarding interview and frequently asked questions is automatically sent to them.

The pipeline is scheduled to run every hour and scan the offboarding spreadsheet for new rows since the last run. For each row, an email is sent to the departing team member using different templates depending on the team member's country.

Scheduled offboarding issue creation

Every 15 minutes, a pipeline scans the offboarding spreadsheet for rows where the Garden Leave (Non-US) Start Date/Last Working Day (US only) Start Date occurred within the past 15 minutes. If neither are specified, Termination Effective Date is used as a fallback. For each row matching this criterion, it will perform the same actions as if a People Experience Associate ran /pops run offboarding <EMPLOYEE_NUMBER> (see Manually initiated offboarding issue creation and Offboarding merge request sections).

The manual process is kept as a backup process should the automation fail or for exceptional cases where a team member offboarding cannot be added to the offboarding spreadsheet.

Manually initiated offboarding issue creation

The Slack command used by the People Experience Associate for offboarding issues is:

/pops run offboarding <EMPLOYEE_NUMBER>

The offboarding issue will be automatically assigned to the People Experience Associate who ran the command and the outgoing team member's Manager.

The job then grabs various details of the outgoing team member, like country of residence, entity through which they are hired, division, department, job title etc. For each of these details, it checks for the existence of a task file in the offboarding_tasks folder of the employment project. These tasks files are of the format country_<country name>.md, entity_<entity name>.md, division_<division name>.md, department_<department name>.md, etc. If such a file is found, it includes contents of those files also in the offboarding issue.

This issue is added to the team member's epic.

Offboarding merge request

The offboarding command will also create a merge request to the www-gitlab-com project. This MR includes:

Removing the individual file from the data/team_members/person directory
Removing the picture used in the previous file
Adjusting the reports_to in case the offboarded team member had reports
Removing the pet picture in case the team member had any
Update the CODEOWNERS file: change to the manager or remove if the manager is already a codeowner for that file

Remove from Guardian

When a team member leaves GitLab they also need to be terminated on Guardian. We have a daily check for offboarded team members. Every day we check if there are any new offboarding issues created for the day before. For those, we check if the team member is located in the United States. If there are matches, we create a file with the following naming convention: 04_employee_termination_mmddyyhhmmss.csv and add the users employee id and their end date to the file. This is then uploaded to Guardian so they can process it.

You can read more about how team members are added to Guardian here.

Redirect rule reminder

When a team member is offboarded, there's a redirect rule that is setup on Google Workspace for the outgoing team member. After 5 days this redirect rule needs to be removed. To make sure this isn't forgotten, a scheduled pipeline is set up for the bot to leave a GitLab issue comment reminding the People Experience Associates to removes the rule.

Currently, the pipeline is scheduled to run everyday at 04:00 AM UTC. It will comment on all the offboarding issues created 5 days before the current date.

Offboarding Automation Flow