Every company's HR process is different. Some have 3 stages, some have 10. Some require manager approval before moving to the next stage. Some need to trigger ADP onboarding at a specific point. Some send a welcome email when a candidate is hired, and a compliance document when they become an employee.
We built a visual state machine that lets HR teams define their own workflows — without writing code.
The Core Concepts
The flow builder is built around three concepts:
- States: Named stages in the employee lifecycle. Every organization starts with three system states — Candidate, New Hire, and Employee — that can't be deleted. Custom states can be inserted between these at any position.
- Actions: Things that happen when someone enters a state. Actions can be manual (require a manager to check a box) or automatic (fire immediately on state entry).
- Assignments: Tracking which employees or candidates are in which state, with a full history of transitions.
Action Types
The flow builder supports 7 action types:
- Send email to employee — with custom subject and body, template variables, and HTML rendering
- Send email to admin — notify specific managers or HR staff
- Send SMS to employee — with optional link content (generates a tokenized URL)
- Send SMS to admin — alert specific phone numbers
- Sign document — trigger an attestation request for a specific document template
- Manager approval — require designated approvers to sign off before the person can advance
- Create employee in ADP — call ADP's onboarding API automatically when someone reaches a specific state
Auto-Fire Actions
Email, SMS, and ADP actions fire automatically in the background when someone enters a state. They don't block the state transition — they run as background tasks. If an action fails, it's logged with the error reason and the UI shows the failure state so managers can retry.
Manager Approval Gates
When a state has a manager approval action, designated approvers receive an email with a link to the employee record. The person can't advance to the next state until all required approvers have signed off. This creates a natural compliance checkpoint in the workflow.
ADP Integration
The most powerful action type is the ADP create_employee action. When triggered, it:
- Resolves the employee's name, hire date, and all configured field mappings
- Calls ADP's
/hcm/v2/applicant.onboardendpoint - Stores the AssociateOID returned by ADP
- Marks the action as "pending" until the employee is activated in ADP WFN
- Runs post-hire actions (deductions, license fields) once activation is confirmed
This closes the loop between Sluble's onboarding flow and ADP's payroll system — automatically, without any manual data entry.