Employee Life Cycle

What is the employee life cycle?

The employee life cycle model encompasses every stage of an employee’s experience within a company, using a different engagement strategy for each stage the employee enters. Even though the professional journey of every employee is different, the classic life cycle includes six different phases: attraction, recruitment, onboarding, development, retention, and separation.

It isn’t a coincidence that the employee life cycle is very similar to your typical customer journey. Because nowadays best organisations know that the employee experience is just as valuable as the customer’s experience.

Designing a consistent experience embedded into the trajectory of every employee within your organisation is the best way to boost a company’s performance.

The six stages of an employee life cycle

Attraction
Attracting great talent is one of the most crucial aspects to any organisation’s growth strategy. Also referred to as the employer brand, the attraction stage occurs before you have an open position in the company. Here the goal is to project the image of a great place to work. You can do so by raising brand awareness, having a great company culture for the current employees, offering attractive benefits and compensation, etc.

Recruitment
The entire hiring process must be managed in a seamless, transparent, personalised, goal-oriented, way. It should be an engaging experience for the candidate.

Onboarding
Incorporate new hires into the organisation’s culture, integrate its values and principles, and reassure them that they have made the right decision to join your company.

Development
During this stage you should consistently encourage career development amongst your team. Learning new skills helps provide them with a future career path within the company.

Retention
At this stage you focus on retaining your top employees, and ensuring they are happy in their roles. A high employee turnover rate is expensive for the company.

Separation
Employees retire, find a new employment or simply leave for personal reasons. This has an effect on other team members, so you should treat the separation process with the utmost care, making sure that it doesn’t cause major disruption.