By role: HR and people leads
HR automation for heads of people
You are hired to build culture and keep good people. Most weeks go on offer letters, access requests, leave balances and the same questions. We take the admin so the job can be the job.
- First workflow live
- Offer to onboarding, usually inside the first sprint
- Usually owned by
- Heads of people and HR managers
- Built on
- Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, Slack, Google Drive
- Judged on
- Ready on day one and Routine questions to HR
In short
An HR automation consultant helps a people lead turn signed offers into ready accounts and first-week plans, keep leave and documents in one record, and answer routine policy questions from the handbook. SBD audits your people processes, builds on the HR and workspace tools you already pay for, and keeps a person reviewing anything that touches pay, performance or personal data.
Who this is for
Who you work with to get this done.
- Heads of people and HR managers
- The first HR hire in a growing company
- Operations leads who also run HR
- People teams preparing for an audit or rapid hiring
Is this you?
If three of these sound like your week, this page is about your week.
- New starters regularly wait for a login or a laptop
- Leave balances live in a spreadsheet only you trust
- You answer the same policy questions every week
- Producing one employee document means searching email
- Leavers have kept access to a tool after they left
- You have not had time for the strategic work you were hired for
What it costs today
Where HR and people leads loses the hours.
Admin eats the strategic work
You were brought in for hiring plans, retention and managers who can manage. The week goes on chasing signatures and fixing spreadsheets.
New starters judge you on day one
A missing laptop or login is the first impression of the company, and the fix sits with IT, finance and a hiring manager at once.
You hold the most sensitive data in the business
IDs, contracts, salaries and medical notes, spread across email, drives and personal phones. An audit or a subject access request takes days.
Every system is a separate login
The ATS, the HR system, payroll and the workspace do not talk, so the same person is typed in four times.
For people leads
Get the admin off your desk.
Walk us through your last new starter, from signed offer to first week. We will show you every step that could run on its own and every step that should stay with you.
Map one onboarding
By company size
HR and people leads at 10 people, and at 1,000.
- 1 to 10
HR is the founder and a folder. Contracts come from an old template and nobody tracks leave.
- 11 to 50
The first people hire, doing onboarding by checklist and answering every policy question personally.
- 51 to 200
A small HR team, hiring every month, with joiners and leavers handled across four systems by hand.
- 201 to 1,000
Several sites or countries, different policies per location, and audit requests that take a week to answer.
What we build
What we build for HR and people leads teams.
- 01
Offer to day one, joined up
A signed offer creates the employee record, requests accounts and equipment, sends the welcome and sets the first-week plan, with each owner told what to do and when.
- 02
One record per person
Leave, attendance, documents and changes kept against the employee, filed by type, with access limited to the people who should see them.
- 03
Handbook answers on request
Routine questions answered in chat from your own policies, with the source quoted and anything personal handed to HR.
- 04
Reports you do not build by hand
Headcount, joiners, leavers, open roles and leave balances produced each month from the record, not from a spreadsheet you rebuild.
The workflows
The HR and people leads workflows, and what sets each one off.
- 01 Offer to onboarding
When an offer letter is signed
ThenEmployee record created, accounts and equipment requested, welcome sent
- 02 Leave request
When a person asks for leave in chat
ThenBalance checked, manager asked to approve, calendar and record updated
- 03 Document expiry
When a visa, certificate or contract is near its end date
ThenHR and the employee reminded, with the document linked
- 04 Offboarding
When a leaving date is set
ThenAccess removal, equipment return and final pay tasks assigned to owners
The numbers we move
How a HR and people leads build is judged.
Every build has a number written into the blueprint. These are the ones HR and people leads builds are measured by, and how we measure them.
| Metric | Before | After | How it is measured |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ready on day one | Some starters wait for access | Accounts and equipment ready before the start date | Share of new starters with all access live on their first morning |
| Routine questions to HR | Several a day, by message | Answered from the handbook | Policy questions sent to HR versus answered by the assistant, per month |
| Document retrieval | Searched across inboxes | Filed by person and type | Time to produce a named document for an audit or request |
| Leaver access removed | When someone remembers | On the leaving date | Accounts still active after a leaver date, checked monthly |
Built on
The tools you already run, where we can.
-
Google Workspace -
Microsoft 365 -
Slack - Google Drive
-
DocuSign -
Airtable -
Notion -
Make -
Claude
Every tool we connect has its own page in the integrations directory.
Proof
Proof from builds like this.
- Customer story
Lightweight project management system
A project and task system on Google Sheets and Make for a five-person studio, cutting manual admin time by about 60% on tools they already had.
Read the story - Customer story
Internal operations tool replacing SmartSuite
An operations tool for a consulting firm with roles enforced on the server and no shared logins, the access model sensitive staff records need.
Read the story
How it starts
An audit of the HR and people leads work your team still does by hand.
One to two weeks. We map the workflows, put an hours-a-week figure on each, and give you a costed blueprint in order of payback. The audit is credited in full to the build.
- Week 1 to 2Audit. We sit with the people who do the work and map it.
- Week 3Blueprint. Fixed scope, fixed price, the first build chosen by payback.
- Week 4 onBuild in two-week sprints, working software every second Friday.
- After go-liveSixty days of hypercare, then a care plan or run it yourself.
What this does not do
So the scope is clear before the call.
- Payroll processing or employment law advice.
- Automated hiring or performance decisions.
- Replacing an HR system that already works for you.
Terms, defined
HR and people leads terms, in plain English.
- Joiner, mover, leaver
- The three moments in employment when access, equipment and records must change.
- Employee record
- The single place that holds who a person is, their role, manager, documents and leave.
- Subject access request
- A request from a person for the personal data an organisation holds about them.
Questions
What people ask about HR and people leads automation.
Do we need a new HR system?
Often not. Most teams have an HR system or a spreadsheet that holds the record. We connect it to signing, workspace accounts and chat, and recommend a change only if the current one cannot hold what you need.
Will AI make decisions about staff?
No. AI answers routine policy questions and drafts documents. Anything about pay, performance, discipline or health goes to a person, and the system logs what it answered and from which policy.
How is employee data protected?
Builds run in your accounts with access by role, documents stay in your storage, and our data processing terms are published on our trust pages. We work on test records until you approve live data.
How does an engagement run with HR?
An Automation Audit at $500, credited to the build, maps your joiner, leaver and leave processes with you. Builds start at $1,500 at a fixed price set after the audit, and care from $50 a month keeps them maintained.
Reading
- Checklist
The 2026 AI readiness checklist
Ten questions across data, process, tools, team and strategy. Score your business before you spend on AI, and see whether to build now or fix the foundations.
- Systems
How much should an AI agent be allowed to do?
An agent with an unscoped token dropped a production database and its backups in nine seconds. Our rule: read widely, write narrowly, cap spend, escalate.
- Strategy
We tried AI and nothing stuck
The sentence we hear on most first calls is rarely about the AI. Four reasons small companies abandon tools, and the change that makes the next try stick.
Related
- Function
HR and people
New starters have access on day one, leave is a message not a form, and the policy question is answered before it reaches HR.
- Role
CIOs and IT leads
The business is already building with Zapier, Make, Airtable and AI tools. You are accountable for the risk either way. We help you bring that work under control and build the next part properly.
- Role
COOs and heads of operations
You are measured on throughput, cost and the things that did not go wrong. We find where the hours go, fix the worst of it at a fixed price, and hand you something you can govern.
- Function
Compliance and risk
Make the audit trail a by-product of doing the work, not a project you run afterwards.
By role: COOs and heads of operations, CFOs and finance directors, Founders and CEOs, Heads of sales and RevOps, Heads of customer support, CIOs and IT leads, Marketing leads
HR and people leads
Get the HR and people leads hours back.
Bring the one HR and people leads workflow your team still runs by hand. You leave the call with a yes or no on fit and the first thing we would build.
Book the call