Employee lifecycle

The seven-stage version, and who names it

There’s no regulator that defines “employee lifecycle” the way one defines a minimum wage or a notice period. The closest thing to a shared standard comes from HR-education writing rather than legislation: AIHR’s Employee Life Cycle guide names seven stages that most other write-ups on the topic converge on with only minor relabeling: attraction, recruitment, onboarding, retention, development, offboarding, and staying in touch with people after they leave.

Read together, those seven stages cover everything that happens to a person at a company, starting the day they first hear the company’s name and continuing well after their last day there. Two of the seven get mistaken for the whole model constantly. Onboarding is stage three. Offboarding is stage six. Both are stages inside the lifecycle; neither is the lifecycle itself.

Four stages this glossary already covers

Four pieces of that seven-stage sequence already have their own entry here, in enough depth that this one links out rather than repeats them.

• Preboarding covers the weeks between an accepted offer and day one, a gap AIHR’s model doesn’t name as its own stage but where a real share of the risk in the recruitment-to-onboarding handoff actually sits.
• Onboarding is stage three: the structured first weeks on the job.
• Internal mobility is what happens when the retention or development stage folds back into something that looks like recruitment, a promotion or a lateral move, without the person ever leaving the company. LinkedIn’s 2020 Global Talent Trends data found employees stayed 41% longer at companies that hired from within regularly, a large enough effect that the loop deserves its own stage rather than a footnote on retention.
• Offboarding is stage six, the exit process.

Attraction, recruitment itself, and development are all named in the model but don’t have a dedicated entry here yet; the SMB-specific version of each currently lives inside sourcing and screening content instead.

What the model doesn’t decide

The seven stages describe an order. They don’t say which software runs which stage, or how much process a ten-person company should build around each one before the effort pays for itself.

Join is a recruiting tool, and that shapes where this glossary goes deep and where it stops: attraction, recruitment, preboarding, and onboarding each get their own entry, because that’s the half of the lifecycle Join’s product actually runs. Development, retention, and offboarding are named and linked from here, but the depth on those three sits inside an HRIS or a performance-management tool, not inside an applicant tracking system (ATS). An ATS claiming equal depth on all seven stages would be a promise the product doesn’t keep.