Jira For HR: How to Automate HR Processes And Use Checklists in Jira

From Recruiting to Offboarding: What Can You Automate?

Using automation in Jira can help you streamline a wide range of HR processes and recurring issues. This includes tasks in areas such as talent acquisition, human resource management, and people operations. For example:

• Organizing recruitment activities
• Pre-onboarding and onboarding
• Running feedback sessions and performance reviews
• Implementing individual development programs
• Handling vacation requests from employees
• Collecting feedback on processes
• Offboarding 

Although not everything can be completely automated, even partial automation will have a noticeable effect. It allows you to build better-structured processes, organize cross-team work more efficiently, and save time and effort. 

As a result, you can ensure that every phase of an employee experience is orchestrated in the best way possible. This also helps you transition smoothly between the recruitment, onboarding, and individual talent development stages. This increases employee satisfaction while optimizing your HR team’s resources. 

Automation in Jira For HR Purposes: What Are Your Options?

As automation is a broad concept, you can utilize various instruments to put recurring tasks on autopilot. They range from using Jira’s standard automation rules to installing third-party tools or building advanced integrations with Jira’s API. 

Here are some examples of different solutions that are available:

• Smart Checklists for typical issues. This works well for tasks involving multiple action points. For example, onboarding includes a long list of steps a new employee should complete: sign documents, receive equipment, and attend intro calls. You can use Smart Checklist for Jira to document this process and automatically add your checklist to every task with “onboarding” in its title.
• Smart Templates for recurring processes. Some processes, such as recruitment, require the creation of identical Jira epics with the same set of tasks. Smart Templates for Jira allow you to save such an epic as a reusable template. For regular processes, typical epics and their issues can be created automatically on a schedule.
• Automation for Jira to implement custom flows. Jira’s native automation functionality allows you to streamline a multitude of HR tasks and processes. It utilizes the trigger-action logic: once a specific event occurs, it triggers a pre-defined action or a sequence of steps. Jira offers you significant flexibility in choosing the conditions and shaping the rules to meet your needs. Some popular uses include setting up custom notifications and assigning tasks automatically.

• Workflow automation for further optimization. A workflow in Jira describes a sequence of statuses an issue should go through, such as “To Do,” “In Progress,” or “Done”. You can use Jira’s Workflow Editor and other tools to incorporate automation into your workflows and make them more efficient. For example, you can block a vacation request from being moved to “Approved” unless it receives approval from the employee’s manager.
• Automation in Jira Service Management. Certain actions and processes in your JSM system can be streamlined as well. When employees submit purchase or refund requests, tickets can be automatically assigned to the responsible team members based on the request type. Another automation example is cloning a JSM ticket as an issue to a different project when a ticket requires the involvement of another department.
• Connecting Jira to external apps. Jira offers a variety of native connectors – for instance, it can be natively integrated with Slack. This allows you to receive notifications from Jira in a dedicated Slack channel. You can also integrate Jira with different apps by using third-party solutions. For example, tools like Zapier or Onward can connect Jira to BambooHR, ERP systems, and other HR apps (depending on the available integration list).
• Custom automation using the Jira API. With the help of a development team, HR processes can be automated further by integrating Jira with custom internal systems in your organization, as well as with various apps. 

These solutions vary in complexity and require different levels of expertise to implement. For some cases, you will need to collaborate with a Jira administrator to set up the automation. However, you don’t have to start big to see a positive impact. Remember that even small changes can significantly enhance your work’s convenience and efficiency. Let’s explore some of the solutions in more detail to see how this can be achieved. 

Set up Automated Checklists in Jira For Repetitive HR Tasks

HR specialists often manage processes that involve multiple steps or require the collaboration of different teams. It can be challenging to keep track of every detail and make sure everyone does their part on time.

Here’s how using checklists with automation can help with this:

For all repeated processes, we prepare a checklist describing the required steps from A to Z. Then, we save it as a template and use this templatized checklist together with Automation for Jira. So, anyone who works on a typical task has the same list of steps to follow. As a result, everyone has the same expectations and a clear understanding of what to do and in what order.

Olia Ududiak

Head of People Team at Railsware

You can use Smart Checklist for Jira to automatically add structured checklists to your typical tasks. Here’s what it can look like:

This example is a checklist prepared for a new hire. It guides them through the process step by step, provides links to the necessary materials, and uses headers to set priority for different action points. 

You can create separate checklists for the People, Legal, IT, Procurement, Security, and other teams involved in the new employee onboarding process. These checklists will be automatically added to every new onboarding task. As a result, the documented process can be easily replicated, ensuring that everyone follows your company’s best practices. 

In particular, Smart Checklist allows you to:

• Mention collaborators in different steps so they know where to join in 
• Include deadlines for each step to better organize your work
• Save checklists as templates for reuse
• Use different statuses for each action item (“To Do,” “In progress,” etc.)
• Include headers to better structure your action plan
• Add links so that all necessary resources are always at hand
• Mark steps as mandatory and prevents moving to the next step until completed
• Use the markdown editor to adjust the formatting
• Add details for each step in an expandable section

Creating an Automated Smart Checklist Step-by-step

1. Install Smart Checklist for Jira by TitanApps. Write down the key stages of the required process in your organization (for example, onboarding). Alternatively, you can copy the draft structure for the onboarding plan from the example we provided above or from other ready-to-use Smart Checklist Onboarding templates. 
2. Open your Jira issue and insert the process description you prepared into the Smart Checklist in your Jira task.
3. If necessary, you can use the markdown editor to adjust the onboarding plan further: add missing steps, remove the ones you don’t need, and so on.
4. Save the checklist as a template, as shown below.
5. Assign your checklist to a specific issue type using the Smart Checklist’s built-in functionality. Click the three dots as shown in the screenshot above, but, in this case, select Manage Templates. Click the template you need to expand its details. In the menu on the right, select the issue types you want to apply this template to. Your Smart Checklist template will be included in all new issues of the specified type for this project.

6. Assign your checklist to a specific issue type using the Smart Checklist’s built-in functionality. Click the three dots as shown in the screenshot above, but, in this case, select Manage Templates. Click the template you need to expand its details. In the menu on the right, select the issue types you want to apply this template to. Your Smart Checklist template will be included in all new issues of the specified type for this project.

7. If you want to integrate Smart Checklist templates into more complex scenarios, use Automation for Jira. Follow this Smart Checklist Guide and Checklist Template Guide to select the type of automation you need and set it up. For example, you can create a rule for adding a checklist template for each new subtask that meets your criteria. For instance, every “Install the required software” subtask in the “Onboarding” task can get a checklist with the tools an employee should install.

In general, using this tool with automation gives you a lot of flexibility. We will talk more about using Automation for Jira in one of the following sections.

Alternatively, if needed, you can add smart checklists manually from a saved template. 

If you're enjoying this article and want to learn more about Jira for hr read the whole article, which was originally written by Olga Cheban and published on TitanApps blog.